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THE 


GHEBERS OF HEBRON 


AN INTRODUCTION TO 

i- 

THE GHEBORIM IN THE LANDS OF THE SETHIM, THE MOLOCH 
WORSHIP, THE JEWS AS BRAHMANS, THE SHEPHERDS OF CANAAN, 
THE AMORITES, KHETA, AND AZARIELITES, THE SUN-TEMPLES ON 
THE HIGH PLACES, THE PYRAMID AND TEMPLE OF KHUFU, THE 
MITHRAMYSTERIES, THE MITHRABAPTISM, AND SUCCESSIVE ORI¬ 
ENTAL CONCEPTIONS FROM JORDAN FIREWORSHIP TO EBIONISM 


HY 


SAMUEL FALES DUNLAP 

1 1 

AUTHOR OF “VESTIGES OF THE SPIRIT-HISTORY OF MAN,” “ SOD, THE MYSTERIES OF ADONI,” 

AND “S5D, THE SON OF THE MAN” 


The Geborim that were of old.— Genesis vi. 4 





1894 




.'D'&s 



Copyright, 1894 , by 


SAMUEL FALES DUNLAP 







« 





TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 







PREFACE. 


There was a line of “Highplaces” running from the pyramids 
of Gizeh through Pliilistia, Ramah , 1 Salem, Shiloh, Beth 
Shems, Moab,—to Bel’s Tower at Babylon. They were sacred 
to Bal or Bel (El) the Sun. In Syria, Moab, and Mesopota¬ 
mia they built temples on elevations natural or artificial. 
Salamah is said to have built one bamah (highplace) to Ka¬ 
mos in Moab, and another to the “ King ” (Malak, Moloch) 
among the Ammonites. The bamoth were probably the old¬ 
est highplaces and temples of the Asarim, Asarielites, or 
Syrians. The Great Highplace was at Gabaon . 2 There Bel- 
Saturn 3 met 4 his worshippers on Saturn’s Day. 

Mse (Masses, or Moses 5 ) was of the race of the Chaldaeans. 
The Chaldaean Mithra had his Seven Rays, and Moses his 
Seven Days. The other planets which circling round the sun 
lead the dance as‘ round the King of heaven receive from him 
with the light also their powers ; while as the light comes to 
them from the sun so from him they receive their powers 
that he pours out into the Seven Spheres of the Seven Planets 

1 The city was upon a hill; and still another ascent up to the Highplace.—1 Sam. 
ix. 13, 14, 25 ; x. 5. 

2 The abode of Iahoh was on the Bamah at Gabaon.—1 Chron., xvi. 39. 

3 Alohim, the Semite dual. 

4 Numb., xxiii. 4, 16. 

6 The Chaldaeans considered fire and light each as having the two genders, like Bel, 
Mithra, As (Ash), Alahim, Asar. Consequently, Simon Magus lets the Divine female 
fire be severed from the Male Fire, just as Genesis, ii. 21-23 severs the Woman-fire 
(Ashah, Aishah, Isis) from the Masculine Adam (Adon, Lunus). Alahim (Elohim) is 
the Spiritus Divine, a dual principium in Genesis, i. 1, 2 ; and in the male-female fike 
of Simon’s theory Spirit is the God.—Hippolytus, vi. 18; John iv. 24. Thus the 
severed pairs are Bel and Beltis, Mithra and Mithraitis, Adon and Danae, Adam and 
Damia (Ker5s), As and Isis, Asar and Sahra or Sarah, Menes (MSn) and Mene, Amon 
and Mona, Lunus and Luna : £ • Genesis, i- ii- is from the Chaldaean. 


IV 


PREFACE. 


of which the sun is the centre . 1 The ancient world was one of 
fire, gnosis, civilisation, and inferences which resulted in re¬ 
ligious systems that, although externally and nominally dis¬ 
tinct, were founded in one common philosophy—the distinc¬ 
tion between spirit and matter. Spiritus means breath, from 
spiro, to breathe. Spiritus as the breath of life was considered 
fire ; but it is an unknown quantity in the oriental philosophy, 
intended to express the abstract idea, “ life.” It cannot be 
proved to correspond to any idea that can be grasped by the 
mind, since the word (meaning breath of life) designates a 
status,—not an entity but only a result. Life is a condition, a 
state, a result of previous conditions. Therefore the use of 
the word pneuma or spiritus to indicate a certain thing is un¬ 
authorised. The ancients invented a term for life, which, 
since vitality is a result, a state of matter, fails to express 
what it was coined to express,—a substance, an entity. 

The birth of man is entirely owing to nature, which has 
made provision for it. Like the grass, we are born from a 
parentage , 2 not from a philosophy or a theology. Since Nat¬ 
ure is the authority for human existence the human thought 
should be based on facts, and not on oriental substitutes for 
truth. The past teaches us human errors. The theory of spir¬ 
it and matter pervaded the orient from the time of the early 
Ghebers down through the Christian centuries. The idea of 
spirit as a Cause is found in all the great oriental religions. 
We find it in those of El, Bel, lad, and Iahoh,—in the Seven 
Rays of the Chaldaean Mithra and the Seven Days of Genesis. 
From the Sun came fire and spirit . 3 This was the astronom- 

1 Julian, Oratio 4. 135. 

2 The life of the embryo animal reproduces very exactly that of the cellular tissues 
of the plants. The form is sketched and marked out in the first times of the evolution. 
—Dareste, p. 103. Let man catch some germ diseases, and he will soon recognise that 
he is a part of nature. 

3 Diodor. Sic. I. 11. p. 15. Wesseling. Cyrus swore by Mithra (Rawlinson, Seventh 
Monarchy, 627; Xenophon, Cyropaedia, viii. 3. § 53) as the Jews did by Iah.—Exodus, 
xvii. 16. 


PREFACE . 


v 


ical religion of the Chaldaeans, Jews, Persians, Syrians, Phoe¬ 
nicians and Egyptians. 

The records of the Jews contain the literature of the fire- 
worship. We trace this people back to a most interesting 
source the city of the Achabara then occupied by a race of 
mighty warriors called the Kheta (Hetha) who defended them¬ 
selves later against Ramses the Great. It stood in the moun¬ 
tains west of the Dead Sea where Chebron, one of the oldest 
cities of Judah (now called Hebron), stands. The word Acbar 
means ‘mighty,’ and the Egyptians knew the Achabara by 
that name, for at an early period they never entirely conquered 
them. From the word Cabar or Gabar (also meaning ‘ mighty ’) 
comes the word Geber or Gheber which (as the Kheta of Khe- 
bron were fire worshippers) was in time used to denote the an¬ 
cient people who were, like all the Old Canaanites, very much 
controlled by that form of religion.—Genesis, xxii. 7; Deut. 
v. 24. 

Our subject is what a Greek dramatist called ‘ the immor¬ 
tal light of fire,’ with which we propose to connect the ‘ Ca- 
naanite fires in the land of Seth.’ The results of a supposed 
action of solar heat or spirit upon the earth-forms of matter 
are plainly seen in the Oriental Philosophy. It has therefore 
appeared absolutely indispensable in this treatise to provide 
the reader with the facts, evidences, 1 and criticism requisite to 
enable the student of the records of the past to understand 
the ancient utterances to which his attention is directed. Be¬ 
fore the works of Movers, 2 of the author of ‘ Supernatural Re¬ 
ligion,’ and of the author of ‘ Antiqua Mater ’ no such treatise 
as the present could have been readily prepared. The extracts 
given further on are translations that deliver the very spirit of 

1 The proper names in the Hebrew Bible have been read without the points, be¬ 
cause these were not in existence in the centuries before our era. 

2 Movers is quoted by Gerhard in his Griechische Mythologie, and has been praised 
by Theodore Parker. Chwolsohn quotes Movers in his work on the Ssabians.—Mas- 
pero, too, quotes Movers. 


VI 


PREFACE. 


the orient, breathing that essence of the oriental philosophy 
that was associated with the fire of the King Sun. 

The red-hot ' Divine Conception holds the first place !—Clialdaean Oracle. 

The Clialdaean held that all things are the progeny of One 
Fire, that the Primal Fire did not enclose his power within 
matter by works but by mind, for the Architect (the Logos) of 
the fiery world is the Mind of mind. Consequently “ the Fire- 
heated Ennoia holds the first rank, and afterwards comes the 
first of the immaterials or spirituals. So, too, the soul was 
held to be, by the Power of the Father, bright fire; remains 
immortal, and is the mistress of life. Compare Genesis, ii. 7. 
Moreover the Clialdaean Logos was the Father - begotten 
Light, for he alone, having gathered from the power of the 
Father the flower of mind, is able to understand the Paternal 
Mind (—Proklus, in Timaeum, 242, Cory, 253, 254; Hermes 
Trismegistus, I. 6 ; Jeremiah, li. 7, 13). Like a Jew, Simon 
the Gittite held the intelligible, mind-perceived, and visible 
nature of Fire ; that the beginning of all things is boundless 
Fire. 1 2 And the Hindu sage declared that when the Divine 
Being formed out of the waters the Spirit, He looked on it, 
and its mouth opened like an egg: out of its mouth pro¬ 
ceeded the Word, and from the Word came forth Fire ! 

S. F. Dunlap, 

Graduated at Harvard in 1845. 


1 Primal Conception. Creative Mind, heated by fire (purithalpes). For God is the 
life of all things in conception. —Philo, Legal Allegories, 1. 29. The soul is life or has 
life.—Justin Martyr, Dial., p. 36. 

2 Matthew, iii. 11. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER ONE. 

PAGE 

The Mountains of the Amoiiites,.1 

CHAPTER TWO. 

Spirit and Matter in the East,.9 

CHAPTER THREE. 

Abraham, Aud, and the Iaudi of Araba,.49 

CHAPTER FOUR. 

The Asarians in Egypt,.82 

CHAPTER FIVE. 

Isis in Phoenicia,. 225 

CHAPTER SIX. 

The Cross, Crown and Sceptre,.817 

CHAPTER SEVEN. 

Before Antioch, . 860 

CHAPTER EIGHT. 

The Nazarenes,.438 

CHAPTER NINE. 

The Great Archangel of the Ebionites,.633 








THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


CHAPTER ONE. 

THE MOUNTAINS OF THE AMORITES. 

“ The people of the land the Beni Khat.”— Gen. xxiii. 7. 

Malachia mimedbar kadmoth.— Deuteron. ii. 26. 

Once the valley of the Jordan was a series of lakes, and the 
Dead Sea of far greater extent than now. The waters of the 
Gulf of Akabah covered the entire Wady el Arabah to the Dead 
Sea, and the salt rocks of Jebel Usdum were formed in the 
sea’s bed. The waters of the Jordan Yalley did not flow down 
into the Gulf of Akabah after the land had emerged from the 
sea. 1 The whole of Palestine rose up from under the waters 
in the Miocene period. The Dead Sea in the Pluvial period 
had a length of nearly 200 English miles from north to south 
at the time when its surface was at a higher level than that of 
the Mediterranean at the present day. This Pluvial period 
extended from the Pliocene through the Glacial period down 
to recent times. The Lebanon throughout the year was snow- 
clad over its higher elevations, while glaciers descended into 
some of its valleys. The region of the Hauran, lying at its 
southern base, was the site of several extensive volcanoes, 2 
while the district around and the Jordan Yalley were invaded 
by floods of lava. 3 During the time that the shores of the Gulf 
of Suez were depressed 200 feet (or more) lower than at present, 
those of the Gulf of Akabah experienced a like submergence. 4 
The region about Sadem (Sodom) was the abode of the Lotan 

1 Alohim said: Let the dry appear.—Gen. i. 9. 

2 The lava patches reach from Northern Palestine to Aden, and the Red Sea is a 
vast crevasse of plutonic depression.—R. F. Burton, in Acad., p. 48. 

3 Gen. xix. 24, 25. 

4 Edward Hull, Mount Seir. 


2 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Arabs. 1 And Genesis supposes Lot to have seen the volcanic 
fires. 2 

Between Hermon and Sinai lay a country occupied by a con¬ 
siderable number of tribes, among the most southerly being 
the Adites (Auditae, 3 or Oaditae) and Midianites ; among those 
to the north being the Kananites of Acho (Ako, Akko) and Tyre, 
and also the Amorites. The Bible describes the Phoenicians in 
the north as Kananites, in the south as Pelestim or Philistians. 
The land Caleb (Egyptian Khalebu) was near the district of 
the Katti (Klieth or Keth) at Hebron, while the Khatti (Katti 
Kheta) extended to the south as far as the country of the lower 
Ruthen 4 (Arad) and Idumea (Mt. Seir, Edom). The land of 
Kanan took in the country between the Mediterranean and 
the sea of Tiberias, from Hermon (Chermon) down to Iebus, 
Hebron, and Arad. Kanaan begat Kliat (Klieth).—Gen. x. 15. 
Over all this region Adonis (Saturn) was adored under various 
names by the fire-worshippers ; for they called Dionysus Adon 
(Adonis) in the Lebanon, Adoni and Adonai in Jerusalem, Sat, 
Set, in Philistia and Seb or Sabi 5 in Arabia. Euripides, Herod¬ 
otus, and Movers leave no doubt upon the point. 6 There was 
a strong desire on the part of the mountaineers of Jerusa¬ 
lem in the second century B.C., to get possession of Kanan. 
Genesis, ix. 25-27, curses Kanan, and declares him to be the 
servant of Shem and Iapet. It carries out this disposition of 
the Son of Cham (the Hot) by taking possession of Kananite 
territory 7 from the surroundings of Sidon and Tyre, all they 
could get of the Khatti territory, the Iebusite, Amorite, 
Gergashite, Choite (Acho, Acre), Arak or Arukaanl and, Beth 

1 Gen. xix. 15, 30. 

2 Compare Gen. xiii. 10, with xix. 17, 24, 25. 

3 Asu (Esau) married Audah, daughter of Ailon the Khethite (Khittite), and lived 
in Mt. Seir in Edom (Adorn).—Gen. xxxvi. 1, 2, 8. 

4 Osiander mentions an Arab deity Ruda. 

5 See also Genesis, x. 7. The Arabs called Kronos Adon and Seb. Kronos is the 
Hebrew Karan ‘to shine.’ Herakles, King of Fire, was called Apis on the Kile, Kronos 
in Arabia.—Nonnus, Dionysiac xl. 393. Also called Ammon.—xl. 392. 

6 Dunlap, Vestiges, 199, 201. ‘ Arabica gens calls jne Adoneum.’—Ausonius, Ep. 
30. Ausonius identifies Adoneus with Dionysus, Adonis, and Osiris. And Nonnus 
evidently holds the same view. The Phoenicians proclaimed Ousorus a deity.—Movers, 
120, quotes Eusebius, de Laud. Constant, c. 13. Osiris was declared to have been a man 
by Euhemerism ; and Eusebius held Ousorus to have been a man. 

7 Genesis, xii. 2, plainly indicates the intention to take the country. Kanan could 
not have become a Son of Cham until after the Kananites had emigrated into and 
colonized the Delta. 


THE MOUNTAINS OF THE AMORITES. 


3 


Ban, Samaria and Karmel to the southern part of the Dead Sea ; 
and Judas Makkabeus took Asdod and Askalon. It was an old 
Phoenician tradition that Saturn had granted the Land of the 
South to the God Taut, and Taut appears to have got a good 
share of it, even so far south as Egypt. The Phoenician Taut 
is the Egyptian Tat, Tot, Thoth. A more recent tradition, in 
Genesis, ix. 25, 26, of priestly origin, opens the Chananite ter¬ 
ritory to conquest by the Jews. 

The climate of ancient Palestine was always of varied char¬ 
acter owing to the variation of level in different spots, but its 
hills and mountains, together with the wooded character of the 
country at an early period, must have made most of it a toler¬ 
able abode for man. In January, 1884, at Jerusalem the snow 
fell to a depth of over two feet all over the country. Such a 
fall had not occurred for five years. In the most ancient period 
the woods must have kept the snow longer on the ground to 
feed the streams of the country, so that it was in all prob¬ 
ability better watered than since its woods have been cut down. 1 
It is possible that Arad may in the time of Ramses II. have had 
water for a moat around the town. Of early Arabia we know 
but little except its worship of Saturn, Kronos, Dionysus and 
Aphrodite Ourania, and in the sketches of ancient Judea we 
are introduced to Adon (Iachoh) the Lebanon Life-god and to 
Asliera (the Syrian Venus), Sarah. 

Without going too deep into geology it may be said that 
marine shells are found in the stratifications around the Dead 
Sea, that salt water ran from the Salt Sea down the Valley of 
Akabah past Petra and Acharon’s tomb 2 to the Red Sea at the 
Gulf of Akabah, 3 that hills formed by the coral insect are found 
some way inland in Arabia, 4 that the Red Sea once was 
broader than now, that the shores were once under water, 4 that 
the land has risen 5 (the water subsided), that the Isthmus 
of Suez was all deep water, and that formerly Egypt had 
w r aterfalls besides the cataracts of the Nile. Egypt has been 
gradually drying up. The prodigious water-worn ravines in 
the cliffs of the Nile valley show this; and there are remark - 

1 The Lebanon was once snow-clad throughout the year.—Hall, Mount Seir, 183, 
and pp. 124, 129, 133, 134. 

2 Aharon ; Ahron, Aaron : from Achar and Chares, meaning ‘ Sun.’ 

2 Hull, Mt. Seir. 

4 Niebuhr, Voyage in Arabie, I. 244. 

5 R. H. Burton, Land of Midian, passim. 


4 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


able evidences of the Nile having been habitually some 50 feet 
above its present level, thus filling up the whole valley at all 
times of the year. That its stream was fed by local rains 
throughout its course is seen by the deep gorges in the cliffs, 
often a mile long, and ending in dried-up waterfalls. In the 
history of the Faium the same drying up is seen. 1 Arabia 
anciently was less dried up than to-day, and appears to have 
been the heart of the Semite race. 2 

From B.c. 2000-450, the time of Herodotus, the Arabians 
of Audah, 3 the Chanania or Kananites, the Tyrians, the tribe 
of Iaudah (Jews), Israelites, Philistians and Egyptians wor¬ 
shipped idols. 

Ancient religion appears as a matter of organization, 
priestly theory, and manipulation,-coupled with the supersti¬ 
tions of the multitude; and these in time became somewhat 
systematized under the efforts of the priesthoods. These, in 
turn, became the leading castes, as in Egypt; and as religion 
reduced to a system requires gradations of rank as well as a 
constant attendance at the temples, a jobbing goes on with the 
people to obtain offerings to support the priest caste, while 
claims are made on the king for lands for the temples, and it 
ends by the pharaoh, the priests and the military holding all 
the landed property in Egypt, while in the Arabian Desert the 
sheiks or patriarchs wander from place to place with their 
families, their slaves, their cattle, horses, camels, and supersti¬ 
tions. 

Meanwhile great temples to the Sungod and the Moongod- 
dess 4 (Binah, Venah) have been erected. Nature is carefully 

1 Petrie, Pyramids, 149. 

2 Renan, Hist. Peuple Israel, I., 10. In the earliest Semite period we may suspect 
that the alphabet may perhaps not have been completed. That p and b were modified 
by subsequent additions to the alphabet may be assumed, or else these letters were 
changed in the pronunciation. Phuo varies into pephuka, showing an early recognition 
of the close relations of p and ph (f). So g, k, ch were originally modifications of one 
sound ; thus we have the district Kabul in Palestine, and the name Chabolo and Gebal. 
T, d, and th are, between Egyptian and Hebrew, in constant interchange, being modi¬ 
fications of one original sound. 

3 Compare Wright, Chr. in Arabia, 2-5. The Arabian peninsula is considered by 
Niebuhr an immense pile of mountains encircled by a belt of arid, flat ground extending 
from Suez around the whole peninsula to the mouth of the Euphrates, and continued 
on the north by the province of Petra and the deserts of Syria.—lb. 11. 

4 W. H. Roscher’s Lexicon der griechischen und romischen Mythologie confirms 
the view that Aphrodite was the great Asiatic moon-goddess, like Astarte and Artemis, 
and is the ‘ Queen of heaven.’ See “ Academy,” August 15, 1885, p. 106. 


THE MOUNTAINS OF THE AMORITES. 


5 


attended to by the priests, the stars are gazed at, the constel¬ 
lations formed and numbered, and a system of the universe 
invented. 

Genesis starts from Chaldaism. Compare Gen. xv. 7 ; Sep- 
tuagint psalm xix.; Philo, Who is Heir, 45, 48, and Change of 
Scripture Names, 3. Phoenicians and Syrians name Kronos 
El, Bel and Bolaten. The God El 1 was the primal God of 
the Semite race known to the Hebrews as Hael (Hel), the 
Greek Aelios and Helios. The Cretan God Abel (Abelios) is 
in Babylon Bel, the Bal, Abel, or Habol of the Jews, the Greek 
Apollon, Cretan Apellon. The Tower of Bel at Babylon with 
its seven stages is duplicated in the Syrian and Hebrew-Ghe- 
ber High Places and in the Pyramids of Egypt,—without 
however the seven stages of Bel’s tower at Babylon; Bel’s 
temples were on the High Places. The Sacred Number 7 was 
everywhere from the Euphrates to the Nile. Bel and Istar 
were among the Hebrews Bal and Astarta, Astarta too in 
Egypt. Ash (fire, life) becomes Asara, Azara, Ashera in Judaea 
and Phoenicia, Aisah in Genesis, and Isis in Ptolemaic Greek. 
Isis came out from Phoenicia into Egypt, and the Assyrian 
Asar becomes Asar in Hieroglyphs, and the Ptolemaic Osiris,— 
the name Surya in India. A ‘ Tomb of Osiris ’ was at Abydos, 
where the nobles of Egypt were buried, the kings of Sjrria 
were buried in the ‘ High Places ’ of the Sun. From all this 
it is evident that Babel was as much the centre of the Semite 
Beligion as Constantinople or Mecca are centres of Moham¬ 
medanism. Only that when the Priests of the Jewish Temple 
in the Second Century before our era compiled or wrote the 
Hebrew Old Testament they substituted the God of fire, life, 
and rain instead of Bal (Baal), abused the Chaldaean stargazers 
(2 Kings, xxiii.), and left out as much of the religion of Baby¬ 
lon as they possibly could. 2 For Bel and Astarta, As and 
Aisah, or Osiris and Esi (Isis), they wrote Adam and Eua 
(Heuah), because they did not choose to surrender the doc- 

1 Ps. xix. 1. The Hebrew Names El, Elah (in Hebrew letters Alh), Alha, Elohim 
(Alhim) are translated ‘ God ’ in the English Bible. 

2 Jeremiah, li. 7, 53. Adonai Iahoh is translated Lord, Adon and Bel also Lord. 
Adonis ‘Lord’ among the Phoenicians and name of Bol.—Hesychius ; Movers, I. 195. 
Balan ‘our Lord.’ Adni ‘my Lord.’ Hoi Adon ! Ah Lord! They subtiliter celebrate 
the slain Adon, and his resurrection.—Movers, 194, 308 ; Hieronymus, ad Ezekiel, viii. 
750. Adonis lives! Kronos has a Son, named Kronos.—Movers, 1.186 ; Sanchoniathon, 
Orelli, p. 3-2. 


6 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


trine of divine dualism (Apasson and Taautha, Hermathena, 
Choclnnah and Bena, Adon and Yena, Bel and Beltis, Osar 
and Asherah) in the primal Creator. It would not do to give 
up the rib of Genesis, ii. 22, 23. What would have become of 
the “ Mother of all that live ” ? The theory of dualism re¬ 
quired the two sources (the male and the female) as late as 
the time of Simon Magus and the haeretical or independent 
opinions. A man in those days was required to believe in the 
‘ Great Mother,’ else he was an unusual heretic.—Gen. ii. 20- 
22, iii. 20; Proverbs, viii. 1, 30. Like Brahma, Adam gives 
names to the animals. 

Bel was regarded as the “ Lord of the world who dost 
dwell in the temple of the Sun.” —Sayce, Hibbert Lect., p. 101. 
So the Septuagint, Arabic and Yulgate copies of the nineteenth 
Psalm say : In the sun Iahoh has placed his tabernacle ! The 
Semite and Sabian population thought alike. The conjunction 
of the ideas fire and light with life was offset by their oppo¬ 
sites darkness and death. As surely as the Babylonians and 
Jews both had the Flood-legend, and the Sacred Seven, and 
the Adonis-myth, the doctrine of a bisex first cause and the 
theory of precosmical powers, just as certainly the Babylonian 
Bel was the God of life (Iachi, Iachoh, Iahoh, Iao, and Ioue or 
Jove), since Bel was the Babylonian Creator (the Demiourgos), 
and out from the Unknown Darkness spoke the word of light 
and life. 

The Chaldaeans had the mysterious Name Iao, the Jews 
had the unspeakable word Ihoh (the tetragramaton ; in which 
the h, or ft, was read a) and the Phoenicians had “ trina littera ” 
and the mysterious Name Iao, the Iao of the Chaldaeans. Thus 
the mysterious ineffable Name at Jerusalem, consisting of four 
letters, stands between the equally mysterious Iao on the Eu¬ 
phrates and the Iao of the Phoenicians. Now since the Jewish 
Temple sought to absorb the other High Places, and as the 
kingdom of Hebron preceded that of Jerusalem, a new and 
unknown Name was not likely to captivate the priesthoods of 
the “ Bamoth Bal ” unless it was revered also in Babylon and 
Phoenicia ; there is reason to infer that lad and Iahoh (mean¬ 
ing life, Eternal Life) are merely shortened forms from the 
Hebrew roots chiah and hiah (chaiah and haiah) “ to live.” 

To exhibit the connection between the Mysteries and the 
religions of the East it is only necessary to quote Plato’s 


THE MOUNTAINS OF THE AMORITES. 


7 


Pkaedrus, which closely resembles Biblical and even modern 
Turkish doctrine, as follows : For if it were merely that 
mania is an evil, it would be well spoken ; but now the great¬ 
est benefits come to us by means of mania given by divine be¬ 
stowal. For both the Prophetess at Delphi and the holy 
ladies at Dodona have done many fine things for Greece, 
privately and publicly, when in a state of frenzy, but when in 
a sober state of mind little or nothing. The ancients who 
gave the names did not regard Mania as anything disgrace¬ 
ful or a reproach. The ancients testify that Mania is as much 
superior to discretion, what comes from God to that which is 
from men, as prophesy is more perfect and estimable than 
augury, or one name than the other, or the work of one to the 
performance of the other. Let us not therefore prefer a sane 
man to one who is moved by an inspiration. 

Every soul is immortal; for that which is always moved is 
immortal; but what moves something else and is moved by 
something else, when it has a cessation of movement its life 
ceases. That, then, which moves itself, since it does not leave 
itself, never ceases being moved but is the source and begin¬ 
ning of motion for the others that are being moved. And Be¬ 
ginning is unborn. 1 For all that is born must be born from 
Beginning, but (the Arche) itself from none; for if a Begin¬ 
ning should be born from anything, then it would not be a 
Beginning. Since, then, it is unborn (uncreate), it must be in¬ 
destructible also. For if a Beginning should perish, it will 
neither be born from anything nor anything else from it, if in¬ 
deed all things must be born from a Beginning (an Arche). 
So, then, the Beginning (Arche) of motion is the very thing 
that moves itself: and this can neither perish nor be born, or 
both all heaven and all genesis collapsing would stop and 
never would there again be (that) whereby what is moved shall 
be born. Since what is moved by itself, has been seen to be 
immortal, one will not hesitate to say that this very thing is 
the quality of soul : that having its impulse (motion given to 
it) from without is soulless, but that which is moved from 
within, of itself, has a soul, since this is the nature of soul. 
And if this is so, that there is nothing else that itself moves 
itself except soul, of necessity the soul (life) must be unborn 

1 Compare the first words of Genesis i. 1 : In the Beginning, Elohim bore. Here we 
see the juxtaposition of MasSs and Plato. 


8 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and immortal. Therefore we have said enough respecting 
athanasia. 1 Plato then goes on to argue that a soul gets a 
body when it has lost its wings (that is, in the fall of man from 
paradise). While it remains perfect it soars aloft and governs 
the universe. This is not essentially different from Semite 
ideas. Plato then gets on the subject of the millennium as 
connected with the Mysteries. 2 Next, he enters more fully in¬ 
to the joys of the Initiated in the Mysteries, pure and blessed, 
in company with “ that happy choir ” in company with Zeus 
(Bel) and other Gods, beholding the pure light and the blessed 
visions seen in those Mysteries, 3 that, according to Cicero, 
gave a promise of dying with a better hope. Therefore Plato 
had been instructed in the Oriental Mysteries, and his specu¬ 
lations are about as closely connected with the Mysteries of 
the Syrian and Egyptian Semites and with Hebrew opinions 
(such as we find in the Bible) as we could expect of one ini¬ 
tiated into the Mysteries that Plutarch (de Iside), Ezekiel, 
Isaiah and Irmiah 4 describe. Plato held the theory of spirit 
and matter, as representing two opposites. So did the Per¬ 
sians, Jews, the Jordan Ascetics, and Mani. But no evidence 
of the existence of such an entity as spirit can be shown. 
The Jews held fire was spirit; but fire is the product of mat¬ 
ter, the friction of two pieces of wood, or flint and steel. 

1 Immortality. 

2 Plato, Phaedrus, cap. xxviii. xxix. p. 92. Stallbaum. Judgment too, and pun¬ 
ishment in Hades. 

2 Ibid. pp. 97, 98. 

4 Irmiaho, Jeremiah. 


CHAPTER TWO. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 

“ ctKcbv yip i(TTiv ovfflas iv v\rj ye veer is. Kal /xi/irma rov ovtos rb yevip.evov.’' 1 
“ Shairep yip 5 vva/us tov irpev/xaris 4<tt i r6 trip.” 

The Egyptians and Greeks had the doctrine of £ spirit.’ 1 The 
basis of Dualism consists in these words: 

Learn what the mind perceives, for it exists apart from mind . 2 


The indictment in this case charges that the Hebrew writ¬ 
ings of the Jews are based upon the recognition of the phi¬ 
losophy called dualism, that is, the doctrine of‘ spirit and mat¬ 
ter.’ We shall prove in this chapter that this is the doctrine 
that underlies the entire Old Testament. The doctrine of the 
Egyptians concerning the first principles inculcates the origin 
of all things from the unit with different gradations to the 
many, which again are held to be under the supreme govern¬ 
ment of the One. And God produced Matter from the mate¬ 
rial (substance) of the divided Essence, which being of a vivi- 
fic nature the Creator (Demiourgos) took it and made from it 
the harmonious and imperturbable spheres. 3 

The expression that SEEing is knowing 4 and believing, may 
be thus illustrated. The Latin word to see is uidi, the Greek 
is oida (I know), the Hebrew is ida (whence we have dath, 
KNOwledge); supernal knowledge, spiritual insight, superior 
science, are expressed in Greek by gndnai, in Sanskrit by 
jnana (gnana, gnonai, gnosis): in Latin, we have NOU-i, in Eng¬ 
lish, I know. The Sanskrit ueda (the veda) is then the same 

1 Plutarch, de Iside, 39, 40. 

2 Manthane to noeton, epei noou exo uparkei. Compare the ‘Ayin’ the ‘No 
thing ’ in the doctrine of the Kabalah. 

3 Hermetic Fragments; Cory, p. 285. 

4 Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abichu, and Seventy of the Ancients, the nobles, SAW the 
Alahi of Isarel (Israel).—Exodus, xxiv. 9, 10, 11. 


10 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


root as the Greek oida and the Hebrew ida, meaning gnosis, 
vidh , uideo, video, uissen, wist , uisdom uisum {visum). The 
Hebrews were gnostics ; 1 for gnosis is older than Christianity 
as a separated tendency of Judaism. 2 The ev koI iroWa (one 
and many) both belong to existence or ousia, which thus com¬ 
bines unity and plurality. The one (the unit) exists and par¬ 
takes of being. 3 

The perfect states are ideal forms and ousia.— Julian, in Solem, 134. 

In an indictment for dualism it must be shown in what the 
dualism consists and the parties against whom dualism is 
charged. Plato speaks of the ousia, the essence of simple ab¬ 
stract existence , which is the vital force of deity in the abstract, 
the cause of causes. The religion of the orient was based 
upon two principles. These principles are spirit and matter. 
The fire principle was in the sun, and the spirit was in the 
sun, according to Diodorus, I. 7, 11, p. 15; compare Matthew, 
iii. 11; 2 Peter, iii. 10, 11. 

There is spirit in man, and the breath 4 of Sadi gives intelligence.—Job, 
xxxii. 8. 

Ialioli thy Alah, a fire that eats is he ! 

Ia'lioh Alahik, ash akalah hoa !—Deuteronomy, iv. 24. 

Oshah malacliio ruaclioth, masartio ash lahat.—Psalm, civ. 4. 

He makes his angels spirits, his ministers a flame of fire !—Ps. civ. 4. 

Ia’lioh, thy Alah, is fire that consumes! He makes his 
angels spirits, Abrahm and LHT (Lot) dwelt in and near the 
fire-district, Laht or Lot. Lot is then the name of a burnt dis¬ 
trict, not of a man. 

The nature of Osiris-Dionysus consists of fire and spirit. 5 

1 1 Samuel, ii. 3 ; Isaiah, xlvii. 10. Hebrew text. “ There is in man a third faculty 
which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but 
in all things ; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense con¬ 
tradicted by sense and reason, but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it 
has held its own from the beginning of the world, how neither sense nor reason have 
been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense.”— 
Max Muller, Science of Religion, p. 14. Mr. Max Muller here gives the exact defi¬ 
nition of the gnosis, and, in a lateral way, gives it the benefit of an endorsement, of 
which it stands in great need. 

2 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, ii. 95, 99, 100; 2 Samuel, ii. 3, Septuagint. 

3 Plato ; Muller, Hist. Lit., ii. 240, ed. 1858. Ousia is the fiery spiritual form, the 
vital essence, or being. 

4 pneuma, neshamath. 

5 Diodorus, 1.11. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


11 


Iachoh is the breath of life ; the feminine spirit is called Eua 
and Asah , 1 and, in the Midrasli Rabbah, Asat . 2 The deities of 
the oriental world mostly represent the spirit, or life, in the 
sun and moon. Plato says that the most high God is in the 
fiery essence . 3 The new fire of Yesta was lighted in March . 4 

Whithersoever the spirit was to go.—Ezekiel, i. 20. 

And the spirit entered into me.—Ezekiel, ii. 2. 

Reasonably then the mind-perceived (the intelligible) 5 does not go forth to 
us ; surely not the single, 6 7 which is set above the ousia : 1 for this too belongs 
to divine gndsis to behold, whence the most supernal of the real elements that 
are mentally perceived by us we declare as mind-perceived 8 and as the real es¬ 
sence, 9 that really is. For Plato bringing the souls up to this place supposes in 
it the Ousia absolute, and visible only to the ruler of the soul.—Damaskius, 
cap. 113. 

In treating of the Mind-perceived primal entities (or pow¬ 
ers) we are reminded of the ancient saying ; 

“ For every nature of the first principles 10 lies far from our senses below.” 

The latin verb, uro, urere, ussi, ustum, has a very respectable 
antiquity. It connects with AR, Ares, and Areia (Hera) mean¬ 
ing fire, in Phoenicia, Armenia, Moab, Israel, Arabia, Ur (Ourie 
the city of the Firepriests) of the Chaldees, mentioned in Abra- 
liamic story; appears in the names Ar (of Moab) ARimmon 
and Ariel, and in the name of the fire-altar ARa. 11 It is the same 
with our word ash (ashes). It begins with the Sanskrit and 
Semitic root as (fire, life), appears in the Hebrew as or ash 

1 So Simon Magus held. The Egyptian Aso. 

2 Midrash Rabba, parasha 22: mn nKJJT DlNiTl 

3 Justin ad Graecos, V. 

4 It was the first month.—Macrobius, I. xii. 6. July was the fifth, August the sixth 

month. 

6 TO VOrjTOV. 

6 to evialov , that which is the unit. 

7 the essence, or ideal substance. 

8 voyjtov. 

9 ovctlo.. The ousia is the place of forms. A mind-perceived world, a mind-per¬ 
ceived Sun, and a mind-perceived to ov belong to gnosis and the early Kabalah. So, 
too, the deities of Italy were the mind-perceived, ghostly, forms of Etruscan Gods. 

10 the first of things, the first elements, the beginnings, or primal powers.—Compare 
Colossians, i. 15, 16, 18. 

11 Our fire, imitating the action of divine fire, destroys whatever belongs to matter , 
in the sacrifice, and purifies what is brought to it and looses it from the bonds of mat¬ 
ter and owing to its pure nature renders it suitable for the Gods to partake of.— 
Iamblichus, de Mysteriis. 


12 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


“ fire,” Asali, Aso, Aisah, Isah, Isis, and terminates at the fire- 
altar of the Phoenician, Etruscan or Roman in ussi and usta. 

For the mortal that approaches the Fire shall have light from God. 1 —Chal¬ 
dean Oracle. 

And said Elialio to the people : I alone am left a prophet to Ia’hoh, and the 
Nabiai (prophets) of Habol 2 (Apollo) 450 men. 

And you shall call on the name of your God (Bol, or Abol) and I will call on 
the name Iachoh. And be it, the Elohim who responds by fire, he is the 
Eloliim !—1 Kings, xviii. 22, 24. 

Then fell down fire of Iachoh.—1 Kings, xviii. 38. 

Kebir is a name of fire. The Gebirs 3 are the fire-worship¬ 
ers, and the Cabiri are the seven spirits of fire. 4 Compare the 
Arabian idol Hlieber, 5 and the Gliebers at Hebron. 

Bacchantum ritu flagrantes circuit aras.—Ovid, Met. vii. 258. 

Circulates around the burning altars like the Sun-worshippers. 

Ia’hoh your Alah is a consuming fire.—Heut. iv. 24. 

To the God who is in the fire, who is in the water, who entered the universe, 
who is in the annual herbs and who is in the regents of the forests, 6 to this 
God 1 be reverence, to him be reverence.—The Swetaswatara Upanisliad, cap. 
ii. 17. E. Roer. 

He whose head is the fire, whose eyes are the moon and the sun, whose 
ears the quarters, whose revealed word 8 the Vedas, whose vital air the mind, 
whose heart the universe, from whose feet the earth, is the inner Soul of all be¬ 
ings.—Mundaka Upanished, mund. ii., 1, 4, Roer. 

We have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire. —Deuteronomy, v. 
24. 

That which in thee sees and hears is the Logos 9 of the Lord.—Hermes Trism. 

I. 6. 

I am that which is the seed of all existing things.—The Bhagavad-Gita, 
cap. x. 

God was the Logos. This was in the beginning with the God and all 

1 Proclus in Tim. 65. 

2 fen may also be read Havol and Evol. Epul and Vul are names of Apollo. 
Hobal is Saturn of the dying year.—Movers, Phonizier, 86, 263, 287 f., 448. 

3 Mankind, p. 579. 

4 Rev. i. 4; iv. 5. 

5 Univ. Hist, xviii. 387. Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 73. The Arab idol Ilheber is at the 
Gheber altar of the Solar Firegod. 

6 The trees. So Vishnu, Krishna, Adam. Magna Sacerdos Arboris.—Juvenal, 
vi. 544. 

7 Logos. Adonis. 

6 Revelation in India; not to the Jews in this instance. 

9 The Word. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


13 


things came into existence through the Logos, and without him not a thing was 
born ; what came to exist in him is Life. And in him the Eua was born, the 
Eua, Life. This is the Eua, Mother of all living things, common Nature.— 
Perataean Gnosis. 1 

The oldest Dionysus was the fire-god Moloch. 2 

Where God’s bacchic fire leaps.—Euripides, Ion, 1125. 

The fireworship in the Herakles-temple at Gades was, ac¬ 
cording to Phoenician custom, conducted without an image; 3 
this was the case in Jerusalem. He is the spirit in nature, the 
Breath of life. The philosophy of the ancient world was ad¬ 
hered to by both polytheists and monotheists. Egyptians 4 
and Hindus, in spite of polytheism, believed in One God 
supreme, the doctrine of the primal unity of the spirit was held 
in the Mysteries of the Chaldean Adonis, the Jewish Ia’hoh- 
Adoni, the Arab Dionysus - Iacchos, the Egyptian Osiris : and 
the frog-headed deities of Egypt pointed to water as the medi¬ 
um in which the spirit was supposed to operate ; for the spirit 
was formed out of the waters. 5 

The region of the Chaldaeans was the nurse of the ancient 
philosophy. 6 The Mosaic philosophy is Chaldaean. 7 The 
Jewish religion is a form of the Dionysus-worship; and Ado¬ 
nis, Adonai, Osiris, Dionysus, all are the Sun, the source of 
rain, as the Hindus regarded him. The vine was attributed 
to Noa’h, 8 Dionysus, Osiris 9 and Iacchos, while, according to 
Josephus, enormous clusters of grapes were depicted above 
the Gate of the temple of Ia’holi at Jerusalem. From the 
Caucases first, afterwards from the Semites, came wine. The 
Greeks got it from the Semites. 10 Spirit has neither flesh nor 

1 Hippolytus, v. 16. Eua is Eva. The upper hemisphere of the earth that we in¬ 
habit was called Venus; Proserpine is in the lower hemisphere. Venus mourns at cer¬ 
tain periods of the year for the Adonis that belongs to her, as Sun and Lover. 

2 Movers, 372, 374, 376, 361. Here we come upon the Ghebers and ’Hebers. Com¬ 
pare Chebron or ’Hebron. See also Dunlap, Sod. I. 160 ; Dr, Paul Haupt, Sintfluth- 
bericht, p. 4; for Kebir meaning fire. 

3 Movers, p. 76. 

4 Philip Smith, Anc. Hist, of the East, p. 195. Harper. 

6 Wuttke, Gesch. d. Heidenth. II., 295. In Genesis, i. 2, the spirit moves on the 
face of the waters. Compare Psalm lxv. 9, 10. 

6 Ammian, lib. xxiii. 6, 25; Pomponius Mela, p. 206. 

7 Movers, 390, 391. 

8 Noch, meaning Descent of rain. 

9 Lenormant, les Origines, II. 239, 247, 250; Diodor. Sic. I. 15. 

10 Lenormant, II. 251. 


14 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON . 


bones. 1 From the spirit issued light and water, and from the 
water matter settled. The serpent, in the mysteries, indicated 
darkness, the earth, death and the tomb. He has his hole in 
the ground and is found, in the cave of Ahriman. 2 As spirit, 
he pointed to the resurrection. 

Berashitli bara Alohim eth lia-shemaim wa lia-araz. 3 —Gen. i. 1. 

At first this was water, fluid. Pra^apati, the Lord of creatures, having be¬ 
come wind, moved on it.—The Taittiriya Samhita. 4 

ua ruacli Alohim merachefet 61 phani liamaim.—Gen. i. 2. 

And the wind 5 of God flitted above upon the surfaces of the waters.—Gen¬ 
esis, i. 2. 

He (Pra^apati) saw this earth, and, becoming a boar, he took it up. 6 —The 
Taittiriya Samhita. 

Here we have again the spirit and matter philosophy, the 
philosophy of the orient. The power of Isis was respecting 
Matter, which takes and receives light and darkness, day and 
night, fire and water, life and death, beginning and end. 7 

Of all objects in the created world water existed first when as yet there was 
neither devatah, nor man, nor animal, nor star, nor other heavenly body. 8 
The whole universe was dark and water. In this primeval water Bhagavat in 
a masculine form reposed. 9 

It is plain that the Jews in the 2d century had the Hindu 
opinions at hand, and Josephus said that the Jews were a sect 
of the Brahmans. 

No mortal lives by the breath that goes up and by the breath that goes 
down. We live by another, in whom both repose. 

Well then, I shall tell thee this mystery, the eternal word (Brahman), and 
what happens to the Self, after reaching death. 

Some are born again as living beings, others enter into stocks and stones, 
according to their work and according to their knowledge. 

1 Luke, xxiv. 39; 1 Cor. ii. 10, 11, 12; iii. 16; xv. 44. 

2 Ezekiel, viii. 8, 10. 

3 Erats. Compare the Homeric adverb Ipafe, erazah, (in Hebrew) meaning to 
earth. 

4 Max Muller, India, What can it, p. 137. 

5 Spirit (spiro, to blow). The Spirit is Wind.—Acts, ii. 2. Ruach, Rudra. 

6 Lifted it on his tusk from beneath the waters. The whole world was involved in 
darkness and submerged in water.—Maurice, Hist. Hind. I. pp. 407, 410. 

7 de Iside, 77. Here we have the A and O. The Moon is the Mother of the Gods. 
The Egyptians represented their deities floating on the waters. 

8 Maurice, Hist. Hind., I. 407. 

9 Ibid., 407. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


15 


But he, the Highest Person, who wakes in us while we are asleep, 1 shaping 
one lovely sight after another, he indeed is called the Light, 2 he is called Brah¬ 
man, he alone is called the Immortal. All worlds are founded on it, and no one 
goes beyond. This is that ! 

He (Brahman) cannot be reached by speech, by mind, or by the eye. He 
cannot be apprehended except by him who says, He is. 3 —The Yedanta. Max 
Muller, 249. 

There is an unbroken continuity between the most modern and 
the most ancient phases of Hindu thought extending over 
more than three thousand years. 4 This remark is applicable 
to the Hebrew mind as well. 

The Stoics defined the essence of the divinity as intelligent 
and fiery spirit, without a form, capable of changing into what 
it wills, and making itself like and united to all things. God, 
being a globe of fire, is intelligence and the soul of the world ; 
he is the mind of the world, and idea is the bodiless essence in 
the conceptions and exhibits of the God. Hence the Stoics 
regarded Bacchus, who is the water-god and the fire-god, as 
God of light, Nutritive and Generative spirit. The male-female 
spirit of Mithra was adored : 

There went out a fire from Ia’hoh and devoured them.—Leviticus, x. 2. 

Whose fire is in Sion and whose furnace in Jerusalem.—Isaiah, xxxi. 9. 

quia dominus est spiritus.—Origen in Numb. cap. xxxiii. 

God is spirit.—John iv. 24. 

pneuma 6 Tlieos.—John, iv. 24. 

Centum aras posuit vigilemque sacraverat ignem.—Virgil, Aen. iv. 199. 

Yet know the untransitoriness of That from which this All is unfolded.— 
Bhagavad-Gita, ii. 7. Lorinser. 

God was regarded as Mind; also as male-female. 5 The recog¬ 
nition of God 6 as the intellectual principle, wholly distinct 
from matter, which presides over creation is seen in Anax¬ 
agoras and Thales. 7 For the nature 8 which admits neither 

1 Compare Pharaoh’s dream of the fat kine. 

2 Gen. i. 3, compared. 

3 So Exodus iii. 14 I am what I am. 

4 Max Muller, 249. 

8 Hermes, I. 9. The Babylonian Ea is king of the ocean. Iah sits king upon the 
floods.—Ps. xxix. 10. 

6 The Gothic Tio, Theos; Tios in Crete. 

’Kenrick, Egypt, I. 367; Cicero, N.D. I. 10. 

8 Substantia. 


16 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


color nor form and is not tangible, the undoubted ruler of the 
soul, is beheld by the mind alone. 1 

Mithra is the divine fire of the Persians and the Moabite 
or Jewish Ariel. 2 3 Mithra stands on a lion, is Ariel. The lion 
of Judah is then the lion of Babylon and Persia. Apollo is 
Mithra, and the lion is his emblem for Croisos sent a golden 
lion to Delphi ; thus the lion is the Persian-Babylonian-Jew - 
ish-Egyptian emblem of Adonis, Mithra Apollo and Bacchus. 
It is the emblem of Horus in Egypt. Mithra is born from a 
cave 3 Dec. 25th, Christmas ! Apollo in the cave of Bacchus. 4 
Hear Plato: 

The man in the cave is liberated from chains, he turns from shadows to the 
images and the light! He ascends from the cavern underground to the Sun.— 
Plato, Republic, vii. c. 13. 

The High priest and 24 priests bowed down before the ris¬ 
ing Sun, 5 who is the water the light, and the fire ! Mithra and 
Matar. 

They impart the Mysteries of Mithra in caves in order that, sunk in the 
Darkness, they may look up to the splendid and serene light.—Julius Firmi- 
cus, 5. 

Slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks.—Isaiah, 
lvii. 5. 


They adored Mithra under the names “ Zeus-Ilelios-Ser apis," 
for Lepsius found in Gebel Dochan, on the peninsula of Mt. 
Sinai, a temple with this inscription ; and dedicated by Ha¬ 
drian. 6 7 The Church Historian T cannot prevent himself from 
dra wing a comparison between the cross in the temple of Sera- 
pis and the attribute of the Redeemer. 8 Serapis was wor¬ 
shipped in Hadrian’s temple as Seir Anpin (the Sun), the 
Second Person of the Kabbala, the Redeemer Mithra who in 
Babylon raises up the souls from the darkness of Hades to the 

1 Origen c. Cels. vi. p. 495. 

2 Ar = fire. Ari = lion. 

3 Justin, cum Tryplio, p. 82, edition 1551. 

4 Diodorus Sic. III. 193. See Isaiah, xlv. 7 ; lvii. 5 ; Jer. xix. 5. Mithra was said 
to have been born from a rock.—Justin Martyr, p. 82. 

5 Ezekiel, viii. 16. 

6 Lepsius, letters, p. 288. Seir Anpin has the two sexes, like Zeus of the Orphics. 

7 Sokrates, v. c. 17. 

8 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 282, note. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


17 


Light of heaven and the eternal life of Apollo, Bol Mithra, 
Horus! 

She did not know that I (Iachoh) gave (Jerusalem) her corn and wine and 
oil, and multiplied her silver and gold ; hut she made silver and golden (things) 
to the she-Baal. 1 —Septuagint, Osea, ii. 8. 

Zahab oso leBol : they made gold for Bol!—Hosea ii. 10. 

In the Kosmogony of Berosns, Belus formed the stars, the 
sun, the moon and the five planets. Iauk the Arab Iach 
(Iachi “ he lives ”), the Hebrew Iachoh (“ I am ”) was repre¬ 
sented as a Horse surrounded by seven images. It is the Arab 
Dionysus ; for Herodotus credits the Arabians with the opin¬ 
ion “ that Dionysus and the Ourania 2 are the only God.” So 
As and Asali, Euas and Issa-Isis. 


Among the Eloliim none like thee, Adoni! I will confess to thee, O Adoni, 
my Elah, with all my heart, and will honor thy name to eternity, for thou hast 
snatched my soul from the lowest Hades.—Psalm, lxxxvi. 8, 12, 13. 

We think then God a blessed living being and immortal and beneficient 
towards men.—Plutarch, de Stoic. Repugnant., 38. 

On the third tablet you will know whence shall be the harvest of wine, 
where the Lion and the Virgin are. And on the fourth who is the ruler of the 
grape-buncli, where, drawing sweet nectar, with painted hand Ganymede lifts 
a cup. 

As thus the God spoke, the vine-loving maid ran turning round her eyes. 
And by the presaging wall beheld the first triangular tablet, as old as the end¬ 
less world, presenting in one what the Lord OphiSn 3 did, whatever aged Kro- 
nos performed, when, cutting the Father’s male ploughs, he ploughed a child¬ 
bed water, Sowing unsown backs of a daughter-producing sea.—Nonnus, xii. 
37-47. 

Eretrians and Magnesians presenting the God 4 with the first-fruits of men 5 
as Giver of fruits, Father of his children, giving birth and loving man.—Plu¬ 
tarch, de Pytliiae orac. 17. 

You shall not kindle fire in all your dwellings on the Seventh day. 6 —Exo 
dus, xxxv. 3. 

1 Heracles-Archal as Rachel; the female Apollo, i.e. Minerva. Gold is Sol’s color; 
silver is luna’s. 

2 According to Macrobius, I. xii. 11, Venus is in Taurus. This is the location of 
Isis, according to Krichenbauer, Theogony and Astronomy, 197 f. 

3 The Divine Wisdom, Herakles the Logos. See John, i. 1. 

4 Apollo Hebdomaios. 

6 So Exodus, xiii. 12, 13. 

0 Our forefathers upon certain frequent plagues in the district, following a certain 
ancient superstition , made a custom to observe that day which by the Jews is called the 
Sabbaton.— Samaritan Epistle , Josephus, xii. 7. 

2 


18 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Seventh day was sacred to Saturn, El, Iachoh, Apollo and 
the Arabian Dionysus, whom the Titans tore into seven pieces. 

And. he put out the inextinguishable divine fire of breakers. 

Honoring Helios and Bacchus and at the same time Zan.—Nonnus, xxiv. 
66, 67. 

Thee I invoke, the Lord of Life and Light.—The Shah Nameh. 

Heat is a mode of motion; but to say what a thing* is in 
itself is always attended with difficulty, since the nature of 
things is not yet fully understood. In drawing sudden infer¬ 
ences there is risk, as in the case of spirit and matter. Spirit 
means nothing appreciable, nor are we to greater advantage 
with the expression matter. Neither is a scientific definition, 
although the term matter is a tolerable, superficial designa¬ 
tion. Matter is proteus-like in its forms, and in its states of 
organization it is hard to say whether or not it ends in a vital 
appearance or exposition of motion and apparently vital aspects. 
The question arises whether what the ancients chose to call 
spirit is not rather an aspect of some of the organizations of 
matter or substance, a result worn as a signal of the vitalized 
aspects rather than a separate entity apart from physical ma¬ 
terial substance. Here we are arrived at the limits of human 
knowledge, if not at the limit of human capacity; and the 
problem of what life is may be left for a subsequent age to 
determine; only, so far as our present thesis is concerned it 
seems as if the dogma, the formula, ‘ spirit and matter ’ was, in 
the ancient world, or might have been, a hasty generalization, 
particularly as a division into things that have life and things 
without life, owing to our limits, is not easily established to¬ 
day. The incomplete condition of gnosis and science in the 
world of two thousand years ago is therefore an assumption 
that has a chance of being correct. The mental condition of 
the system-makers and theorists of that day seems to us to 
have been truly unscientific, founded in mere surmises and 
baseless conjectures regarding spirits, and, of course, spirit. 
The only definition of spirit is breath, and breath was re¬ 
garded as the symbol of life , whereas, like heat, it resolves 
itself, under some aspects, into a mode of matter in motion. 
So far as we know, no life is observed apart from substance, 
from some stage or form of material organization. But the 
ancients in their superstitions gave forms to souls , and to all 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


19 


sorts of spiritual beings of the imagination, such as Gods and 
Goddesses, demons, etc. Examine Etruscan drawings found 
in their tombs, the descriptions of beings that the imagination 
only has conceived. This shows the power of the imagination 
to create untruth, to personify unverities, such as seven devils 
entering a human being. From the point of view of accurate, 
scientific observation, the orient will not bear examination. 
Omne vivum ex vivo is the result of all human observation of 
animal flesh, or of human. Under certain forms of organiza¬ 
tion is there not a tendency to the distillation, secretion, of the 
nervous strings or telegraphs that primarily transmit sensa¬ 
tion, and (by the reflex action) a repetition of the cerebral mod¬ 
ification of sensation? Is not thought a reflected modified 
sensation repeated, by physical effort, in the brain ? The 
repetition of the image that sensation impresses on the brain ? 
In dreams, this can occur; but in fainting (bloodlessness in 
the brain) never! 

Herodotus regarded all the dark-skinned population extend¬ 
ing from Nubia across Southern Arabia to India as Aethio- 
pians ;* Desvergers, 2 Wright andHeeren 3 describe the Aethio- 
pians and Arabs as masters of the commerce of India, while 
Winwood Beade 4 states that Arabia was enriched by the mo¬ 
nopoly of the trade between Egypt and the Malabar coast. 
Lucian tells us that the Indi rose at dawn to pray to the 
Sun, kissed their hand facing the east, and greeted the Helios 
with dancing. The Bible tells us that David danced before 
Ia’hoh, that the Jewish temple faced the rising sun and Job 
speaks of looking upon the sun and moon and kissing the 
hand. 5 

Hang them up to Ia’hoh, facing the Sun.—Numbers, xxv. 4. 

Whom some call Sun, others Jove.—Servius, Ad Aeneid, i. 729. 

In the sun Ia’hoh has set his tent.—Psalm, xix. 4. Septuagint. 8 

Kronos is the spirit in the sun ; Yenus is the feminine spiritus 
in luna. Plutarch says that all things are born from Kronos 
and Yenus. 7 Nonnus mentions Kronos as lancing rain. The 

, 1 Herodotus, iii. 97, 98. 

2 Desvergers, Abyssinie, 7. 

3 Heeren, Hist. Res., iii. 407-409. 

4 Martyrdom of Man, 97. 

6 Job, xxxvi. 27. 

6 The Vulgate says the same. 

7 Plutarch, Iside, 69. 


20 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Kabbala Denudata speaks of tlie Dew of the Seir, which is the 
moisture of the Sun ; for Seir Anpin (Serapis) is the Sun, the 
source of fire, heat, spirit, water, light and life. The Babylo¬ 
nians and Hindus adored heat, water and earth. Pythagoras 
held that heat is the principle of life, that God is spirit and 
fire, that fire is the soul of the world and the source of all 
souls. 

He shall baptise you with holy spirit and with fire.—Matthew, iii. 11. 

The Sun, Adonis, appears as the spirit, Eros, and Bacchus, the 
source of the soul. The fable of Cupid and Psyche has all the 
characteristics of a Platonic myth. The Orphics, like the 
Essenes, held that the soul descended into the body as into a 
prison. Plutarch confirms this by expressing the same view. 1 
A bas-relief of the Louvre represents Prometheus modelling a 
human figure, other finished forms are by his side, and Athena, 
fons naturae, fons omnium, imparts life to them by placing 
the symbolic butterfly on their heads. The Magi taught that 
the soul is immortal, 2 and Egypt believed it. 

The IAO of the Chaldeans and Phoenicians (Movers I. 539, 
552) is the mysterious name of Dionysus and the Hebrew deity 
Iao. Since the Homans had vestals who vowed in chastity to 
watch the eternal fire, and the Hebrews had an eternal fire to 
watch that was never suffered to go out on the altar of Ia’hoh, 
is not Plutarch’s question pertinent when he inquires : 
“ Why it has been forbidden both to speak and to ask and to 
name the God, whether he is male or female, 3 who is charged 
with saving and preserving Borne ? ” 4 As the four-letter name 
of the Jewish Jehovah (Ihoh) was ineffable, and the word 
Adoni or Adonai spoken instead in the Jewish mysteries, it is 
but reasonable to presume that the Boman priesthood were 
quite up in the Iacchic Kabbalist mysteries, as much as in the 
Bacchic mysteries ; for the two “ traditions ” seem to be one, 
just as they appeared to Plutarch eighteen centuries ago. 5 And 
this is not all; for in a chapter on Yows (nedarim 6 ) there is 

1 Collignon, Essai sur les mon. grecs et romains, 830, 339, 358 ; Dunlap, Vestiges, 
155, 169, 170, 177, 195, 196, 222, 231; Dunlap, Sod, I. 187, 188. 

2 Spiegel, Vendidad, 16, 32; Theopompus, apud Diogenes Laertius. 

3 The Orphic hymn : Almighty Zeus is male, Almighty Zeus is female !—Gen. ii. 23. 

4 Plutarch, Quaest. Roman. 61. 

6 ibid. Quaest. Conviv. iv. 6 ; ix. 14, 4. 

6 Leviticus, xxvii. 2, 3, 4. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


21 


mention of vows of males and females; and the priest must 
appraise the value of a vow according* to the age and sex of 
those who devoted themselves. As it is said by Origen that 
the eunuch has devoted himself to God, a similar self-devotion 
may have earlier existed, on the part of women, so very an¬ 
ciently as prior to Herodotus ; for Philo mentions the Eunuchs 
in his time as does Juvenal, and Lucian places them within 
the temple precincts of the Syrian God and Goddess a century 
later. It is not intended here to overlook the Mosaic statute 
that prohibits a eunuch from attending the Congregations; 
only to remark that Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, 5, gives the eunuchs 1 a 
very high position in the Church. Consequently a temple- 
devot, hardly a vestal, and even a sacred devadassi, may have 
once graced the temples of Babylonia, Syria or Palestine. 2 
Dr. Movers shows that the vestals were in the temples of 
Diana all through Southern Europe and Asia Minor. The 
castum cubile belonged to the religions before Christ, and 
Christian monachism carried out the doctrine, handed down 
inferentially by Plutarch, to mortify the flesh; for he says 
that “ Matter is what first is subject to being born, corruption 
and the other changes.” 3 Saint Paul spoke about this cor¬ 
ruption putting on incorruption; but this is implied in the 
old doctrine of metempsychosis, es aX\o £wov ad yRonevov, and 
long previously was the doctrine of the Bacchic, Chaldaean 
and Mithriac Solar self-denying inspiration. Like the gnosis, 
eastern monachism began long before Judaism and Chris¬ 
tianity, in which we see only the after part of the insurrection 
of the spirit against “ the doings of the body.” The politician 
Josephus indeed says of the justice of the Essenes, that they 
owed it neither to Greeks nor Barbarians, but it was theirs 
from anciently . 4 In the morning-land the Sun is associated 
with fire, water and spirit, which is the flatus or breath of 
life. 5 The spirit is the associate of water, and moves on the 

1 Sarisim. Lucian De Dea Syria 43, 50, mentions the Eunuchs at the sanctuary at 
Byblus in the second century of our era. 

2 Movers, Phonizier, 360, 679 ; 1 Samuel, xxiii. 7. 

3 Plutarch, de placitis philosoph. I. ix. 1. Bromius and Siva create and destroy, 
to recreate in other forms. “But how can the same man be both immortal and mor¬ 
tal ” asks De Vita Contemplativa, 1, when speaking of the Demigods. Daring to con- 
neot license with the Blessed and Divine Powers, if those thrice blest and free from all 
passion madly in love consorted with mortal women.—ibid. 1. see Genesis, vi. 4. 

4 Josephus, Ant. xviii. 2. 

5 Acts, ii. 1, 2, 3. 


92 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


face of the waters. 1 In the waters Brahma placed a quicken¬ 
ing seed. It is associated to moisture ; hence the serpent 
working in the wet 2 is the emblem of the spirit. The hus¬ 
bandman had closely observed nature and well knew the con¬ 
ditions under which the phenomena of life and growth are 
exhibited in young plants. 


This is the truth : As from a blazing fire 3 in thousand ways similar sparks 
proceed, so O beloved, are produced living souls of various kinds from the in¬ 
destructible, and they also return to him. 

He is verily luminous, 4 without form, spirit, he is without and within, 
without origin, without life, without mind, he is pure and greater than the in¬ 
destructible one. 5 

From this 6 7 are produced life, mind and all the organs, aether, air, light, 
the water, the earth the support of all. 

He whose head is the fire, whose eyes are the moon and the sun, whose ears 
the quarters, 1 whose revealed word the Vedas, whose vital air the mind, whose 
heart the universe, from whose feet the earth, is the inner soul of all beings. 

From him is produced the fire whose fuel is the sun, from the moon, 
Parjanya, the annual herbs on the hearth; children are born from the wife, 
many creatures are produced from the spirit. 

From him proceed the seven senses, the seven flames, the seven kinds of 
fuel, the seven sacrifices, these seven places 8 in which the vital airs move that 
sleep in the cavity 9 and that, always seven, are ordained. 

Thence all the seas and mountains; from him proceed the rivers of every 
kind, thence all the annual herbs, the juice by which, together with the ele¬ 
ments, the inner body 10 is upheld. 

Spirit alone is this all, the works, austerity ! Whoever knows this supreme 
immortal Brahma as dwelling in the cavity, breaks, O gentle youth, the bonds of 
ignorance.—The Mundaka Upanishad of the Atharva Veda. 11 

And the Lord is the spirit!—2 Corinth., iii. 17. 

1 Gen. i. 2. The priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel.—Numbers, 
v. 17. 

2 Genesis, i. 2, 28; ii. 6, 7, 8; iii. 1 ; Plutarch, de Iside, 11, 18, 26, 87, 39, 47. 
Hence Bacchus is Hues, the Moist, Damp, Diphues ! The Argives evoked him from 
the water. —Plutarch, de Iside, 35. 

3 Father, Lord, Abadon ! Abdon ! Abaddon ! 

4 John, i. 4. 

5 the neutral brahman. 

6 Brahma. 

7 the four quarters of the universe. 

8 the places of the senses. 

9 of the heart. 

10 the subtile body, according to the Vedanta, consisting of the three sheaths of 
intellect, of the mind, and life. 

11 Second Mundaka, 1st section. We have made the part concerning the birth of 
children less striking than in the original passage, Bibl. Ind. 156. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


23 


The chariot of Vishnu (Bacchus, buried in Apollo’s shrine) 
is very large and richly carved. On these chariots images 
of the God are adored. 1 Here we have sun-chariots, like 
those of the Hebrews mentioned in 2 Kings, xxiii. 11. 

The Egyptian regarded the beetle as double-gendered and 
self-producing. On a coin of Magnesia occurs the type of a 
Hermaphrodite. The idea of an original self-complete nature 
in which the distinction of sex has not yet been developed was 
characteristic of the cultus of Cybele, and is known to have 
been an Asiatic, not a Greek thought. 2 The divine being has 
both principles, the masculine and the feminine, united in 
itself, like the source of light; 3 it divides and unites them 
again to create, or God can bring forth something with his 
own procreative power. Bhavani is the feminine principle 
separated into a Goddess, Maia, the Love that from eternity 
dwells with God. She is spouse of the creative Light-prin¬ 
ciple, becomes Mother of the three Gods and, again, their 
common wife, so that the great world-principle continues one 
and the same throughout the succession of formations. Those 
three Gods and their feminine parts, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, 
become again with their Lady one form; they are hermaph¬ 
rodite and receive the names of Bhavani as surname. 4 * Com¬ 
pare the Adam (Sun, Mithra) as spirit us vitae (containing in 
himself the souls of all the Israelites) before the Issa (the Isis 
rib) was parted from him. 

In the beginning it existed alone, the spirit ; nothing beside Him active or 
at rest. He thought: I will let the Worlds issue from me : He let them go 
forth : Water, light, what is transitory, and the waters. Water was above the 
firmament which bears it. Then he formed out of the waters the spirit (the 
Purusha). He looked upon it and its mouth opened like an egg ; out of its 
mouth proceeded speech and from the speech fire ! Aitareja-Aranjaka TJpan- 
ishad. From him who is, from this immortal cause who exists for the reason 
and does not exist for the senses Purusha the divine Son of Brahma is born. 
He remained in the egg of gold for the space of a divine year, and by the single 
effort of his thought divided it in two. Having divided his body into two 
parts, Nara, the spirit divine, became half male half female, and, uniting him¬ 
self to this female part, the immortal Goddess Nari, He procreated Viraj. 6 

1 Allen’s India 380 ; Buchanan, Mysore. 

2 Journ. Hellenic Studies, III. 54; Jahu in Leipz. Verhandl. 1851. 

* Wie der Lichtquell. 

4 Nork, Braminen und Rabbinen, 245. Ma, Maia, Vena, Venus are the Lunar 

feminine principle. 

8 Belonging to the Rig Veda. 


24 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Yak, the Wisdom , 1 is the feminine Logos 2 the supreme and 
universal soul, the active power of Brahma. She says : I up¬ 
hold both the sun and the ocean, the firmament and fire . . . 

I pervade heaven and earth. I bore the father 3 on the head of 
this, 4 and my origin is in the midst of the ocean; and there¬ 
fore do I pervade all beings and touch this heaven with my 
form. Originating all beings, I pass like the breeze; I am 
above this heaven, beyond this earth; and what is the Great 
One, that am I. 5 When He prepared the heavens there was I. 
When he described a ball (or circle) on the face of the abyss : 6 
when he fixed the clouds above: when he made stable the 
fountains of the deep: when he laid down for the sea his 
statute and the waters did not go beyond the words : when he 
defined the foundations of the earth. And I was by him, the 
Maker. 7 

The “ Monad being there first, where the Paternal Monad 
subsists ” indicates the Father and the Son. 8 When the Monad 
(the Son) is extended and this extension generates Two, 9 we 
have the Adam and the Eua, the Dionysus and the Eua. For 
the Duad (the Isis Mother) is the maternal cause which is doub¬ 
le, having received spirit and matter from the Father. For 
the Duad sits by this and glitters with intellectual sections, to 
govern all things and to arrange each. 10 From the Two Prin¬ 
ciples the Orphic egg appears, which is the Duad of the nat¬ 
ures male and female contained in it. 11 From this egg issues 
Arich Anpin the Phanes, 12 the New Light. For from this triad 
the Father has mixed every spirit. 13 All things are governed 
in the bosoms of this triad. 14 

1 Proverbs, viii. 1, 2, 30. 

2 Speech, the Word, Athena. 

3 Heaven. 

4 Spirit, Mivd in the Waters. 

5 The Sanhita of the first Veda. Colebrooke, Essays, pp. 16, 17. 

6 Tahom. 

7 Amon, the Creative Mind (the Nous). —Proverbs, viii. 27-30. 

8 Dunlap, Vestiges, pp. 179, 226, 229; Proclusin Euc. 27. 

9 Prod us in Euc. 27. 

10 Proclus in Plat. 376; Cory, Anc. Fragm. 245. 

11 Damaskius; in Cory, Anc. Fragments, 286, 320. The Venah shall be called 
Mother.—The Sohar, III. 290 a ; Gelinek, Frank, die Kabbala, 137. The Chochmah 
is Father, the Venah is Mother, as it is said ; am 1’Venah tekara.—Sohar, III. 290 a. 

12 Dunlap, Vestiges, pp. 249, 250; Orpheus, Argonautika, 16. 

13 Lydus de Mensibus, 20. Cory, Ancient Fragments, 245. 

74 ibid. 20. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


25 


Moulding first the Generic Man, in whom is, they say, the male and female 
sex, He afterwards makes the species, the Adam.—Philo. Legal Alleg. II. 4. 

And the God cast upon the Adam an ecstasy, and he slept; and He took 
one of his ribs and filled in flesh in its place. What is spoken respecting this is 
mythical.—Philo. Legal Alleg. II. 7. 

In the time of the Caesars the Moon-god at ’Harran (Carrhae) 
in Mesopotamia was androgyne. 1 Iacchos is male and fe¬ 
male, and diphues. 2 

The epithets $t ^op<£os, Sio-tro^mj? have been said in a 

qnite recent work of M. Lenormant to refer to light and dark¬ 
ness ; bnt they appear equally expressive of that two-sexed- 
ness, belonging to Vishnu and the consort of Rhea, ascribed 
in the Levant to the Hermaphrodite Adonis-Osiris-Dionysus 
in the moon. A recent work by Lenormant shows that the 
Lebanon Venus is the Image of Jealousy mentioned by Eze¬ 
kiel as a piece of sculpture in the portico of the Jerusalem 
Temple. Adonis died, was mourned and rose the third day. 
The spirit was regarded as hermaphrodite! Did not a sacti 
emanate from the Hermes-Adonis in Hades? The luna in 
Hades is Proserpina; but Venus is the crescent (vena), 
daughter and rib of Sol-Saturnus, the Venah (Binah, B is V) 
the “ Daughter of God ” mentioned in Jewish philosophy. 
Now we come to the two-gendered Bol of the Babylonians 
and the remarkable manliness of the Homeric Goddess of 
Wisdom, who later appears, with the ball on her head, as 
Fortuna. 

The Wisdom which is man and woman !—Hermes, i. 30. 

The Wisdom the Daughter of God is also male and father.—Philo Judaeus, 
de Prof. 9. 

The Egyptians supposed that the world consisted of a mascu¬ 
line and feminine nature. They engraved a scarabaeus for 
Athena and a vulture for Hephaistos, since these were regard¬ 
ed as hermaphrodite ; 3 like Men, Lunus-luna, Adam Kadmon 
and Brahma. 

The holy image of Athena (Minerva, the Isis or feminine holy spirit) fell 
from heaven : and a lamp of gold Kallimachus made for the female God. And 

1 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 399, 403. 

2 Gerhard, Gr. Mythol. p. 453. 

3 Cory, Anc. Fragm. p. 286, from Horapollo. The duad is the combine of the 
Male and feminine Fire that Simon Magus propounded. 


26 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


filling it with oil, they wait until the same day of the next year: and that oil is 
enough for the lamp 1 during the intervening time, which shines equally by day 
and by night. It has a wick of Karpatliian flax, which is the only flax that is 
not consumable by fire. A brass palm-tree over the lamp going up to the roof 
draws off the smoke. 2 

Compare Prometheus, Artemis and Minerva as fire deities. 
And it is said as follows : Iodama having been consecrated to 
the female God 3 went in at night into the temple and to her 
Athena appeared and on the chiton (tunic) of the female God 
there was the head of Medusa the Gorgon; and Iodama, as she 
looked on it, was made stone. And on this account a woman, 
placing, every day, fire upon the altar of Iodama, announces 
as many as three times in the Boeotian tongue that Iodama 
lives and asks for fire. 4 Compare the “fire-born Dionysus” 
and the fire that ever burned upon Apollo’s altar. 5 Is not 
Iodama a form of Ashah (the feminine vital fire of Huah in 
Genesis, ii. 23) ? This Ashah or Aishali (with the later vowel 
point put in) is the Mother of all, like Athena. They call the 
Moon the Mother of the world and think that she has a male- 
female nature, because being filled by the sun and becoming 
pregnant, she sends forth again the generative germs into the 
air and scatters them about. 6 

From him who is, 7 from this immortal cause who exists for 
the reason and does not exist for the senses, Purusha 8 the 
divine son of Brahma is born. He remains in the egg of gold 
for the space of a divine year, and by the single effort of his 
thought divided it in two. . . . Having divided his body 

into two parts, Nara the Spirit divine became half male and 
half female (like Adam Hermapliroditus), and, uniting himself 
to the immortal Goddess Nari (his female part), became the 
father of Yiraj. In the temples Nara was typified as bull, Nari 

1 The virgins took their lamps, and went forth to meet the Bridegroom.—Matthew, 
xxv. 1. 

2 Pausanias, i. 26, 7. 

3 Athena, the spirit divine, r) ixrjrrip. The name Iodama is significant of some con¬ 
nection with Adam and Damia perhaps; although Adam, if not connected with Kad- 
mos, would appear to be Mithra Adamatos, Invictus. 

4 Pausanias, ix. 34, 2. 

8 Apollo and Bacchus are the same God.—Macrobius, p. 299, ed. bipont. ; see 
Sophokles, Antigone, 1126, and Euripides, Phoenissae, 227, 228. 

6 Plutarch, de Iside, 43. 

7 See Exodus, iii. 14 ; vi. 3. 

8 The Spiritus, the Spirit as Life-princip. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


27 


as heifer. This usage was general, as Dionysus was so repre¬ 
sented and Astarte, not to mention Osiris, Apis, the Minotaur 
and the Mukerinos-Heifer (Isis) in Herodotus. In the case of 
Adam Kadmon 1 of the Jewish Kabalah we know that the 
Monad becomes a duad. Here we have the lingam in the 
yoni, the primitive hermaphrodite uniting the two sexes, 
Mahadeva and Bliavani, Isvara and Isi, representing, in the 
popular worship of Siva, the Great Being, Author of all things 
and the form or Universal Mother, 2 whose union gave birth to 
the Trimurti or trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. The unity 
in which the duality resides is the source and beginning of all 
creation. The lingam and yoni are in mystic union. ‘ This is 
the primal principal, “l’unite et le tout.” No temples were 
raised to this neutral unity, 3 except in Babylonia to Lunus- 
Luna. Zeus is male and female 4 in the Orphic hymns. The 
word man is used for the Monad from the one ; 5 6 woman for the 
r] vypa cf>vcn<; the moist element, Huah or Hue, Isah or Isis. The 
divine Hermaphrodite or Hermathena (Bel-Achad, 6 rj Jeos) is 
Chadmus, Kadmus, Dionysus diphues or ’liadmus (Adam) be¬ 
fore the Woman (Ishah, Isis) or lunar (lunar rib, crescent) 
principle was taken out of him. This is the Mighty Mother in 
Phrygia, the “ Huah Mother of all that live,” “ Venus, Original 
Mother of our race,” the Minerva or Mother of the Gods. 
This is the worship 


’A vtotSkos Zeus 

’'Apaevi aprjyova &rj\vv ’A&-f)vr)v, . . . 

Kal Ail Kal Bpop-lca /cal IlaAAaSt /uu/xov cLvdipw. 

—Nonnus, xxvii. 62, 63, 69. 


1 Who is Brahma the Son of the neutral unit, brahman in the neuter gender. “ La 
croyance a la nature androgyne de la divinite fut imaginee par les Indous pour expliquer 
la difference des sexes et leur mysterieuse union.” The Huah (Eua, Eve) being the 
moist, for Dionysus is called Hugs, is the Binah or Venah bom from the foam of the 
sea, the Aphrodite of Askalon and the Phoenician B5routh. 

2 aya\p.ara ev rr} crroa Aiovvaov Kal ‘E/carijs, ’A<f>poSirr] re Kal Mrjnjp Beiav Kal Tv\y. — 

Pausanias, ii. 11, 8. 

8 das brahman, to Belov. 

4 Dunlap’s Vestiges, pp. 145, 146. To Elohim the Seven altars were raised by 

Balaam ; which corresponds to Apollo JTebdomaios, both altars being horned. 

6 eirai8ev6r)<rav Oeparrevecv to ov o Kal ayaOov Kpelrrov eon, Kal evos ei.kiKpive<TTepov Kal povaSoq 

apxeyovioTepov : they were trained to serve what is, which also is better than Good and 
more absolute than the ONE and more first-causal than the Monad.—Philo de vita con- 
templativa, 1. 


28 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of the Great Isis Mother of the Gods, of Sarah who is Wisdom, 1 
of Eua or Hue the Mother of all that live, 2 of Pessinuntia the 
Mother of the Gods; for, as the Hindus said : 

\ 

To me the only Gods are water and earth !—Nonnus, xxi. 261. 

a\ A’ Ujuets (xsv irdvres vScop Kal yata yivoicr&e ! —Iliad, vii. 99. 

But may ye all become Water and Earth !—Lucian, Jupiter Tragoedus, 19. 

The Egyptian priests of most note, hallowing water of purifi¬ 
cation, take it from the place where the Ibis has drunk. 3 Hin¬ 
dus and Greeks had “ holy water ; ” it was used at funerals. 
The Hindus also had progaschita or extreme expiation with 
consecrated oil. 4 

The largest part of the Jews lived in Babylonia, where Bel- 
Mithra was worshipped. Their religion was the religion of 
High-Asia, India and Arabia—the fireworship. 5 In the “ Life ” 
of Josephus it is declared that the Jews are a sect of the Hindu 
philosophers , the Kallanoi. Kalanus was a gymnosophist who 
returned with Alexander from India and burned himself alive. 
The soul was regarded as a bright fire, immortal and mistress 
of life. 6 Kalanus evidently took this view of the subject; for, 
by his self-sacrifice, he anticipated by near three and one half 
centuries St. Paul’s doctrine : 

By the spii'itye slay the doings of the body.—Homans, viii. 13. 

If I deliver my body to be burned.— 1 Cor. xiii. 3. 

The spirit as large as the thumb dwells always in the heart of men.—Hindu 
Kaivalya Upanishad. 

Divine without form is the spirit pervading the internal and external of 
beings, unborn, without breath, without heart, shining elevated above the liigh- 

1 Philo, legal alleg. II. 21. Sara-isuati (Sarasvati) is the Primal Wisdom. As 
Vach (Vox, Word, Logos, Minerva) she is the Queen, conferrer of wealth, the pos¬ 
sessor of knowledge, omnipresent and pervader of all beings.—Compare Colebrooke, 
Relig. of the Hindus, 16. Hence one may infer Fortuna Minerva, as will appear later. 
Sarasvati is a Hindu river-name ; which does not conflict with the lunar Sara’h as a 
source of water. 

2 Genesis, iii. 20. Rhea (from pew to pour out water) having first received the pow¬ 
ers of all things in her ineffable bosom pours forth perpetual generation upon every¬ 
thing. She is the lunar Dios Rhea, Alma Mater. See Eua or Eve, as the Nurse of the 
entire world.—Dunlap, Sod. H. 125 ; Ewald, Abodah Sarah, p. 303. 

3 de Iside, 75. 

4 Jacolliot. Voyage au pays des brames, 307, 310. 

6 Dunlap’s Vestiges, 108-118; Movers, I. 31, 150, 279, 300, 301, 303, 323-337, 358, 
360, 372, and all of his chapter ix.; Deuteron. iv. 24; 2 Kings, iii. 27 ; Deut. v. 23-26 ; 
Ezekiel, i.; Dan. vii. 9, 10. 

6 Cory, 243; Psellus, 28. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


29 


est and unalterable. Out of liim comes tlie breath of life, the mind and all 
senses.—Hindu Mundaka Upanishad. 

The Generator of men as well as of heaven and earth, entering into the 
womb, procreates.—The Rig Veda. 1 

Consider how man is formed in a mother’s body. . . . Who has made the 
bones hard ?—Hermes Trismegistus, v. 6. 2 

Thou dost not know the way of the spirit,— the BONES in the womb of a 
woman enceinte.—Ecclesiastes, xi. 5. 

Spirit is God.—John, iv. 24. 

Spirit has not flesh and bones.—Luke, xxiv. 39. 

Labor not for the food that perishes.—John, vi. 27. 

The life is more than the meat. —Luke, vii. 23. 

All living creatures are the dwelling of the Self who lies enveloped in matter, 
who is immortal and spotless. 3 That Self is hidden in the heart of the creature. 4 
—Vedic Hymn. 

The Pythagoreans were ascetic. 5 The flesh is sin. 6 

Every genesis having two causes, the most ancient philosophers and poets 
preferred to give heed to the better exclusively.—Plutarch, de defectu orac. 48. 

Sensual, having not the spirit.—Jude, 19. 

In iniquity I was formed, and in sin my mother warmed me (into being).— 
Psalm, li. 7. 

Life and death are as it were the essence of genesis.—Hermes, xi. 2. 

The spirit is contaminated by the very nature of body.—Origen c. Cels. vi. 

504. 

And Moses (Mases) descended from the mountain to the people, and sancti¬ 
fied the people and they washed their clothes. And he said to the people: Be 
ready for the third day ! Do not go to a woman!—Exodus, xix. 14. 15. 

Labor not for the food that perishes.—John, vi. 27. 

For when the mind walks on high and is initiated into the mysteries of the 
Lord it esteems the body a wicked and hostile thing.—Philo, Legal Allegories, 
iii. 22. 

Spiritum contaminatum jam natura corporis.—Origen c. Cels. vi. 504. 

Let not then the sin control in your mortal body unto obedience to the de¬ 
sires thereof.—Romans, vi. 12. 

For when we were in the flesh the passions of the sins that were by the 
Law worked in our members so as to bear fruit unto death.—Romans, vii. 5. 

1 Wilson, II. 84. 

2 Parthey. 

3 Max Muller, India, what can it do, p. 104. 

4 ibid. 247. According to the Veda, the soul (life) is eternal, but the body of all 

creatures is perishable.—ibid. 104. The life comes from the sun, and the Hindus and 
Hebrews agreed in this doctrine.—Compare Wuttke, ii. 312; 1 Samuel, xxv. 29; Numb, 
xxv. 4; Duncker, II. 162; Bhagavat Purana; Wuttke, ii. 263, 328; Job, xviii. 5; Sep- 
tuagint and Vulgate psalms, xix. 4. 

6 Grote, Plato, I. p. 9; Plut. de Iside, 5, 10. 

3 de Iside, 27-46 ; Gen. vi. 2, 3, 5, 6. 


30 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The will of the flesh is death, but the will of the spirit is life and peace.— 
Rom., viii. 6. 

On account of the weakness of your flesh.—R omans, vi. 19. 

Condemned the sin in the flesh.—R omans, viii. 4. 

Those who are in flesh do mind the things of the FLESH, but those in 
spirit mind what are affairs of the spirit.—R omans, viii. 5. 

You are not in flesh but in spirit, if indeed God’s pneuma dwells in you. 
—Romans, viii. 9. 

All flesh in which is the spiritus vitae.—Genesis, vi. 17. 

Into his nostrils the breath of the lives.—Genesis, ii. 7. 

Zeus himself in matter is the sun and Hera herself in matter 
is luna. 1 From India to the Mediterranean, the oldest form of 
philosophy, after the belief in spirits, was dualism. The spirit 
or “ breath of life ” was regarded as residing in the blood. 2 
By the blood we are joined to God, who is spirit ; the animal 
(life) is intermediate between the spirit and the body. 3 The 
pure fluid (akaslia), which has emanated from the Great All, 
and is the soul, comes to unite itself through the blood with 
the body. 4 The names Zeus, Jupiter, Brahma, Nara, Nereus, 
Poseidon, Abralim, Dionysus, Iacclios, IHOH were names of 
the spirit. 

Spirit of life from the God.—Rev. xi. 11. 

Sic dum eum vocamus spiritum, corpus tamen ilium non dicimus.—Origen 
c. Celsum, vi. p. 504. 

Deus Verbum corpus non esse potest. 

Nec Ignis ille corpus est qui Deus esse dicitur.—ibid., vi. 

Unless one be born of water and spirit he cannot see the Kingdom of the 
heavens.—John, iii. 5. 

Bacchus-Osiris-Adonis is the life-giving Water. Three bear 
witness, spirit , water , blood . 5 We may add also fire ; for Dio¬ 
nysus was represented carrying up the divine fire to heaven. 0 
Dionysus, like Posidon, went under the wave of the sea. 7 

1 Plutarch, Quaest. Roman, 77. Borsippa is the Holy City of Artemis and 
Apollo.—Strabo, 739. 

2 Genesis, i. 30; ix. 4, 5; xxxvii. 21 ; Leviticus, xvii. 14; Deut. xii. 23; Gen. ii. 7. 

3 Origen, II. p. 298, ed. Genebrard, Paris, 1619. 

4 Jacolliot, la Bible dans l’lnde, 181, quotes Ramatsarier; Revelation, xi. 11 ; 
1 Sam. xxv. 29. Blood contains all the mysterious secrets of existence no living being 
can exist without.—Ramatsarier ; Isis Unveiled, II. 567. 

5 1 John, v. 8. 

6 Pausanias, i. 20, 3. Hephaistos, Phatha, Patah, the Creator-spiritus, Vulkan. 
Some of the Eleans name the altar of Hephaistos that of Areian Jupiter (’Apdov Atos).— 
Pausanias, v. 14, 6. 

7 Homer, Iliad, vi. 135. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


31 


Your blood of your lives.—Genesis, ix. 5. 

The flesh with its life, its blood.—Genesis, ix. 4. 

The spirit and the water and the blood, and the three testify to the one. 1 

Like a brahman, 4 A-brahm ’ required a son. Like a brah¬ 
man he prepared to burn him alive on a hastily built altar as 
a holocaust to the most high source of all life. 2 According to 
Brahman precedent in the laws of Manu, Sara’h consented 
that Abrahm should enter into an arrangement with her maid, 3 
which is popularly supposed to fully account for the origin of 
the Shemal-worshippers, the Ishmaelites. If any should object 
that a Brahman from Ur 4 should have at least set fire to 
Sara’h’s mortal coil instead of burying her, Jacolliot states 
that the Hindu Chshatrias formerly mummified their dead. 5 
And Abram bought a Khattite cave at Hebron to put her in. 
The Jews are in one case, however, mentioned as burning the 
bodies and burying the bones. 6 Schliemann, at Mukenai, 
found the bodies laid away scorched by flames. The sacred 
element had touched them with its purifying power. 

According to Jeremiah, vii. 21, 22, blood offerings were not 
divinely commanded. According to the Samaveda, says Jacol¬ 
liot, 7 8 it is murder to shed blood except as an offering. In com¬ 
paring the Jewish religion with the Hindu, Leviticus, xvii. 
3, 4, offers a positive testimony. The verses show that the 
Hebrews were under the sway of this chief brahman doctrine. 
The Brahmans were not allowed “ to feed on the flesh of liv¬ 
ing creatures that assist the labors of men.” 7 The Egyptians 
slay no cattle except for sacrifice.—Herodotus, ii. 41. Qiva is 
the only God to whom animal sacrifices were offered. 9 


1 The one first cause, or the one pneuma, the one life.—1 John, v. 8. 

2 The Chaldaeans regarded the soul as fire. The Persians said : earth to earth, 
ashes to ashes, fire to fire !—Dunlap, Sod, I. 63. Abaram (from Bara, creare) seems to 
have been father to many of the Goiim.—Gen. xvii. 2, 4. Abar, to be strong. Abir 
(Aber) means ‘Mighty.’ Compare the name Abiram.—Numbers, xxvi. 9, 12. 

3 Gen. xvi. 1, 2. Hagar is Semele to the Ismaelite Semal. 

* Uro “ to burn.” 

6 Jacolliot, Voyage au pays des brahmes, p. 311. 

8 1 Sam., xxxi. 12, 13. 

7 Bible dans l’lnde, 185. Who slaughters an ox has stricken down a man.—Isaiah, 
lxvi. 3. Compare slaying a man and castrating an ox.—Gen. xlix. 6. Hebrew text. 

8 Strabo, 712, 15: carnibus vesci animalium quae hominum opera adjuvant: 
ovre Kreivovai ovSev emffvxov, ovre n (rnitpovat ovre olk tas vofii^ovai eKTrjaOai. —Herodotus, iii. 

100 . 


9 Lassen, I. 924. 


32 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Whatever man of the house of Israel who shall have killed a young bull 
or lamb or goat in camp, or shall have killed it outside beyond the camp, and 
does not bring it unto the ostium of the Tabernacle of the Congregation to offer 
it, a corban, before the face of the Tabernacle to IaTilioh (the God of life), 
blood shall be imputed to that man, he has shed blood ; and the man shall 
be cut off from the midst of his people.— Levit. xvii. 3,4, 5. 

It was bloodshed to kill these animals, except for sacrifice to 
the source of all life ; perhaps originally there were no blood- 
offerings ; but these were offered to the God of Life. 1 

For the life of the flesh is in the blood.—Levit. xvii. 11. 

The Pythagoreans abstained from animal food. The Egyp¬ 
tian priests abstained from eating cows, goats, sheep and 
fish ; 2 the Nazarene Tlierapeutae from animals 3 always. 

ov £wa Kara&vovTes. —Philo, quod o. p. liber, § 12. 

Not sacrificing living creatures.—Philo, § 12. 

Only on religious occasions is it allowed to kill animals and to eat their 
flesh ; Brahma created them for the preservation of the life-spirit ; and this 
spirit devours 4 all that is movable or immovable. He created animals for sac¬ 
rificial-offering, and the sacrificial-offering for the augmentation of the universe. 
—Nork, Real-Worterbucli, iii. 317. 5 

Daniel and his companions abstained entirely from living 
creatures. 6 From the above extracts and authorities it is clear 
that there was an entire agreement in this doctrine between 
India, Judea, Jerusalem and Egypt. Lassen and Jacolliot 
have held that the Hindu law is prior to the Jewish ; in other 
words, that the Hindus have not borrowed from the West. 

In the beginning, was one spirit by whom all has been pro¬ 
duced. 7 Brahma Narayana floats upon the waters. 8 The Sun 

the Breath of life. 9 Spirit was in the sun 10 and in the sea¬ 
water. 

1 Gen. iv. 4 ; Acts, xvii. 25. 

2 Origen, c. Celsum, V. pp. 485, 487. 

3 Philo, Vita Cont., 9. 

4 This great fire will eat us up.— Deutcronom. v. 22, 23. 

5 quotes Majer, Brahm. p. 175. 

6 Origen, c. Cels. vii. part II. p. 507. ^ 

7 Wuttke, II. 293; quotes one of the oldest cosmogonies of the Vedas. Spirit is 
the God.—John, iv. 24. The Sun is Brahma.—Wuttke, II. 293. God is the Sun and 
full Moon.—Metrodorus, de Sensionibus, 18. 

s Wuttke, II. 300. 

9 Ibid. II. 301, 302. 

10 Diodorus, I. 11. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


33 


Among all works, tlie highest is the perception of the ‘ ‘ spirit.” This is the 
preferable in all sciences; for it leads to immortality.—Mann, xii. 85. Recog¬ 
nizing him who is the breath of life and whose ray is in all beings, a man be¬ 
comes a Wise Man, one whose action is confined within himself, one content in 
himself. Through truth we must grasp the “spirit,” through complete cogni¬ 
tion, 1 and by penance and by abstinence.—Mundaka-Upanishad, III. 1. 

Since the deity itself became the first created matter, the 
world was an ensouled body. 2 The problem how the material 
world had its origin out of that pure spirit, and how that came 
in contact with it, has produced the whole gnosis. 3 For the 
Supreme King of the universe dwells in inaccessible light 
and cannot be approached except by mediating intermediate 
spirits; this was the dogma of nearly the entire orient, not in 
Egypt only, as Iamblichus 4 showed, but also among the Chal¬ 
deans, Persians and Indi. 5 

God who art pure spirit, the principle of all things, the Master of the world, 
it is by thy orders that I rise and go to mix in the trouble of the world!— 
Hindu Prayer at Sunrise. 6 


Thus we show that “ spirit and matter” was the dualism of the 
ancient philosophy in the Bible, in India, Judea, and every¬ 
where. 

Thousand-headed, thousand-eyed, thousand-footed was Purusha ; round 
about the whole world he stood forth about 10 fingers. 

Purusha is this All, what has been and will be to come, he also reigns over 
the realm of immortality which becomes great through food. 

So far reaches his greatness, and yet more than that is he ; one fourth of 
him is all beings ; three fourths of him is the kingdom of heaven. 

To three fourths Purusha mounted up, 7 a fourth of him stayed here ; then 
he stepped out to the sides to the realm of the eaters and those that eat not. 

In the beginning was Viraj, out of Viraj sprung Purusha. 8 

1 Gnosis. 

2 Nork, Brahmanen und Rabbinen, 245. 

3 Chwolsohn, I. 726. 

4 Iamblichus, de myst. Aegypt. viii. 

5 Chwolsohn, I. 732. 

e Jacolliot, Christna et le Christ, 37. Jacolliot reads “God who art a pure 
spirit.” God is spirit, not a spirit. Siva enfin ou Kara, c’est a dire l’Esprit divin, 
est le principe qui preside a la destruction et a la reconstitution.—Jacolliot, les Fils de 
Dieu, 13. 

7 Compare “Dionysus carrying up Hephaistos into heaven.”—Pausan, I. 20, 3. 

8 Given from Purusha-sukta before Rv. 10, 90. in Heinrich Zimmer, Altindisches 
Leben, p. 217. 


3 


34 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON . 


With Yiraj in the beginning, compare what St. John says 
of the Logos, that it was in the beginning, that life was in it. 
The pnrusha is the spiritus vitae. This bears out John, i. 3, 
in the idea that all things were made through it. We have 
the same idea in Isaiah : 

Thus said the El Ia’hoh who created (bora) the heavens and moves them, 
spreading out the earth and its productions, having given life to the people on 
it and spirit 1 to those that walk thereon.—Isaiah, xlii. 5. 

Zeus is beginning, Zeus is the things between, and from Zeus all things 
originate. 2 —Plutarch, de defectu orac. 48. 

If then Judea exhibits Brahman and Chaldean influences in 
its sacred books, was there no Gymnosophist or Budhist^ in¬ 
fluence at work upon the Gymnoprophets, 3 the Nazers, Nazo- 
renes, the Baptists, the Essene and Christian anchorites ? 
Epiphanius here comes to our aid, asserting that “the 
Nazarenes were before Christ and knew not Christ.” 4 Philo 
gives us the letter of Calanus to Alexander, and mentions the 
gymnosophists sleeping on the ground according to their an¬ 
cient usage. 5 Ibn Sina (died in 1037) relates that the Tlane- 
fites (whom he mentions right after the Sabians) derive them¬ 
selves from the Religion of Abraham and assert that he was 
one of their people. 6 One sees in these ’Hanefites the Ilarrd- 
nians , who sought to legitimatize themselves before the Ma- 
hommedan authorities, by any real or fictitious biblical char¬ 
acter (?) It is also possible that by these Ssabians believing 
on ‘ Abraham ’ the Brahmans are meant, of whom many Mo¬ 
hammedans asserted, misled by similarity of name , that they 
are followers of the patriarch Abraham. 7 It is much more 
probable that Abraham is Brahma; and that the Christians are 
the ones misled by too slavish a credence of Jewish fables. 

Plutarch asks why, on the Ianuary Ides, flute-players are 
permitted to go about the city, wearing women’s dresses. 


1 Ruach, breath from on high; pneuma = holy spirit. 

2 Compare Rev. i. 18. The Hindu Vach, in the true sense of the “ Word,” claims 
to uphold the sun and the ocean.—Colebrooke, Relig. of the Hindus, 16. So Proverbs, 
viii. 1, 24-30. 

3 1 Samuel, xix. 20, 24; John, vi. 14; Deuteron. xviii. 15, 18. 

4 Epiphanius, I. 121. 

6 Philo de Somniis, II. 8. 

6 Chwolsohn, I. 226. 

7 Ibid. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST . 


35 


Probably because the Mysteries of Herakles were then celebra¬ 
ted. Among the Hindus abstinence from women was in many 
cases required, as on the day of the Newmoon and Fullmoon, 
and on the 8th and 14th days of the month. 1 According to 
Josephus, the Hebrews consecrated the tabernacle on the New- 
moon ; 2 probably because Osiris entered Selene on the New- 
moon of Pliamenoth, the beginning of spring. A brahman 
was indispensable to every solemn offering, even to the little 
Newmoon and Fullmoon offerings. 3 This is just what was 
the case among the Jews, 4 as Brahmans. 

The Newmoons and stated feasts !—Isaiah, i. 13, 14. 

Faustus says that Christ’s power dwelt in the sun, his wisdom 
in the moon. Horus, Adibudlia, Krishna and Christ (among 
the Manicheans) each had the sun and moon for his eyes. The 
Jews blew the trumpet on the newmoon, poured out libations 
and offered burnt sacrifices. And for this duty the Loim , 
Luim 5 or Levites were assigned to do just what the Brahmans 
did in India. They ministered to Ia’hoh, Lord of Life, accord¬ 
ing to Exodus, iii. 14 ; xxxviii. 21; xl. 15; Jeremiah, xxxiii. 18. 

Hence the Jews were the Brahmans of Palestine, as Josephus 
said, worshipping Brahma, whom, for their own political pur¬ 
poses, they chose to regard as Ab (Father) Ram (Most High) 
which title is not unsuitable to the Most High of the Hindu 
Gods. King states that the words brahma and abrahm have 
the same numerical value. 6 The root is bar (creare); allied to 


1 Wuttke, Geschichte d. Heidenthums, II. 366; Lassen, III. 355. 

In the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are married, but are as Angels in the 
heaven.—Matthew, xxii. 30. 

These are those that have not been defiled with women ; for they are virgin.— 
Rev. xiv. 4, 5. 

And the people stood near, having kept themselves pure from connection with 
women and having abstained from pleasures, except the necessary pleasures of eating, 
having been purified by baths and lustral water-sprinklings for three days, and besides 
having washed their clothes clean, all clothed in white among them. — Philo, Ten 
Commandments, 11. See Bxod. xix. 14, 15. 

2 Josephus, Ant. iii. 9, p. 88. Coloniae, anno 1691. 

3 Dr. Martin Haug, Brahma und die Brahmanen, p. 9. Miinchen, 1871. 

4 1 Sam. xx. 5 ; Amos* viii. 5; 2 Kings, iv. 23 ; 1 Chron. xxiii. 31 ; Psalm, lxxxi. 
3; Isa. lxvi. 23 ; Ezekiel, xlv. 17; xlvi. 1; Hosea, ii. 11; Josephus, Ant. iii. 10. 

5 Numbers, xvi. 9, priests of Uos (whom the Hebrews called El, Elah) a name of 
Saturn in the orient, the God of Ilium, the Hebrew Elioun. 

6 C. W. King, The Gnostics, 13. 


36 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


iubar a sunbeam and bhri to produce. 1 The Sun is Brahma, 
Zeus and Apollo ! The Numerical Kabalah of the Jews identi¬ 
fies, by the letter numbers, Abrahm with Brahma. Abrahm and 
Brahma are both names connected with the Ghebers; and it 
is significant that the early Mohammedan chronicles mention 
the rulers of Cabul as Guebres or Infidels.—Newall, Highlands 
of India, 238. The Mohammedan was a later religion and 
regarded as infidels the unconverted to its creed. But the fire- 
worship reached from the Mediterranean and the Jordan to 
Persia, Kashmere, and the Brahmans of India. “ For see, the 
Bibles which you call Holy contain myths too, over which you 
are accustomed to laugh when you hear others relating them.” 
—Philo, on Confusion of tongues, 2. “ Nearly all or the most 

of the giving of the Law is allegorical.”—Philo, On Joseph, 6. 
Abrahm was identified with the mythic Bel Saturn of the 
Semites. Abrahm and Israhel (Saturn, according to Philo) were 
found among the mythic kings of Damaskus. The Moham¬ 
medan Arabians regarded Abrahm as the Saturn in the Caaba, 
the Hobal who was derived out of Syria, who was represented 
as an Old Man with seven arrows or fates of destiny in his 
hand. Mohammed destroyed the idol, saying: Our Ancient 
(Our Sheik) they represented as conjuring with the arrows; 
wdiat then has Abraham to do with the arrows ?—Pococke, 
Specimen Hist. Arab. p. 980. 2 Josephus, Ant. I. 8, represents 
him as instructing the Egyptians in astronomy; Movers states 
that Bel-Saturn passed for the Inventor of astrology. 8 The 
seven arrows, like the seven lamps of the Jewish Sacred 
Candlestick, of course referred to the Seven Planet Bays. The 
temple of Saturn among the Sabians w*as sexagonal, made of 
black stone, hung with black curtains. His image was that of a 
black old Hindu who has an axe in his hand ; also he was repre¬ 
sented with a rope by which he draws a bucket out of a well ; 
then again as a man reflecting earnestly upon the old Hidden 
Wisdom ; also as a worker in wood; finally, as a King riding 
on an elephant. It was the custom of the Sabians to come on 
Saturday into Saturn’s temple dressed in black. Their prayer 
is to this effect: Sanctified be Thou, O God, in wdiom the 

1 bharami means the “bearing of me.” — A. H. Sayce, Science of Lang. II. 152. 
To derive Brahma’s name from brih, to strain in prayer, instead of from bhri, to pro¬ 
duce, to bear, is straining a point; since Brahma is Creator. 

a Movers, I. 86, 87. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


37 


Evil indwells, who does not the Good, because He is the Mis¬ 
fortune and the reverse of good luck, who when he comes into 
connection with beauty thereby makes it ugly, who looks on 
the Fortunate and thereby makes him unlucky.—Dimeshqi; 
in Chwolsohn, II. 384. Markion regarded the God of the Old 
Testament as the fearful God; and Job, ii. 1, mentions Satan 
as one of the Sons of the God. Osiris-Iachoh is in heaven and 
in Hades. Psalm cxxxix. 8, locates this Sabian Deity in 
Hades, Isaiah, xlv. 7, makes him the Creator of Darkness and 
Light. In the treatise De Iside, Isis wears black when Osiris 
dies, when a pestilence occurs Typhon’s bad animals are car¬ 
ried into darkness and threatened or slain, and Ezekiel, viii. 
10, 12, 14, shows what the Jewish priests did in the darkness, 
incensing Satan-Typhon, and mourning Adonis-Osiris. It is 
quite probable that the Arabs regarded Saturn as Deathgod. 
Homer puts him in Hades, and the Egyptians made him Earth- 
god, i.e. Subterranean. 

From an early period Egyptian philosophy would naturally 
be more subject to Babylonian and Syrian influences than to 
Grecian, before the time of the Ptolemies. As might be ex¬ 
pected, their Hermes was not the Grecian, but the Phoenician 
Hermes (Taaut, Tat, Thoth), which last, Thoth, was in our 
copies of Plato spelled Theuth. 1 This Egyptian - Phoenician 
wisdom appears in the Old Testament, and, in Proverbs viii. 
30, by the name Amon, as well as Chochmah. Whether the 
Psalms of Dod 2 are the divine compositions of D5d, Tot, Thoth, 
or Taut, remains to be seen. M. Menard, in various passages, 
recognizes “ habits of thought which are not Grecian ” in the 
Books of Hermes Trismegistus ; but he adds that, “ initiated 
into philosophy by Greece, the orient could give it only what 
it possessed, the exaltation of the religious sentiment.” 3 This 
is ignoring the dualism and gnosis of Egypt, Israel, Arabia 
and Syria, not to mention Mesopotamia. But under the Ptole¬ 
mies, it would not be strange if Grecian ways of thinking had 
exerted some influence, especially in the expressions. The 

1 Philebus, cap. viii. p. 136.—Stallbaum. 

2 Orelli, Sanchon. p. 34, has Adodos, King of the Gods. Another Phoenician God 
is Khrusor who is the Phoenician Vulkan, the Egyptian Patah. Ptah.—ibid. 18, 19. 
See Genesis, iv. 22. The art of working metals was carried from Phoenicia to Egypt by 
the Thoth-Taut.—Sanchoniathon, pp. 18, 20, 38. But the Semitic Daud (d = t) makes 
Taut in Egyptian. 

3 Me'nard, Hermes, p. xii. 


38 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


first thing one notices in Hermes Trismegistus is the Greek 
ra ovtcl, meaning the real existences; for Plato calls matter 
to /xr) 6V, that which has no real existence : which is akin to the 
Hindu idea that there is nothing but Brahma; all else is 
delusion. 

Before entering on the mythology of the Book of Genesis it 
is requisite to refer to the theology of which it forms a part; 
for the entire Hebrew, Phoenician, Babylonian or Egyptian 
theology is not given in the first chapters of Genesis. There 
is something wanting that preceded Genesis i. 1 in other cos¬ 
mogonies. Hermes Trismegistus ought to supply this. He 
says : One time, my thought being upon ra ovra (the divine 
entities and essences) and my mind being exceedingly raised 
up to a height (of contemplation) and my corporeal sensations 
having been subdued ... I seemed to hear some one of 
exceeding size, of indeterminate proportion, calling my name 
and saying to me “ What do you wish to hear and see and what 
by mental conception to learn and to know.” 1 I say, Who are 
you then ? I indeed, says he, am the Poimander, the mind 
of the “ absolute power ” and I know what thou wishest and am 
present with thee everywhere. I say, I wish to know the in¬ 
telligible entities, 2 and by mind to comprehend their nature, 
and to know the God. This, I said, I want to hear. Again he 
says to me : Have in thy mind whatever you wish to learn and 
I will teach thee. 

Saying this, he was changed in the ideal form , and straight¬ 
way all things were opened to me in a moment and I see a 
sight without bounds, and “ all things ” having become light 
more pleasant and joyous ; and seeing I was enraptured ; and a 
little after there was a sunken dakkness in part become fright¬ 
ful and drear, crookedly terminated, so that I seemed to see 
the darkness changed into a certain fluid nature (<£wris) unspeak¬ 
ably stirred up and giving out smoke as if from a fire, and a 
certain sound, filling, unutterable, mournful: then a cby from 
it was emitted not in accord, as I conjectured,—the voice of 
light. From this light went out a certain holy logos upon 
the “ nature,” and pure fire sprung up from the liquid “ nature,” 
into the height and it was light and piercing and energetic 
at the same time. And the air, being buoyant, followed the 

1 Gnosis. 

2 ra ovra. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


39 


breath of life (the Spirit), itself rising, as far as the fire, from 
earth and water, so that it seemed to hang down from it. And 
earth and water stayed by themselves mixed up so as not to be 
discerned from the water; and they were being moved 1 by 
means of the pneumatic logos laid (or put) upon (them), so 
that the sound was audible. 2 This is not wholly Greek ; for the 
logos-doctrine was Hindu and Chaldean: probably Ionian, 
Egyptian and Pythagorean before it was Platonic doctrine; 
and the Cry of Minerva, although it is in Pindar, must have 
been a Syro - Phoenician conception, else why is it found in 
Proverbs, viii., and in the Poimander of Hermes? 

With the exception of Joshua’s claim to the north 3 as far 
as Hamath, the description of the Jewish borders in the Book 
of Joshua is nearly identical Avith the territory occupied by 
the Jews B.c. 140-84. The Book of Daniel is said to date 
about B.c. 150. It possibly may be somewhat later. Of 
course, the compilation of which it is a part can be no older 
than its latest book; and the books of Moses have the ap¬ 
pearance of having been prefixed to all the rest, Joshua form¬ 
ing a sort of introduction to the history of the Jews settled 
along the Jordan from south to north. In Syria, Arabia and 
Egypt everywhere we find Dionysus worshipped. Why 
should we not expect to find the same among the Israelite 
Moloch worshippers ? For Moloch is Dionysus. 4 The Jewish 
state, at least so far as relates to the Makkabees, was entirely 
new; it was the starting of a new dynasty, as the result of 
being freed from the dominion of the successors of Alexander 
the Great. Under these circumstances we find priest-kings ; 
for the Makkabees were Highpriests : and such a one is men¬ 
tioned, Malchizedek, in Salem. We find in the Pentateuch 
the late Hebrew, so late as not to be distinguished from other 
Hebrew writings, as to language. We find some prohibitions 
of the distinguishing marks of the Adonis-Osiris-Dionysus 
usages, introduced into the Pentateuch, to separate the cir- 

1 The Breath of Life (the Spirit) of Alahim moved itself on the faces of the waters. 
—Gen. i. 2. There is a reference here to the Ionian philosophy of Thales, which is the 
Oriental philosophy. Philo, de profugis, 458, calls the Wisdom the Daughter of God, 
while Proverbs, viii. 1 (29, 30) and Pindar, Olympiad, vii., mention her exceedingly 
great Ory. 

2 Hermes Trismeg., Poimander. 

3 based on hope probably. 

4 Movers, Phonizier, 325 ff, 371 ff, 438. 


40 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


cumcised (the initiated) from the profane; but these changes 
are small compared with what was retained. Then, too, the 
absence of the least mention of the resurrection in the Books 
of Moses has a very Saddukean aspect. Suppose now that 
neither Jacob nor Joseph had gone into Egypt, that the 
history of the Kings of Israel, Judah and Idumea partially 
perished in the period when Antiochus oppressed Israel or got 
reduced in some way to the scanty notices preserved in script¬ 
ure, but that it was decided to make an imposing genealogical 
tree for these Arab fire-worshippers out of whom the strategy 
of Judas and the talents of his successors had created a na¬ 
tion—were the scribes of that shrine of flame unable, at the 
close of the second century before Christ, to locate the imagin¬ 
ings of their Arabian fancy anywhere they wished, in Egypt, 
Arabia or Syria, and instead of letting Typhon kill Osiris, to 
write that the Jealous Qan, or (Ken) killed Abel (who is the 
lamented Bel-Adonis), or that the Ghebers in Israel had come 
by the most roundabout way out of Egypt, wdiich took them 
40 years to accomplish, and instead of going home to Cheb- 
ron, Ghebron, or Hebron 1 preferred to make off to the east of 
the Dead Sea for the purpose of getting rid of their Gheber 
name and to call themselves Ebers (those who came from 
over the Jordan)? By ignoring Hebron for Jerusalem , it is 
plain that ‘Exodus’ and Deuteronomy and Joshua were 
penned at Jerusalem. The bahr Jusuf, an artificial arm of 
the Nile, afforded the scribe an opportunity to get on the 
track of Joseph in Egypt, and the story told to account for 
his being there at all came within the daily experience of 
captives taken prisoners and sold as slaves in oriental coun¬ 
tries as well as in Greece and Italy. The theory on which 
oriental names of cities are held to indicate the former exist¬ 
ence and residence of ancestors of that name, and which will 
be indicated further on where the 12 tribes of Israel are 
mentioned, is almost euhemerism. 2 In this manner, Israel is 
found in Izrael 3 and Ioseph in the names of the bahr Iusuf, 
the Arab idol Asaf, the Mt. Saf-ed and Supha (Numbers, xxi. 

1 Chebrori, Kebir, Gebar, Gebaron, Ghebron. 

2 The cities and towns often bore deity-names, like Aun, Sunem, etc. As Euhem- 
erus said that the Gods had been men, it was easy in these sun-named places to find a 
patriarch almost anywhere in order to render a fiction credible. Gaba might suggest 
Iaqab, Iakob. 

3 Izrael is Jezreel in the English Bible. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


41 


14), more especially taken from the story of a historical 
Ioseph about b.c. 225 in the 3d century; mentioned in Jahn’s 
Hebrew Commonwealth, 210 ; Josephus, Ant. xii. chap. 4, 2. 

The Egyptians had their attention drawn to the 7 planets, 
the Great Lights, well-known to Egyptian astronomers. The 
Syrian took notice of Saturn-day (Saturday) because (accord¬ 
ing to the priests of El) Saturn was the Greatest God, the 
Adonis, 1 Osiris, Abel, 2 or Bel, who went under earth quite 
early and reigned in the world of souls. 3 Saturday was the 
great day of Kab, Keb, Koub, Iakouph, Kouph, or Iakab 
(Jacob), who was chief of the Kabiri, their El-Saturnus. 4 
There was in thte Holy of Holies a Candlestick with 7 lamps, 
a symbol of the Adon-Alohim, who hallowed the 7th day and 
presided over these Seven wandering Eulers, or Planets. The 
priest well knew that the Moon (to whom great attention was 
early paid in Chaldea, Syria, and Egypt, particularly on the 
New moons, as in Jerusalem) made a lunation in twenty-eight 
days, one-fourtli of which is the number Seven! Now the 
Pharisees believing in Spirit, believed in Angels as spirits. 
The intelligent Saddukees declined the superstition. 

Plutarch distinctly asserts that Dionysus is Adonis. In 
proof of this he adduces the mitre worn by the Jewish high- 
priest, his fawn-skin dress, the bells depending from it, the in- 
carved thyrsus exhibited on parts of the prominent, elevated, 
structure facing the people, the buskins and the drums ; for 
these, he says, suit no other God but Dionysus. 5 

K at ouroi irpo(TKvvov<n rep fi\'up. —Septuagint, Ezekiel, viii. 16. 

Begin to my God with drums.—Judith, xvi. 1. 

The fawn-skin indicates stag-slaying Dionysus, as do the bus¬ 
kins. The tinkling of bells on the dress of the Jewish high- 


1 Adoni (Adonai) was the Deity-name in the Hebrew text, and' Adonia is the name 
of the Syrian festivals : they occurred in autumn and at other times. Adonis slain by 
the Boar signifies the fruits cut off in their ripeness.—Movers, 206. 

The constellation of the Boar rose about the time of Libra in the autumn. 

2 Abel = Abelios = Apollo. The Egyptians had the Abel Misraim, Mourning 
Adonis. 

3 The Sadukees held that there is neither resurrection, angel, nor pneuma (Spirit). 
—Acts, xxiii. 8. 

4 Great Sabaoth.—Gallaeus, Sibylline Books, 175-180; Plutarch, Quaest. Conv. 
671 E. p. 816. 

5 Plutarch, Quaest. Conviv. iv. 5, 6. So Movers, p. 234. 


42 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


priest points to spring, as does the paschal lamb, in the ver¬ 
nal joy. The shower-bath of blood poured on the chief priest 
annually was the symbol of the renewed life of all flesh, and 
the circumcision pointed to the same thing. Adonai or 
Adonis was, then, the Young Dionysus who was mourned in 
Syria (which included Judea, and at times was a part of the 
power of Egypt). If the Bacchic branch was mighty through 
Greece 1 it was because it was mighty in Syria ; and the Jews 
still carry the palm branch ; like the Persians, who bore the 
bundle of twigs. The Arab worship of Dionysus and the 
name of the Arab Sun-festival in September, Ashurcch , point 
as distinctly to the Dionysus-Mithra-worship in Suria, Assu- 
ria and Asher as the wailing of the women of Asher for the 
Only begotten points to the Death of Adonis in autumn and 
the Grave of Bacchus. 

The initiated 2 of iDAean Jupiter, 

Having completed 3 the raw-eaten feasts, 

And having clothing all of white, 4 

1 avoid the race of mortals ; 

Not having been brought near a grave !—Porphyry, de Abst. iv. 

The names of the Thracian Orpheus and Musaeus carry us 
back to the dusky period from which all sacred history starts. 
The name Moses, or, as it is written, Mse (Mase), 5 designating 
as it does many of that name, originally meant a mythic per¬ 
sonage. Mases is an ancient Greek town mentioned by Strabo, 
376, and Pausanias, 197 ; similar names are Amasia a city of 
Pontus in Asia Minor, Musia 6 (Mysia), Masion, a name of a 
mountain near to Armenia, and Masa. 7 Some may prefer to 
connect it with Mosia meaning redeemer , others with maase, 

Euripides, Bacchae, 308. 

2 When the Egyptian Israelites are initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries they are 
purified and warned to keep away from the women.—Exodus, xix. 11, 14, 15. 

So in the Mysteries of the Bona Dea (Isis) men were excluded. In fact, the men 
and women of the Jews were kept apart at religious services. 

3 TeletSs, complete. 

4 The Magi wore white in hostility to Darkness and Hades.—Plutarch, Quaest. 
Rom. xxvi. 

5 Compare Mas (Gen. x. 23), Mt. Masius, under which Nisibis lay, the river Masa 
near by, the Masian Arabs (the Masei of Pliny)Chwolsohn, I. 442; also Mesa an 
Arab melech.—2 Kings, iii. 4. 

6 Musaeus. Orpheus is Apollo’s son.—Gerhard, Griech. Mythol. § 681. 6 c; 
Pindar, pyth. iv. 176, 177. 

7 Gen. xxv. 14. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


43 


meaning story ; but Plutarch gives us the mythic name Masses, 
who is apparently no other than Mase (Moses) himself. As 
this name is connected with much that is mysterious as well as 
apparently miraculous, and as he is expressly stated to have 
been learned in all the Wisdom of the Egyjitians, his treatise 
is based on the Mysteries and is evidently an inspiration or 
revelation from their hidden wisdom. Some have connected 
him, floating in an ark on water, with Dionysus, Osiris, and 
Noah. 1 But his horns 2 point to the crescent, to Dionysus and 
Hermes or Mithra. Genesis points to the life of the Egyptian 
priests just as it was known to be in later times. 3 The allies 
of Saturn were called Eloeim the Jewish priests were 

the Loim or Luim (Levites), and Dionysus Luios or Luaios (as 
Nonnus has the name ; from luo to free, to redeem) might have 
called his priests redeemers of the souls from Hades. 

There is among the Orphic rhapsodies in circulation a cer¬ 
tain theology about what the mind perceives, which philoso¬ 
phy the philosophers expound, putting Time in the place of 
the one beginning of all things and Aether and chaos instead 
of the two ; but counting the Egg instead of the absolute ex¬ 
istence (to ov), and making this the first triad. But in the 
second triad are now reckoned the pregnant and all-containing 
Egg, the God or the Tunic of fire or the Cloud ; for Phanes (is 
born, or) leaps forth from these. This then is the Mind, the 
Father and Power. The third triad is the Metis, the Erikapaios 
(as Power), the Phanes himself as Father. 4 The Egg is the 
Bacchic symbol of the Deity containing and comprehending 
all things within himself; and, from this, Phanes appears as 
first-born Light, Metis (Mind) and Ericapaeus (Arich Anpin). 
Here we have something akin to the doctrine of the Kabalah 
starting in the Dionysus Zagreus worship of the Orphic theo¬ 
logians ; and, soon, alongside of the Phanes notion we have the 
Light springing up at the command in Gen. i. 4, and the God 
of thunder and rain, 5 Sabaoth Adonaios of the Jewish Sibylline 
Book, with Christos 6 his Angel-king. The finding all these 

1 Nadi, Noch, Annakos. “ The Mourning for Annakos ” in Phrygia, in a drought, 
lest all should be destroyed ! 

2 Cornutus. Aron (|'|"IS*) means an ark. 

3 Movers, Phoenizier, 112, 113. 

4 Damaskius, cap. 122. p. 258. 

5 Gen ix. 13-17. 

6 King was the epithet of Apollo.—Eusebius, Praep. Ev. iii. 15; Kallimachus, 


44 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


inheritances of an earlier gnosis associated intimately with 
Orphic and Platonic ideas a number of centuries before our 
era, even approaching the source of the earliest Kabbala-no- 
menclature, and not wholly at variance with some of its funda¬ 
mental doctrines, such for instance, as the theory of a father 
and a mother as the two primal principles, ought to make any¬ 
body hesitate to ascribe any of the Oriental Gnosis to an in¬ 
spired origin; for it is plain here that philosophy inspired 
religion. The Kabbalists spoke of Adam as two-fold in sex. 
So Phanes is male and female. Two-fold in nature is Eros. 
Immortal Zeus is male, immortal Zeus is female say the 
Orphic writers. 1 


Zed KvSurre, fxeyiffre, iceXaivetpes, alde'pi vaiuv. —Homer. 

O Zeus 2 most honored, greatest, enveloped in dark clouds, 3 dwelling in the 
burning.—Iliad, ii. 412. 

Nil praeter nubes et coeli numen adorant.—Juvenal, xiv. 97. 

Nothing besides clouds and heaven’s deity the Jews adore.—Juvenal. 

Orpheus means dark. It is certain that he was merely an 
invented personage, as has been already emphatically stated 
by Aristotle. 4 Homer and Hesiod have known nothing of him, 
and the decision of Herodotus, that all poets that are held to 
be older than these two are really later, is evidence that, even 
if he has not denied the existence of an Orpheus, he has at 
least perceived that the pretended Orphic poems are fabrica¬ 
tions. The so-called Orphic traditions spoke of an inborn sin¬ 
fulness of mankind who sprung from the ashes of the Titans, 
the foes of the Gods; of a migration of souls in a circuit 

Hymn to Apollo, 78, 111; Homer, II. i. 390; Dunlap, Vestiges, 244. The sun is the 
emblem of the Logos, according to Philo. Affirming the sun to be the offspring pro¬ 
ceeding perpetually from Apollo, who is eternal and who perpetually brings him forth. 
—Plutarch, de Pyth. Orac. 42. Some regarded Apollo and the Sun not as two Gods, 
but one. —ibid. 12. 

1 Orphic Fragments. 

2 The Spartan “ Sios,” the Semitic zio = fulgor. Sios is the “shining,” a far nearer 
and better derivation than Djaush “ coelum.” From zio comes Zeu; making the diph¬ 
thong by quick speaking the io as eu. 

3 A strong resemblance here to the Clouds of heaven and the God of heaven, the 
object of Jewish worship according to Juvenal, xiv. 96, 97 ; and Nehemiah, i. 5. Gene¬ 
sis, ix. 16. Here is an allusion to Indr a’s thunder-bolts, the storm and the rainbow af¬ 
ter it. The bow in the cloud is the sign of a covenant between Alohim and the earth. 
—Gen. ix. 13. 

4 G. F. Schoemann, Griech. Alt. II. p. 330; Cic. de nat. deor. I. 38, 107, mit m. 
Anmk. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST . 


45 


through earthly bodies into which they were banished as into 
a prison in order to expiate the old fault and then, purified, 
obtain better dwellings upon the stars; of the punishment of 
the unpurified, and of the necessity of a purification through 
religious consecrations and employing the means of grace 
which through Orpheus have been revealed! Even one sort 
of the Orphics, which is but a sordid and caricatured imitation 
of the earlier Orphic character, gave out that they were in¬ 
vested with the power by the Gods 1 of making good, by offer¬ 
ing and conjurations, all sins that one has himself committed 
or that come from the forefathers by descent, and to ward off 
their punishment without great discomfort and trouble, nay, 
even with pleasure and festivities. 2 But among the better sort 
of the initiated persons were admitted after certain prescribed 
purifications and their mutual practices of religion, whereby 
the Orphic doctrines found their expression, partly in forms 
of prayer, partly too in expositions of the holy traditions, 3 
called Mysteries, not only because only the initiated could 
take part in them but also because they, both the ritual and 
the theological expositions which then took place, had a hid¬ 
den, mystical meaning. The expression, with which these 
Orphic dedications 4 and religious practices were usually desig¬ 
nated, is reAerjy (telete 5 ), Consecration to Dionysus (the Sun, 
Mithra, Saviour) in the Mysteries. 

The march of thought was with navigation to the west. 
From Kadam (in Chaldee), Kedem (in Hebrew), the light w^ent 
out to the western peoples, and the emigration was from As¬ 
syria and Syria. The period preceding the year B.c. 32 is, 
historically, 6 dark. 7 With the year B.c. 32 the more decided 
influence of the Babylonian studies in the history of the Jewish 
traditional scripture begins to spring up. This influence is 
evidenced by distinct historical data. 8 The greatest part of 
the “ traditions ” respecting the Law must have been built up 

1 Exodus, xx. 5. 

2 Schoemann, 330, 331, 333. What a parallel to the sale of indulgences in Luther’s 
time ! 

3 iepol \6yoi. 

4 initiations. 

6 G. F. Schoemann, Griech. Alt. II. p. 332. 

6 Josephus, Ant. xiii. 5, 9, carries back the three Jewish sects at least as far as 
b.c. 150-145. 

7 Fuerst, Kultur und Literatur der Juden in Asien, 9. 

8 ibid. 10. 


46 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


prior to this period. 1 In B.c. 32 Hilel came from Babylon into 
Palestine and established there the study of the Law in con¬ 
nection with the Tradition. 2 Now, if the Schools of the Phari¬ 
sees had been occupied in making commentaries and “ tradi¬ 
tions ” for two thirds of a century previous, they must have 
already accumulated a large amount of them in the year 32 
before our era. The Mishna collections of Hilel and Chijja no 
longer exist; but that mishnas or “ precepts of the Tradition ” 
must have formerly existed appears from many Haggada-works 
which quote mishna-collections that cannot be found. 3 The 
Babylonian teachers already had their Traditions or Mishna- 
precepts long before Jehuda ha Nasi. In Babylonian high 
schools the “ Law with the Traditions ” was taught as the sum 
of the then Jewish theology long before the dissolution of the 
Jewish state. 4 

Some of the greatest teachers of Palestine were Babylo¬ 
nians ; as Ezra, Hilel, B. Nathan, It. Chijja. 5 In Babylon the 
seeds of the most kinds of Jewish literature were sown. There 
the germs of the Jewish religious philosophy and the Mid¬ 
rash-development had their origin. The Jews in Spain, in 
Maghreb, in Italy, about the year 900 after Christ, were only 
the inheritors of the Jewish mind and the science of Babylo¬ 
nia, which a thousand years before had been developed and 
perfected upon the banks of the Euphrates. The Jewish 
Literature in Babylonia is the introduction to the entire Jew¬ 
ish literature. 6 The high school at Nehardea was the oldest of 
the Jewish schools of learning in Babylonia. The first traces 
of the efficiency of this school at Nehardea are found about 
188 after Christ. 7 But we find that Abba the priest and B. 
Samuel both went to Palestine to pursue the study of the 
“ Traditions ” under Jehuda the Nasi, 8 and Abba after his re¬ 
turn sent Law questions to Jehuda ha Nasi for his opinion. 9 

One of the most distinguished of the academies after the 


1 ibid. 11. 

2 ibid. 12. 

3 Fuerst, 20, 21. 

4 ibid. 5; Mark, vii. 3-13; Dunlap, Sod, II. 87. 

6 Fuerst, 11. 

« ibid. 2, 3,11. 

7 ibid. 88, 91. 

8 a.d. 150-180. 

9 Fuerst, 92. 


SPIRIT AND MATTER IN THE EAST. 


47 


destruction of Jerusalem was the School of Tiberias in Galilee, 
which St. Jerome mentions as still existing* in the fifth cen¬ 
tury. 1 The doctors of this school early in the sixth century 
agreed to revise the sacred text and issue an accurate edition 
of it. This is the present Hebrew text, the text according to 
the Masoretic Tradition.* In the first quarter of the fourth 
century R. Iosef sought to recover many a meaning of the Old 
Hebrew which was lost. 3 From 200 to 250 after Christ the 
Jewish Liturgy had already for some centuries gone through 
a process of development and refining. 4 But the Prophetical 
Books equally with Matthew postulate spirit as the life-prin¬ 
ciple, and fire as its representative.—Matthew, iii. 11; Exodus, 
iii. 2, 14 ; Gen. i. 2 ; Luke, i. 35 ; 1 Kings, iii. 3, 4; xviii. 24; 
2 Kings, ii. 10; Judges, vi. 21, 22; 1 Sam. x. 10. 

Thus, as we have seen, the sources of Judaism are in the 
Oriental Philosophy. This philosophy postulated an inven¬ 
tion of which the orientals could not prove its existence. The 
dual philosophy was that of the Asiatic world, as well as 
Europe. It was certainly the doctrine of India anciently ; for 
the theory that Brahma is the spirit, and that all else is non¬ 
existence, mere deception of the senses, appearance and not 
reality, is clearly posterior to and dependent on the previous 
dogma of two principles, spirit and matter. The Hebrew 
Syrian, like the Babylonian, held fast to the doctrine of dual¬ 
ism in Palestine. 5 The Syrian philosophy of dualism (in the 
sun and moon) of the spirit has prevailed from the sea of 
Kyprus, the shores of Syria and the mountains of Judah to 
the Bay of Bengal. This doctrine dominates all the rest of this 
work, although it fails to explain the constitution of the uni¬ 
verse. 

In the third century, not far from a.d. 231, Fire that once 
was held in the greatest honor, as on the Jewish altar in the 
days of the Old Testament, had in some degree lost its sig¬ 
nificance and religious influence among the Persians. It had 
been an essential part of the Persian religion to maintain per- 

1 Jerome, pref. ad comment, in lib. paralipomenon. 

2 Compare Horne’s Introduction, I. 201; Dunlap, Sod, I. 207. 

3 Fuerst, p. 152. 

4 ibid. 59. 

5 Psalm, xxxi. 5; Job, xxxii. 8 ; xxxiii. 4. In the 8th century of our era, a Hindu 
drama opens with an address to the Supreme Light, the One Eternal and Invariable 
God !—Wilson’s Hindu Drama, 325. 


48 


1 

THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


petually upon the fire altars the sacred flame and to see that it 
never went out.—Geo. Bawlinson, Seventh Gr. Oriental Mon- 
archy, p. 55. The Jews in Leviticus vi. 13 held that the fire 
on the altar must never go out. Compare Levit. vii. 5, ix. 24; 
see however 1 Sam. iii. 3. Artaxerxes then caused the sacred 
Zoroastrian Fire to be rekindled on the altars where it was 
extinguished and restored to the hierarchy of the ancient Magi 
their former influence in religion.—Bawlinson, ib. pp. 55, 57. 
As another proof of the practical identification of the Old Tes¬ 
tament Judaism with the Mithra religion of Cyrus (Kurus), it 
is found in Isaiah, xlv. 1, 15, and elsewhere in the pages of 
this work. 


CHAPTER THREE. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE IAUDI OF ARABA. 

“He has delivered us from the power of Darkness.” —Gen. xxxii. 24; 
Coloss. i. 12. 

“ I swore by the blood-besprinkled Aud and by the pillars of Sair.”— Old 
Arabian Poet. 

The Arabians adored Dionysus and Onrania, which are 
Abrahm and Sarah (Sarach, Sahra) Asar and Ashera, Istar, 
Astarta, Elel and Alilat, Euan and Eua, Adonis and the Binah, 
Yenus. Aud was adored with human sacrifices ; and by add¬ 
ing* ano (us, our) we get the word Adano, Adan, Adon the Sun, 
the Lord. Audah was his land. I Audah makes Iaudah (mirP), 
the h being read an a by St. Jerome. The Jews anciently 
were in Babylonia called Iaudi. Taqab (from achab, to love) 
means the Lover, and he loves Iracli (Luna), who is euhemer- 
ised as Rachel. Sarah was the name of the Arabian crescent. 
“ Monotheism is necessarily euhemerist in the judgments which 
it passes upon the mythologic religions. Not comprehending 
anything of the primitive divinisation of the forces of nature, 
which was the source of all mythology, it has only one way of 
giving a meaning to these grand constructions of the ancient 
genius ; it is to see in them an embellished history and succes¬ 
sions of deified men.”—Renan, Hist. Peuple Israel, 3d ed. p. 
50. “ Deified men build the first cities, invent the arts, and 

lay down the conditions of civilised life.”—ib. 70, 71. Nimrod 
was one of the Gods of Harran.—ib. 76. Abrahm came out of 
Aur of the Kasdim. The Firegod was identified with the Sun- 
god Samas, Shems.—Sayce, p. 183. The Firegod of Ur was 
Ab (Father) Ram (Most High), in other words Abrahm ; Brah¬ 
ma in India. Izchaq (Isaak) is a remodeling of the word 
Zachaq, to laugh. The Arab raingod Sakia caused nature to 
smile, and Sarach (the Saracen land) to laugh right out. Sakia 
was adored by the tribe Ad (Aud, the Iaudi). The Gods, said 


50 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Euhemerus, had once been men. So Osiris and Isis, Abrahm 
and Sarah. Genesis calls Eve Aisali, and Josephus calls her 
Issa. She was Adam’s rib, and the rib has a mythological 
affinity to the moon-crescent. “The Coming of Isis out of 
Phoenicia.”—Plutarch, de Iside, 50. 4 On each side a figure 

of Isis 20 feet high, with the moon over Her head.’—Egypt, 
Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, I. p. 132. The word 
Zarach means the Morning-red, and Serach, the sunrise. 1 The 
Obstetrix delivers herself on the point in Gen. xlvi. 12, xxxviii. 
30, by binding deep scarlet on the hand that first was put 
forth. The deity name Asaph and the town Saphir suggest a 
patriarch Ioseph, just as the Aaqabara at Chebron suggest a 
patriarch Iaqab, or as the town Saue suggests Esau. We find 
in Genesis a number of Arab tribe-names put down as Pat¬ 
riarchs. The Shammah appear as Ishmael, the Agraei or 
Hagarenes as Hagar, the Rawalla as Raual or Reuel, the Sa- 
rakens (Sarakenoi) as Sarach, etc. The Assyrians called tlie 
Jews Iaudi, from Iaudah or Ieudah, Judaea. See Schrader, 
188, 257, 286. The policy of the Jews was to keep up relations 
with the great Saracen-Ismaelite nation.—Gen. xvii. 20. The 
Nabatheans (Nabaioth.—Gen. xxv. 13) were the people of Petra, 
and the Son of Ishmael.—Wright, Chr. in Arabia, 9 ; Gen. xxv. 
13. Everywhere was sun and fire worship. Israel had the 
Bamoth Bol (the High Places of the Sun or Saturn.—Jer. iii. 
2 ; iv. 11) and the Bamoth Aun.—Hosea, x. 8. The Jews and 
Nabathites 2 were allied in opposition to the Syrian power of 
the Seleucidae.—Jervis, Gen. p. 382. The fire under its differ¬ 
ent appearances was called, as God personified among the 
Chaldaeans and Assyrians, Azar, a name which is preserved 
among the New Persians, and which softens into Asar. 3 

The inscriptions of Thotlimes III. mention the names of the 
inhabitants of Upper Buthen which his majesty had taken in 
the hostile city Megiddo (Makeda, or Makheta perhaps, as the 
consonants of the two names would in Egyptian be identical); 


1 Pharez, from Phar, to make to shine, the Sun at Daybreak. 

2 The Nabathaean is true Arabian.—R. F. Burton (in the ‘ Academy ) p. 47. 
Nazara and Nabathaeans are the same.—Burton, Midian, II. 15. Nazorines dwelt in 
wastes and deserts and particularly in a certain region in the Desert called Nabathaea 
and Idumea.—Renan, Vie de Jesus, 95; Epiphanius, I. 121 ; Dunlap, Sod, II. 10, 11, 
16, 33, 34 ; Matthew, iii. 1. The Ascetics were beyond the Jordan in the first centuries 
of our era.—Renan, Jesus, 5th ed. 90, 97 ; Luke, i. 80. 

3 Movers, I. 340, 341. 


ABRAHAMAUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


51 


moreover we must not believe too much all that the Egyptians 
told as their side of the story, which the modern Egyptologists 
have exhibited a tendency to magnify. Brugsch represents 
Kedescliu as referring to Kadesh on the Orontes, and Maketha 
as Megiddo, although the Bible places Kadesh and Arad very 
far to the south near Edom, on the border of the Desert. We 
have in this catalogue, whether correct or not, cities of the 
extreme south in Judea, mingled in with names of such towns 
as Libnah, Lachish, Aclizib, Makkeda within the Naliren 1 dis¬ 
trict, the river district of central and west Palestine west and 
southwest of Jerusalem, also in tolerable proximity to the 
Aaaqbaron (Kliebron-Hebron 2 ) on the east and the Aaspliaar 
(Sapliir, further west and bearing northwest towards Azotus), 
as well as Eglon which last is still in the Naliren (the Biver 
district) of Palestine. Other towns not far off show that 
Thothmes III. campaigned in the neighborhood of Maketa. 

1 In Hebrew Mcln or Mdin is either Midian or Medina.—1 Chron. i. 32. But Mdn 
is Maden, the Madxans or Midianites, the Midian of Judges, vi. 33 ; vii. 12, 24 f. Mid- 
ianites were on the eastern arm of the Red Sea, proximate to the Amalekites. Egypt 
had wars with both tribes. When Heinrich Brugsch finds the names Nahrna, Satharna, 
Dusratta, Mitani, in Egyptian hieroglyphs we should read the Semitic names nahrena 
(river district), Satarna (a name compounded of Set, and like Saturn), Dusares (a name 
of Osiris in Arabia), and Mtn (Madian or Midian), the Egyptian t = d, in Mitani. The 
river district was near Lachish, west of the Khatti of Hebron. The Mitani or Mid¬ 
ianites fought both Hebrons (Hebrews) and Egyptians. The Egyptologues have been 
deceived by the word naliren , which means any river district; in this case between the 
Sorek and Besor rivers. The Egyptian armies needed water in expeditions against the 
Khatti mountaineers in the ‘cities of Hebron.’ How the Pharah’s forces could leave 
all the nations of Palestine in their rear and march over the snow-clad Lebanon to 
Karchemish on the northern Euphrates might puzzle a Moltke, for the Aaaqabaara of 
Kheth (the Mighty Khatti) were never conquered by Ramses. The name Karukamasha 
is that of a people living on a river south of Moab ; or else the tribe of Massa ; or the 
eastern Karu; and has nothing to do with Asia Minor, Karchemish, or Mesopotamia. 
Dusares (a Grecianism for Dusarat) was worshipped in the Desert east of Moab; and 
the Midianites came through Moab into Israel and camped in the valley of Jezreel. 
Now, on their repulse, they made a stand at Karkor beyond Jordan (Judges, viii. 10-21), 
and this Kark-ir was not probably remote from Kerak, the district where the river 
Keraki ran. Karak or Kerak is then the first syllable of the word karuka-masha. 
Judges, ii. 13; vi. 33; vii. 3, 9, 12, 24; viii. 10, 11, seems to, in conjunction with the 
Massa tribe on the River Keraki to the east, settle the locality of the Karukamasha ! 

2 Compare Kabar, Kabi (Josephus, Ant. xx. 8, 11), and Keb the Egyptian Saturn. 
Jeremiah, xxvi. 22, gives us Aakabor. Tanit (Ourania) is the Queen of heaven (Jer. vii. 
18). See Baethgen, Semit. Rel. p. 56. In Tanit the essential nature (being, existence) 
of the Deity himself is manifested,—comes into appearance, is visible.—Baethgen, 
p. 56. She is called the face of Bal (pen Bal).—ibid. 58. Take the name Peniel, or 
Penel; the face of El. Kamos is a form of Bal.—Baethgen, 15, 19. Tanit is the face 
of Bal, and is Astarte, Queen of heaven (in Judges, ii. 13) ; the Israel worship Bal and 
Her, as the Midianites did Set, Bal, Astarta and probably Dusares. 


52 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Take Bera, Ain, Islipar (Saphir), Iaqob-aal (as Brugsch trans¬ 
literates it), the Aaaqabaara of Qebron, Khebron-Hebron, and 
they all confirm the indicated position of Thothmes III. in the 
Hebrew Nahrena. But ‘ the waters of strife ’ around Kadesh 
directly point to the Southern Kadesh in the Negeb. See 
Ezekiel, xlvii. 19; xlviii. 28. Thothmes mentions the Negebu 
and the Luthen (Lot) in the midst of it. Thothmes III. must 
have been master of the region attributed to the tribe Simeon 
because 1 Chronicles, iv. 41, says that people from Kham for¬ 
merly lived there. The Pharaoh had set up his tablet in 
Nahrena to enlarge the frontiers of Kam.—Birch, Statist. Table, 
p. 30. Yet the Pharaoh’s officer in the next line mentions the 
tablets of Kara in Philistia. Gador itself (1 Chron. iv. 39, 40) 
is within the Biver District, Naliren, northwest of Gerar, while 
Kadesh (Genesis, xiv. 7) is Ain-mi-Saph-at, situated on the 
Amalekite border and near the Amorites. Now, as the prophet 
charges the Jews with a descent from the Amorites and Khe- 
ta (Hittites), Thothmes III. in following the river to Maketa 
refreshed his troops, got in between the confederates of the 
Klieta king, met the Aasaphaar and came near getting a glimpse 
of the Aaaqabaar at Khebron surrounded by a moat filled with 
water supplied from mountain forests and springs. It lay be¬ 
tween the head waters of two streams that may also have con¬ 
tributed to fill its moat. If then it is assumed that the Lotan 
tribes of Edom, with the Amalekites, were the Lower Buthen, it 
seems to follow that the Upper Buthen were the Amorites of 
the Aaaqbaar, the Khebron mountaineers, Hebrons, Hebrews. 
Brugsch-Bey, Geschichte Aegyptens, p. 333, gives Iaqob-Aal 
as the name of a people in Palestine; but, as in Egyptian the 
same letter can be read both as 1 and as r, Aaqabaara stands 
for Aqbar and Cabar, both meaning ‘ mighty ’; and therefore 
Cliebaron (Chebron, Hebron) was the city of the great ( aa , in 
Egyptian) and c mighty ’ (Acbar and Cabar, in Semitic) Gabarim. 
Iacob (Aaqab) represents Hebron versus Esau, Edom 1 (Idu- 
means) or the Arabs of the plains. 

First, we have the word ‘ Gupt ’ in Ai-gupt-os (Egypt), then 
we have ‘ Kobt,’ Kopt, the Kopts being among the most ancient 
peoples of Egypt. The t would seem to be a termination of 
place ; leaving Keb and Kebo to soften into Kefa. A. H. 
Sayce places Kaphtor in the Delta of Egypt, and mentions 

1 Psalm, cviii. 9; cxxxvii. 7; lxxxiii. 6. 


ABRAHAM , AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


53 


Keft as a name of Phoenicia. Keb means to “go down,” and 
Keft the Low Country (“ going- down ” to Egypt), like Canaan. 
The Hebrew b changes to v, p, and ph, so that in these pro¬ 
nunciations the permutation of Akoub, or Iakoub, into Akouph 
and Khufu is accounted for. Kab, 1 Keb, and Kub 2 were, ap¬ 
parently, names of the ancient Saturn in mythology. Although 
Dr. C. H. Cornill follows the Septuagint in reading Lub for 
Kub, yet the Septuagint Isaiah is very different from the 
Hebrew Isaiah ; and, therefore, the Septuagint can be of no 
authority at all in the verse Ezekiel, xxx. 5. Besides, the 
translators of the Revised Version adhere to the reading 
Kub. Adding the termination of place, t, we have Kub-t, or 
Kopt, Kaph-t-oer, ‘ Greater Phoenicia.’ Ideler, Handbuch, 
II. 504, has Kebt. As forms of the name, we give from the 
Septuagint, by way of illustration, “ the sons of Achiba,” “ the 
sons of Akouph,” “ the sons of Akkaba,” “ the sons of Akbos.” 
—1 Esdras, ed. Tiscliendorf, v. 30, 31, 38. Here we see that 
the name varies from Akab to Kab, Keb, Kob, Akkub, Koub, 
Kouph, and Khufu. If we add the land of Iakoub, the extent 
that might be given to Koub’s country at one time or another 
becomes apparent. The statements in Maspero, Hist. An- 
cienne, 3d edition, pp. 504, 505, refute both the Septuagint 
Ezekiel, xxx. 5 and Cornill’s substitution of Lub for Kub ; as 
there is no reason to think that Nabu-koudour-oussour (Nebu¬ 
chadnezzar II.) extended his arms as far as the border of Lybia, 
especially as he was beaten ; the Greek-Egyptian fleet in the 
Egyptian service having beaten the Phoenician fleet in the 
service of the Chaldaeans ; the Egyptian army of Ouhabra took 
Sidon by assault.—Maspero, 505. In fact Herodotus, II. 61, 
mentions the Karu (the Philistian Karu, not the Carians of 
Asia Minor,—see 1 Kings, xviii. 28) “ who live in Egypt.” The 
author has a Syriac Bible in which Ezekiel, xxx. 5, reads in 
the following order: “ Kushia, and Phutia, and Lubia, and all 
x4.rabia, and Kub and Sons of the land of the covenant.” This 
reading of Lubia and Kub together in the same verse is 
against Dr. CornilPs substitution of Lub for Kub. St. Jerome 
has “ Ethiopia, et libya et lydi et omne reliquum vulgus : et 
Cub et filii terre federis cum eis gladio cadent.” St. Jerome 
lived at Bethlehem 34 years, from 386-420. In 392-404 he 

1 See Gab.—2 Sam. xxi. 18. Gaba.—Joshua, xxi. 17. Iaqab.—Gen. xxx. 

2 Goub.—2 Sam. xxi. 19. 


54 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


published the Vulgate edition of the Old Testament. So that, 
between the Peschito and St. Jerome, Kub is sustained. The 
names Khufu and Gupt (in Aiguptos) are related, apparently. 

The Hebrew Beth Shernes (Beth Sliems) is the Temple of 
the Sun. 1 The Hebrews worshipped the fire of the Sun (com¬ 
pare Numbers, xxv. 4; xxxiv. 26), the Deity of the sun being 
supposed to be in it, and to go round with it. 2 Numbers men¬ 
tions Azan (Asan) a solar name, since we find Beth San, 3 the 
Sun’s temple, Asana (the Spartan name of the Sun’s Goddess 
Atliana, Minerva, Mene Orphea), Sonne, the Sister of Apollo 
(Bel, Bal, Abel, Abelios); Azania (Arcadia), Zan (Zeus), Zano 
(Juno), Iason (Jason), San the Assyrian God, 4 Sandan Herakles, 
Shun (Sun) in Mandshu-Tartar, Shanah (a solar year; sanah) 
in Hebrew, and Asanet Spouse of Ioseph and Daughter of Phre 
or Ptah-Phre (Patah-Phar) the Sun-priest of Ptah the Crea¬ 
tive Eire of the Sun. Compare San-ar (Senaar) in the East. 
—Gen. xi. 1, 2, 4. 

Moses (M-s-e) took with him the bones of Ioseph, 5 and they took their 
journey from Sakoth, iind camped in Atam (city of Tamus, Thammuz, in 
Atuma). — Exodus, xiii. 19, 20. Hebrew. 

In Tyre the ashes of the God, with the burned bones, were 
preserved, 6 Herakles was burned in a tunic of fire. The sepul¬ 
chre of Herakles was shown at Tyre where the fire was burned. 7 
A man of the House of Loi married a daughter of Loi. 8 The 
Elo iim, Elo eim, were the priests of Saturn. Eloi is the Hebrew 
God ; El Saturnus, the Phoenician El, Kronos. Iagab (Iacob) 
is Keb (Saturn). Kebir means fire, Kabir -- the Sun. The 
Seven Kabiri (Cabiri) are the Seven Spirits of Fire, 9 about the 
Throne of Mithra-Kronos. Sabos is the Arabian Dionysus 

1 Judges, i. 33; 1 Samuel, vi. 9, 12, 19. 

2 Plutarch, de Iside, 41; Movers, Phoenicians, 444 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 11. 

3 1 Sam. xxxi. 10. Compare the Hebrew proper names Asan (1 Chron. ii. 25), Has- 
san, Asena (2 Esdras, ii. 50. Greek), Sani (1 Chron. vi. 28. Greek), Samel, a Jewish 
angel. Beth-San.—Joshua, xvii. 16. There was the temple of Astarte, the Moon. 
Asanus was king at Jerusalem.—Josephus, Ant. viii. 6. Saniel is mentioned.—Gal- 
laeus, Sibylline Books, p. 274. 

4 Johannes Brandis, Historische Gewinn, etc. p. 104. 

6 Seph, Seb, Sev is a name of Saturn. 

6 Movers, 357. 

7 Movers, 357; Clementine Recogn. X. 24. 

8 Exodus, ii. 

9 Rev. iv. 5; v. 6. 


ABRAHAMAUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


55 


(Asaf). The Talmud calls Ioseph Sarapis. 1 Sarapis is the 
name of him who orders the universe. 2 Sarapis is Dionysus, 
Hades, and Osiris. 3 In Egypt, Saturn’s name was Sev and 
Seb. Osar-siph is priest of Osiris-Seph. Iosef is consequently 
a name of Sarapis, Asaf, Sabos, and Sev (also Seph, or Sef). 
The Stoic and Peripatetic could say that God is the “ Inde¬ 
fatigable Sun and Full-Moon.” Metrodorus, de Sensionibus, 
cap. 18, says that they were right in so saying. Herodotus 
iii. 8 distinctly states that the ancient Arabians regarded 
“ Dionysus and the Ourania 4 as the Only God.” So that, like 
Israel, Isiri, and Usiri-Osiris, we are brought back again and 
again, like the Arabian Dionysus in the times before Herod¬ 
otus, to Sarach, the Saracen Moon-crescent. Adonis is the 
Greatest of Gods, and Father of Adam (Epigeios) and Eua 
(Luna) in the Mysteries so called. 5 Persians and Magi divide 
Zeus (law, Iovis, love) into two parts, transferring his essence 
(nature) into the sex of both man and woman. 6 Josephus 
says: Our Legislator telling some things very properly in 
enigmas, but speaking others in allegories with solemnity. 7 
Herodotus knows no Law of Mase or of Mases, Moses, or 
Masses. The Saracen crescent was kept sacred (adored) in 
Israel. 8 

Dionysus is the First Ancestor.—Nonnus, xxvii. 341; xxiv. 
49. So was Adamatos (ha Adam ha Gadol.—Josh. xiv. 15) 
the Son of Dios. Kronos called Israel by the Phoenicians 
had an Onlybegotten Son whom they called Ieud.—Porphyry; 
Euseb. Pr. Ev. I. x. According to St. Paul all Christians are 
of the seed of Abraham, 9 consequently entitled to know that 

1 Talmud, Tract Avodasara, p. 43; Dunlap, Sod, I. 168. 

2 de Iside, 29. 

3 ibid. 28. 

4 The Celestial Venus, Vena, Lunus-Luna. 

6 Movers, 191, 542-544 ; Orelli, Sanchon, 20, 24. 

6 Firmicus, de Errore prof. rel. 5; Preller, Greek Mythol. I. 409. Adam is a 
duad, Eve in him. The Egyptian myth claimed that Osiris was in Isis, the Hebrew 
Issa and Ashah (Ishah); the Babylonian held that the Sungod proceeded from the 
Mother, who is the superior nature. Compare Kubele, the Mighty Mother. 

7 Josephus, Ant. preface, I. 1. 

8 Isaiah, i. 13. 

9 Galatians, iii. 28 f. Forms in Ab are Achiab, Eliab, 1 Sam. xvi. 6, Merab, 1 Sam. 
xviii. 17, Abiel, 1 Sam. ix. 1, Abiazar, Joshua, xvii. 2. Rama (in the district of 
Suph). 1 Sam. ix. 5, Ab-ram was connected with the Gheber worship (the fire wor¬ 
ship) at Khebron and built an altar there to the Fire of Life, Iachoh, God of life, the 
Chion.—Gen. xiii. 18. Delitzsch (speaking of the word Abah : No. 13, pages 17-21 of 


56 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Asar 1 was Osiris in Phoenicia and to see Osiris in Israel. We 
may be said to enjoy some of the privileges of the ancient 
Syro-Arabians or Saracens; but “ if you are circumcised , 
Christ will do you no good.” 2 Since, then, “ the Wisdom, 
the Daughter of God, is also male and father ” 3 the spirit 
in Sin (Lunus-Luna) is of both genders; for Sin is the 
male-female Moon-god. 4 The temple of the Moon-god in 
Ivharran 5 (Harran) was undoubtedly copied elsewhere. Nico¬ 
las of Damaskus in the fourth of his narrations tells us that 
Abrames was king of Damaskus, a stranger, who came with 
an army from the land called Khaldea, which is beyond Baby¬ 
lon. . . . And of the Abrames yet, even now, the name is 
magnified in the Damaskus district, and a village, from him, 
is shown, called Abram’s residence. 6 Terach’s name appears 
(Renan, Israel, p. 90) to have been discovered by the scribe in 
the name Trachonitis—the transjordan district. Moab, Edom, 
Ammon, Israel, Kanaan spoke the same language as a result 
of a common origin (Renan, Israel, 99). Laban and Iaqab 
speak together (apparently the same language—Gen. xxxi. 
43), and Iaqab tells his brethren to bring stones for a cove¬ 
nant! These were the Arabs! Iachab’s name (compare Iachi, 
Iacche) could well mean the Life-father Dionysus, who was 
worshipped (as Herodotus says) by the Arabs, together with 
Ourania, as the Only God. But the Hagarenes (1 Chron. v. 

his Assyrisches Worterbuch, Erste Lieferung) mentions (1) Father in the sense of be¬ 
getter, used of men and gods ; (2) Father in the sense of forefather, ancestor; (3) 
Father as a title of reverence and affection, in an address to the moon-god. —Prof. 
David G. Lyon, Vol. xiii. American Orient. Soc. p. clxvii. In an address, then, to the 
Moon-god he could have been called Father, an appellation suited to the Assyrian 
Shamas as well as to Zeus and the Babylonian Allah Sin or Lunus. The Ammonites, 
Moabites and Idumeans regarded Abram as their common father.—Renan, 92, 93. 

1 The God Sar is mentioned (Am. Orient. Soc. p. clxvi.) on pages 64-66 of the ex¬ 

cursus of Delitzsch; according to Prof. Lyon of Cambridge. In India we have 
Surya, the Sun ; in Sur, Syria, we have the land of the Sun. Asariel. 

—Joshua, xvii. 2. The name of Osiris is written Asar in ancient hieroglyphs.—De 
Rouge,—Recherches, 49. Therefore the name Asar went down from Canaan into 
Egypt. 

2 Gal. v. 2, 3. 

3 Philo, de profugis, 458 ; Dunlap, Vestiges, 228, 229. 

4 See Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, p. 164, 73, 74, 88, 90, 249. According to 
Genesis, xi. 27, 29, 32 compared with xxiv. 10, 15, 29, Kharan (Harran, Carrhae) 
was Laban’s home. Laban was a god and ordered the temple of the Moon-god at Har- 
ran to be rebuilt.—Sayce, ibid. 249. 

5 ibid. 163. On the Moon-god, in general, see Sayce, 155, 156. 

6 Josephus, Ant. I. vii. 2. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 57 

10), Hagaraim , were in the land of Rauben (Galaitis) and ran 
their mares among the Ishmaelites as far as the desert of 
Pharan.—1 Chron. i. 31 ; Gen. xvi. 7-15 ; xxi. 20. The same 
difficulty occurs with Akhab’s name as with Khufu’s in 
Egypt. Akab or Keb is the root of the names Akhab and 
Khufu. Both are deity names of Saturn. The king was called 
by a deity name. 

Starting, then, from Harran (Carrhae) in Aram (Mesopota¬ 
mia) and employing the name of the Aramean Father (Ab- 
Aram, Ab Ram, or Bal Ram) the scribe got along (using the 
right of the migrant Arab) as far as the Bahr Lut at Sadem or 
Sodom. Drawing one line from this place across Arabia from 
north to south nearly to Medina, and another from Sadem to 
Kadimah on the Persian Gulf we shall then have before us the 
vast Arabian province of Nejd (Najd) with the Beni Kheibar 
(Khaybar, as R. F. Burton spells it) near Medina (to the west) 
and the small tribe of the Beni Ukbah 1 further north in Mid- 
ian, not far from el Muweylah, on the eastern coast of the Red 
Sea, below the Gulf of Akabah. Drawing another line from 
the foot of the Dead Sea, to Ezion Geber (Gabar or Akbar) at 
the head of the Gulf of Akabah and further on down to Me¬ 
dina we thus enclose a space extending from this point Akaba 
eastward to the Persian Gulf at Kadimah, while it reaches from 
Medina (far to the south) to the Sea of Lot (the Dead Sea). 
This is the sphere of Iacob, or, as the. scribe calls him, Iaqab. 
Observe that the Beni Kheibar (compare the names Akbar 
and Kabar) are a tribe of Jews very ancient and indomitable ; 
•next to them on the east come the tribe of Harb 2 ( a warlike 
tribe), next the Shammah and the Anazeh (Aneyzeh) ranging 
over the Arabian Desert from south-west to north-east and 
sometimes going nearly to Damascus. In the midst of Arabia 
Deserta we have the Agubeni and Rliabeni, and, near Petra, 
the town Gubba. In describing the antiquity of Abrahm, 
Isaac (Ischaq) and Iacob the scribe goes back to Mesopotamia 
in the case of Abrahm, to the Beni Sakr perhaps and Azaka, 
or else to Gerar and to Sekun among the Peleti at Gerar in 

1 Burton, Land of Midian, L 30, 40. Jabel Ukbal.—Burton, II. 183. El-Akabil.— 
ibid. 184, 188. 

2 Ezekiel, xxx 5, Hebrew, mentions the nation Harb. Burton, Land of Midian, I. 
77, mentions Jebel Harb. It is chiefly the sheik of the tribe of Harb that annoys the 
caravans.—Niebuhr, II. 45. 


58 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Philistia for Ischaq, to the Desert of Arabia for Iaqab (Ja¬ 
cob), Lotan (Lot), Esau (Saue, Atuma, Idumea), Hagar, Ish- 
mael (the Shammah), to Egypt and Syria (west of the Jordan 
and north of Jerusalem) for Asar (Osar, Osiris, Isiri, Ousir) 
and Isarel (Israel), and to Nabathea for the patriarch Nabioth. 
Geography, euhemerism and mythology therefore lie at the 
base of the patriarchal theory. Moreover the scribe applied 
the doctrine that the name of a place was the name of its foun¬ 
der. The Ludians had heard that Askalos built Askalon— 
Movers, I. p. 17. It is this principle that was followed in the 
scribes’ use of Akabar (meaning great, mighty) to indicate a 
forefather Iakab (Iaqab). The Aakabara are the Mighty, a 
name peculiarly suitable to the Beni Kheibar as a tribe of 
Jews in Arabia ; and the name Kheibar can readily be derived 
from Akabar. 

In regard to Ezion Geber (Gabar) the name “ Giant’s slioul- 
derblade ” is probably an afterthought, noway connected with 
the original name. El-Akabah means the city of the Descent} 
Judges, vii. 24, puts the Madianite expeditions as high to the 
north as the Dead Sea and even north of Jerusalem. In later 
times the district of Madian was reckoned as part of the prov¬ 
ince of Medina. 2 The Ma’azah reach from Madian to Wady 
Musa of Petra. They occupy the greatest part of the Hisma 
and the northern Harrah, 3 joining on, geographically, to the 
Harb country. In Southern Madian (Midian) the Harb Beda- 
win (on the eastern side of the Sharm) are jealous and hostile. 4 
On the north, the Ma’azah meet the hostile Beni Sakr, to the 
eastward they find the Anezah, and the Kuwait are their foes. 5 
The province of Nejd is of vast extent; it includes all the in¬ 
terior of Arabia between the southern and eastern provinces 
(previously mentioned in Niebuhr, Voyage en Arabie, II. 51- 

1 Burton, Midian, I. 234. Akab = heel. 

2 ibid. I. 123. It would almost seem as if there had at one time been some connec¬ 
tion between the Beni Amr in Midian and Kerak in Syria.—Judges, xi. 22, 23. See 
Burton, Midian, 1. 164, 167. The Beni Kheibar are Jews, or Jewish: so that their 
name (as a variant of Alcbar, Gabar) is to be taken into account in tracing the Biblical 
narrative of the tribe of Iaqab. As to the Karukamasha of the Karnak inscriptions, 
it will be treated further on. 

3 Burton I. 335, 336. Among them are the Beni Subut or Sabt, whom Wallin sus¬ 
pects to be of Jewish origin from their name. The Beni TJkbar occupied North Midian 
(Midian proper) between Damah and Shamah (Syria).—ibid. I. 168, 295; II. 11, 12, 15. 

4 Burton, I. 134. 

® Burton, I. 316, 335. 


ABRAHAM , AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


59 


137) and the Syrian Desert. 1 The Nejd is divided into two 
great districts: El Ared, which borders on Oman, and El 
Kherje, which touches Iaman. In El Ared the prophet Abd 
ul Wahheb w~as born at El Aijaene. 2 In the north of the 
Syrian Desert , south-east of the Dead Sea, was Suphah; but 
see Numbers, xxiii. 14, which tends to place Saphem more to 
the north. 

Wahab be Suphab wa-etb na’halim Arnon.—Numbers, xxi. 14. 

Balaq went out to meet Balam to a city of Moab on the border of Aranen 
(Arnon) at the end of the border.—Numbers, xxii. 36. 

It was not too far for the Oahab Arabs to go to reach Suphah. 3 
Niebuhr connects the Anaesse (Aneyse Arabs) with the name 
Hanassi and the Baruch Anzah. He says that the Jewish 
Beni Kheibar ruled this country for more than twelve centu¬ 
ries. The Jews in the environs of Medina do not travel on the 
Sabbath. These Jews live in the midst of vast deserts. The 
country north-east of Medina is called Kheibar, and these 
Jews are known as the Beni Kheibar. One of their tribes is 
the Anaisse. 4 The Wahabi Arabs occupied Mecca and Medina 
in 1803-4. 5 The Semite nomads, says Kenan, 6 particularly 
fancied the land of Aus (Us, Uz) the place of abode of the 
Anezis, the country of Terach (Trachonitis), the region of 
Damaskus, and the south of Palestine where the Kananites 
had not yet penetrated; and, probably, like the Arabs (and 
Egyptians), they had an aversion to the sea, as they never ap¬ 
proached the coast. In Arabia, where the Hebrews appear to 
have settled as early as the time of the Babylonian Captivity, 
there is some reason for supposing that the Jewish religion 
was professed by the kings of Iaman as far back as B.c. 129, 
and it is certain that the Jews were very numerous there in 
the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ, that they had kings 
of their own religion, that they were engaged in extensive 

i Niebuhr, II. 137. 

3 IL 139-141. 

3 1 Chron. xviii. 3 ; xix. 6, 16. 

^ Niebuhr, II 45-47. 

6 Burton, II. 148. Of course, the Wahabi in Suphah are separated by two thou¬ 
sand years or more from Mehemet Ali’s Wahabees; but, the Oahabi name already ex¬ 
isted before the Book of Numbers was written; bow otherwise could the quotation 
have been made ? 

’ Renan, Israel, 90. 


60 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


wars and severely punished the Christians. According to the 
testimony of Niebuhr there are still in the district of Chaibar 
in Hedjas in Western Arabia some tribes of independent Jews 
who are governed by their emirs or sheiks and live a nomad 
life. Their name is Beni Chabar. 1 

Speaking of the Arab tribes, Ghillany (Menschenopfer der 
Hebraer, p. 119) says that the settled and wandering tribes 
had their especial deities, but that the conceptions of these 
deities did not differ. The Gods were fundamentally every¬ 
where the same. Men were everywhere in Arabia offered up 
as victims. The worship of Moloch or Saturn ruled in this 
land thoroughly. The deity had here a six-cornered black 
temple, the priests were clad in black ; offerings were made to 
him on the Seventh Day, Saturday. As God of war they gave 
him a red temple, and offered up to him a warrior in blood- 
besprinkled clothes, who was pitched into a pool; the heaven¬ 
ly image of Moloch was the planet Saturn, as God of war he 
was Mars. See Gesenius, Jesaia, II. 337, 344, 345. Bol (Baal) 
has among the ancients been very frequently declared to be 
Saturn, or both Saturn and Sol, but they called him ‘ the An¬ 
cient ’ rather than Saturn. 2 Iahoh is the Phoenician Iao. The 
Phoenician Iao is the Only-born Son of Saturn, the Kronos 
revealing himself.—Ghillany, p. 437. “ The God called Iao 

among the Jews.”—Diodorus Sic. I. 94. The Chaldeans called 
Dionysus Iao. —Ghillany, p. 435 ; Movers, I. 547. Iao and 
Iahoh are originally one and the same Being, the ideas con¬ 
nected with them are the same. Iao is shortened from Iahoh, 
and is the Sun.—Movers, I. 554; Ghillany, 435, 437, 438. Iaqab 
is Herakles-Dionysus, and Herakles is Saturn-Kronos. The 
Phoenician Iao is the Only-begotten Sun of Saturn, the revealed 
(sich offenbarender) Kronos, the Highest God, the Name not 
to be uttered, like the Jewish Iahoh ! It is known only to the 
Initiated! Ghillany, 439, declares the hanging in Numbers, 
xxv. 4, a sacrifice to the Sun ! To speak strictly, the Egyptians 
and Hebrews observed their Deity in the sun. But the Old 
Testament is far richer in passages showing Iahoh to be Sat¬ 
urn. Like Saturn in Phoenicia, Osiris in Egypt is represented 
with many eyes (Ghillany, 441), and Mithra has thousand eyes. 
Osiris, like Saturn, is connected with the color black. 

1 Jahn, Hist. Hebrew Commonwealth, 421. 

2 Movers, I. 185, 263. 


ABRAHAMAUD, AND TIIE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


61 


There lies between the Bahr Lut (the Sea of Lot) and the 
Elanitic Gulf (the Gulf of Akabah) a valley, a continuation of 
the geological depression of the bed of Jordan and the Dead 
Sea, running down to the Gulf of Akabah 1 at Ezion Geber. 
The Midianite range originally began at Moab, ran down on 
the east of the Glior, past Mount Hor, down along the east side 
of the aforesaid Gulf that washes the eastern shores of the 
peninsula of Sinai, 2 and perhaps was extended further in 
Arabia. G and K were nearly identical sounds in Arabic and 
consequently in ancient Hebrew. The Hebrew kab means 
Mourning, aqabah means fraud, and aqab = to lay snares ; the 
name Iaqab is more intimately connected with ‘fraud,’ ‘trick’ 
and lunar love; both significations being used by the Hebrew 
scribe in writing Iaqab’s history. 3 The Midianite region was 
mentioned by the classical writers under the names Nabathaea 
and Nabataea. 4 Southeast of the country of the Nabathaeans 
we come to the Agub-eni. The relations of the land of Koub to 
the land of Iakoub were near. 5 Did the tribe of Iakoub reach 
to the Agub-eni and Rhaabe/it f According to Genesis, xxviii. 
2, 10, 14, Iakoub crossed the entire North Arabian Desert from 
Beer Sheba to Mesopotamia. Genesis, xxix. 1, would carry 
him to the Persian Gulf at Kadimah. 6 So that the Agu- 

1 Akabah means descent; keboa means the Sun’s descent in the west; Kab means 
to become extinct. Keb, like Saturn, sinks below the earth’s surface. Like Osiris and 
Turn, Iaqab’s name is allied to that of the setting sun. Iaqab means literally to “ be¬ 
come extinct,” he “whose sun shall set,” kaboa.—Deuteronomy, xvi. 6. In Gen. 
xxxii. 22, 26, he, as Light, fights Darkness, the fiend Typhon, who lives in a cavity in 
the earth. 

2 With settlements in the Sinaite peninsula compare the names Jebel Ukbal and 
El Akabil. That these two names existed when Genesis was written we do not affirm. 
But “ Iakab ” could be formed from others just like them. 

3 Iaqab threatens to go down to Hades:—Gen. xxxvii. 35. He does go there.—Gen. 
xlix. 33 ; 1. 11. He has the number 12 sacred to him ; refers to the signs of the zodiac, 
Leo, Gemini and Scorpio.—Gen. xlix. 5, 9, 17, 28. Saturn was also Sol, descending to 
Hades as Adon-Osiris-Asar-Asarel (Israel). Homer, Iliad, v. 721, and xiv. 204, puts 
Saturn down in Hades and calls him “Mighty.” Thou goest to the mansions of 
Hades beneath the recesses of the earth.—Iliad, xxii. 482. The Eelios Phaethon took 
their life away.—Odyssey, xxii. 388. Consequently the Cabir Iaukab (the Gabar), 
when he descends to the Hades is the Saturn (Sol) under earth, the Keb (Kebo), or 
Seb, of the Egyptians, who mourned him with the abel Misraim.—Gen. 1. 11. 

4 Sir Richard Burton’s “ Gold Mines of Midian,” p. 179 ; Hall, Mt. Seir, 208. The 
Jews and Nabathaeans are spoken of as allies against the Syrian power of the Seleu- 
cidae.—Jervis, 382. 

5 Ezekiel, xxx. 5. 

6 The ancient Kadimah was a celebrated commercial city at the head of the Persian 
Gulf, in proximity to the Ishmaelite tribes comprised under the confederate title Agraei 


62 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


beni 1 and Iakonb were well acquainted, as it would seem. Tlie 
Jews and Nabatheans were mentioned as allies. 2 Genesis im¬ 
plies more than it says outright. 3 Justin Martyr says that the 
prophetic spirit foretold, through Moses, that there will be a 
conflagration of the world ; 4 he (Moses) said thus : Everliving 
fire will descend and consumes down to the Abyss beneath. 5 
Genesis, xlix. 1, may have had in view something of the sort; 
but Numbers, xvi. 30, 33, applied only to Kori, Datan and 
Abiram, and does not confirm Justin Martyr’s prophecy . Philo 

or Hagar-enes. Josephus, Ant. I. xiii. p. 22, says that the Ishmaelim (Beni Hagar, or 
Shemali) inhabited the country between the Euphrates and the Red Sea. Genesis, 
xvii. 5, 6, 16, 20, xxi. 13, describes Abrahm as the Father of the Ishmaelite peoples. 
Bara-am, in Hebrew, means ‘creavit nationem,’ ‘he created the nation.’ 

1 Compare the Akub (Ezra, ii. 42), the Beni Hagabah (Ezra, ii. 45), and the Beni 
Hagab (ii. 40). The Akub (Ezra, ii. 42), is written, in Hebrew, Aqub. The Naba¬ 
theans were in the neighborhood of Gilead, the Hauran, parts of Syria adjoining the 
Lebanon, and this line of country is identical with the Desert mentioned in 1 Chron. v. 
9-11, 16, 18-21, as the seat of the Hagar tribes of Itur, Naupish and Nodaubh; the 
Nabatheans and Hagarites occupied this tract in common, for Dionysius (Orb. Descrip. 
954-956) represents the Nabataei and Agraei as inhabiting, with the Chaulasii, the 
southern foot of Mt. Libanus and the frontier of Syria.—Jervis, Gen. 382. 

2 ibid. 382. The influence of Nabioth predominated in the Hijaz and Nejd, and 
from the Nile to the Euphrates.—ibid. 383, 384. 

The Agraei (Hagareni), Agubeni and Raabeni, their districts being in this order 
from northwest to southeast, were between 30° and 31° latitude.—Ptolemy, Quarta 
Asiae Tabula ; ibid/Univ. Geogr., Tabula Asiae IIII.; see A Universal Hist. vol. 18, p. 
333 map and p. 344, which refer to ‘ Ptol. in Arabia, edit. Oxon. 1712.’ Thus the names 
Hagar, Kub, Agubeni, Raabeni and Rauben (Reuben) are names of Arab tribes. These 
tribes Genesis describes as persons, not as tribes. Arba (the same name as the district 
Raab-en) was a Great Man among the (Sun-worshipping) Anakim.—Joshua, xiv. 15; 
xxi. 21. 

Ptolemy lived at Alexandria, and used the plan of Marinus of Tyre. One Arabian 
writer regarded Ptolemy as ‘ propago de terra Sem,’ descendant of the land Sem. He 
was born about the middle of the 2d century A.D. 

3 The Ebionites attributed to the patriarchs a supernatural origin.—Mackay, Prog¬ 
ress of the Intellect, II. 362. It is beyond all doubt that the fundamental character of 
the pre-islamite heathenism was Starworship and that this has never been obliterated : 
at every period we find worshippers of the Sun and other heavenly bodies. Particularly 
they made a distinction of the sexes, as Sungod and Jupiter male, Moon and Venus 
female.—Osiander, in D. M. G., vii. 502, 503. The Sabaeans worshipped the spirits of 
the stars.—Mankind, p. 446. Nork, Hebraisch-Chald.-Rabbin. Worterbuch, p. 22, 
holds the patriarchs to be deities. 

4 Ekpurosis. 

5 Justin, Apol. I. p. 159. I swore by the blood-streams around Aud and by the 
stones that by the side of Sair are set up.—Osiander, in D. M. G. vii. 500. The land 
of Aus, where the patriarch Job had his domicil, was in Iemen and near Medina.—Osi¬ 
ander, in Zeitschr., D. M. G. vii. 496. Now Iakob oiled a stone, and as a symbolical 
exhibition of the divine presence made it a sort of temple or place of sacrifice.—Gen. 
xxviii. 18-20. Moreover the Israelites were on such terms with the interior and south¬ 
ern part of Arabia*that they introduced an Arab work (Job) into their Bible. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


63 


Judaeus, however, comes out plainly with the doctrine of Ek- 
purosis , 1 and so does the New Testament. The Egyptian 
doctrine was that the divine universe of spirit and matter runs 
a round of developments and transformations, till at length all 
forms are reabsorbed into the primary element, whether watery 
or fiery, and the Deity, having thus re-entered into himself, 
after a pause 2 goes forth again into energy and repeats the 
same successive developments and transformations as before . 3 

Keb stands for Seb, 4 Gabal was the Sun-god. 5 Keb is Sa¬ 
turn, Akbar. The Jewish angel, Akibeel, as to name, might be 
made to pair with the Phoenician Kubele. The words Gabar, 
Gabor, Kliebar, Gheber, Kebar, Acbar mean “mighty,” as 
does Ha-Gabar-in or ha-Geberim in Genesis, vi. 4. The words 
Cabir and Cabiri, like the Semitic-Nabathean Cabar, have the 
same signification. The people of Khebron (Hebron is writ¬ 
ten with a Greek chi in the Septuagint) were the Aaaqabaar 
the Mighty Ghebers, or Hebrew-Aaqabarou, of Khebron (Heb¬ 
ron), near the home of Abrahm, Isaac (Ischaq, in Hebrew) and 
Iaaqab. The orientals could make an impersonation ; and the 
Mighty Iaaqab personifies (in Genesis, xxxii. 28) the Mighty 
Aaaqbaar of the Aachabaron of the city Khebron (Hebron) of 
Abrahm, Isaac and Iaaqab. In Genesis, xxxvi. 38, also, we 
find Aclibor (rather Aakabor, or Aakbor) the name of a ruler 
in Edom. Iaaqab then is a supposed founder of the Aaaqbaar, 
Aqabar, or the Cabari of Chebron. Aa, in hieroglyphs, means 
in Egyptian “ great,” so that Aa-Aqbaar would be perhaps 
an Egyptian adjective prefixed to the name of a Semite tribe in 
the district of Khebron (Hebron), or else the Egyptians may 
have transcribed Hagabar into Aaaqbaar. For the sounds 
k, g, ch, q were readily transmuted one into the other. “ Aaaq¬ 
baar ” 6 and “ Aasphaar ” seem to be the correct transliteration 

1 Burning out of the world.—2 Peter, iii. 7. Acts, iii. 21 preaches the reestablish¬ 
ment of all things. 

2 Gen. ii. 2. 

3 Palmer, Egyptian Chronicles, I. 2. 

4 Lepsius, Trans. Berlin Akad. 1851. p. 168 ff. 

6 Creuzer, Symb. I. 259. Iaaqabel, if such a name could be found, with Kubele. 
But in the Bible we have only Iaaqab, without el as in Akibeel or in Kubele, the Mighty 
Mother. Mythology, however, can do a great deal in connecting again characters that 
literary priests have partially severed. 

6 Compare AchabarS, a town of Upper Galilee.—Josephus, Vita, xxxvii. Also the 
Rock of the Achabara (axajSapwv nerpav) in Upper Galilee.—Josephus, Wars, II. xx. 6 
(Josephus, ed. Coloniae, 1691, p. 823). Also Gabara. —ibid. p. 1014. Achabaron would 


64 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


of two names which some have hitherto persisted in reading 
‘ Jacobel 5 and ‘ Josephel ’ when there are no such words to be 
found in the Bible, which does have Iaaqab and Ioseph in 
Exodus, i. 5. Of these names the first corresponds to the 
Aaaqbaron at Kliebron; the second, to the district Saphir 
mentioned in Micah, i. 11. Thothmes III., at Maketa, would 
have been in just the position where he might expect to have 
the people of Saphir, Khebron (Hebron), Mareshah, Libnali 
and Lachish all on his hands. The plain of Mamare is in 
the district of Hebron.—Gen. xiii. 18 ; and this was the home 
of the Hebrew patriarchs.—Gen. xxiii. 2. As Euhemerus held 
that the Gods had been men, the Hebrew patriarchs should be 
strictly watched lest a deity creep out of sight in the disguise 
of a patriarch. 

We find the Khabari in Numbers, xxvi. 45, the Khebroni 1 
in Numbers, xxvi. 58, and the Hebrew Ghebers in Deuteron¬ 
omy, y. ,22 23, 26. We are not forced to go very far to find 
the Phoenician fire-altars, for Abrahm 2 took fire in hand 3 and 
came near sacrificing his son Ischak. 4 The Arabians were as¬ 
trologer-astronomers, 5 and we know that they were Sun-wor¬ 
shippers. 6 But for the geographical relations of Arabia and 
Philistia to Egypt and Phoenicia we may, besides Genesis, 
refer to Jeremiah, ix. 26 ; xxv. 20-24 ; xlvii. 4, 5. The prophet 
first mentions Egypt (Mazrim), Ieudah (probably Audali, the 
land of Ad formerly), then Adum (Idumea). Later, he enu- 

relapse into Chebron, Hebron. Kabar in Ezekiel, i. 1, is Khobar in the Septuagint. 
Cabira was, in Strabo, a residence of the kings of Pontus.—Movers, I. 649; Blau, in 
Zeitschr. D.M.G. ix. 88. Hagabarim, = the Mighty.—Gen. vi. 4. Chebron ( = Che- 
baron).—See Gen. xxiii. 2. 

1 The Kaati lived at Khebron.—1 Chron. Septuagint, vi. 1, 2, 38, 54, 55, 56. The 
land of Khaleb (Caleb) adjoined the Khebron (Hebron) location. The Khetti.—Nehe- 
miah, ix. 8. Septuagint. Kibir is Fire-god.—Sayce, 181. 

2 This is the way the name ’Aj Bpa.fi was written in the Semite letters QrYDfcs, prob¬ 
ably to suggest or subindicate the name Brahma. Little marks (vowel points) came 
into use at a late period (post Christum), by which, when desired, a name could be 
made to read somewhat differently, and variations from the original text introduced. 

3 Gen. xxii. 6. 

4 Gen. xxii. 10; Ezekiel, xx. 31. viii. 2; Deuteron. iv. 12, 15. 2 Kings, xvi. 3. 
There was a fire-city, Sadem, named from Sada l a flaming fire.’—Gen. xiii. 10; xiv. 
12 ; xix. 24, 29. Abrahm’s name is mentioned in connection with this fire-city. Sadef 
in Hebrew means to burn, to parch, to dry up. The word Sadem means, therefore, the 
city of fire.—Gen. xix. 24. 

6 Jeremiah, xix. 13; 2 Kings, xxiii. 4, 8, 11, 12. See Movers, PhOnizier, I. 65, 66; 
Orelli, Sanchon., p. 8. 

6 2 Kings, xxiii. 5, 11,19 ; Ezekiel, xx. 28, 29. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


65 


merates all the Arab (Oreb,=Midian), and ‘all the kings of 
the land of Auz, Askalon, Gaza, Akaron (the Kara, Ekron), 
Asdod, Adurna, Moab, Ammoniadis, the Phoenicians, Arabians 
and all the sheiks of Harb that dwell in the Desert. 1 As we 
find Oreb and Sab, two Sari (Lords) of Maden (Midian), 
mentioned in Judges, vii. 25, we may presume that the Mid- 
ianites and Sabians could become members of a confeder¬ 
ation formed in Syria, Arabia, or the Negeb, for “going down 
into Egypt.” The Midianites joined the land of Aud, just as 
they did the land of Mab or Moab; and the name Arab, 2 or 
Aureh, would be a name likely to be given to the peoples east 
of the northern part of the Red Sea. This numbering of the 
tribes and their leaders, east of the land of the Pharaohs, has a 
tendency to exhibit, as on a map, Egypt’s relations on its east¬ 
ern border ; and the reader will not be led far astray in taking 
it as a hypothetical sketch of the geography of the Hyksos, 
the far-famed invaders of Egypt. 3 It should not be difficult to 
detect the nationality of the Hyksos, for Manetlio and Herod¬ 
otus mention Phoenician and Philistian Shepherds, and after 
the taking of Avaris the Egyptian king marches on Simeon 4 
against Sharuhen. 5 « 

Semaun and Loi, brothers ; instruments of violence their swords.—Gen. 
xlix. 5. 


The orientals have been shrewd politicians if poor histori¬ 
ans, and the Book of Genesis keeps political relations 6 always 
in sight from the vale of Hebron and the Beni Kheth (Heth) 
to the Mesopotamian Plain or the Beni Kadm in the east, to 
the Rhaubeni (Reuben) and the Agubeni to the south, or the 
Saracens from the Hauran to Beer Sabat and the Delta of 

1 bemedbar. 

2 land of Aur (the East, Arar, Aurora); like Tunep (land of Aton, Atunis, 
Adonis). So, Sadaph has Sad “fire ” for its root, the Persian-Arabic Sada “a flaming 
fire.”—Johnson, Persian-Arabic Diet. p. 690. Sad-ad (Shedad the Adite) seems to come 
from this same root. Ad may be compared, in name, with Ata and the Arab God TA. 

3 Some Egyptian deities have come from the Phoenicians.—Movers, I. 42. Especi¬ 
ally such as have Semite names. 

4 Gen. xlix. 5. 

6 Wiedemann, Agypt. Gesch., 307; Joshua, xix. 6. The name resembles Sarachen, 
Saracen. 

6 Compare Gen. xxvi. 1, 17, 20, 22. Rehoboth was in the Nahren district, close by 
the Geraritica.—Gen. xxvi. 22. The whole region from Tyre down was Sethite, fire- 
worshippers. 


5 


66 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Egypt. Rebecca, who represents the eastern parts towards 
Mesopotamia, is adroitly described as in no way satisfied that 
her son should take a wife from among the daughters of the 
Khatti at Khebron (Hetliite), and relations are maintained 
with her connections further east. 1 Ezekiel, xxx. 5, in the Syriac 
and Hebrew copies, is evidently fully posted on the mixed 
tribes of Northern Arabia 2 and is confirmed in Genesis, 10th, 
22nd, 25th, and 36th chapters. Sarach covers the whole Sara¬ 
cen country, assisted by Hagar and the Hagarenes, 3 while 
Jeremiah xxx. 18, speaks of Jacob’s tents. 

How good are thy tents, O Iaqob! 

Thine abodes, Israel!—Numbers, xxiv. 5. 


Iaqob is here credited with tents , the mode of dwelling in 
the Desert; but Israel with habitations. Genesis, xlix. 27, re¬ 
ports Beni Amen (Benjamin) as Arabs given to robbery and 
dividing the spoil. The frequent migrations or changes of 
locality by the tented Arabs would mix them up so as to leave 
their place of abode at a given moment somewhat uncertain. 

In 2 Kings, xxii. 12, 14, the earliest Hebrew text, without 
‘points,’ gave the name Achabor. Josephus, Wars, II. xx. 6, 
mentions the ‘Achabara’ or Achabari. Khebron (Chebron, 
Hebron) could have been Chabara; and Azin Gabar (which 
was at Ailut on the Gulf of Akabah) may have been Gabara 
(compare Numbers, xxxiii. 35 ; 1 Kings, ix. 26). Between 
these two places, in almost a straight line, lay Mount Saphar 
(Numbers, xxxiii. 23, 24) west of Petra. 4 Mount Saphar is sup¬ 
posed to be identical with Mt. Mukra. Bal Khanan ben 
Achabor ruled as Arab sheik not far from Rechaboth of the 
Besor. 5 6 Then we have, on Jenks’ Map, Bethagabris or Bato- 
gabra, not far from the River Escol and Remmon (Reman) a 
place that may have supplied the Egyptians with the name 


1 Gen. xxvii. 46; xxviii. 1-5, 10. 

2 The Egyptian Amu ; the Hebrew Amim : from am, people. 

3 Gen. xxi. 20 says plainly that the Beni Hagar were Ishmaelite archers. With what 
unanimity the Christian writers speak of the worship of Venus in Arabia.—Osiander, 
in D. M. G. vii. 498. 

4 See Hall, Mt. Seir, p. 97. See the name Hasabaarim.—Joshua, vii. 5. Compare 

Aasaphara. 

6 Genesis, xxxvi. 37-39. Garar, Charmah, Kharadah, Karioth, Karkaa, Karek, 
and Khareb (Horeb), Achor seem to have prescribed the name Kharu for this lower 
country, extending from the Gerar to Mount Hor. 


ABRAHAM , AUB, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


67 


‘ Remanen.’ Aachabaara is then related to Acliabor, which 
can as well in Hebrew Euliemerism have been a place or tribe, 
as a man’s name. 1 

The Arabs had a most ancient idol Hliebar 2 (read Chebar). 
Take the Hebrew word Kabir and think how many centuries it 
has been in existence—from before Akaron and Aakabaron (Klie- 
bron, Hebron) were—and we shall have to identify Iaqab with 
the Khati, the Aakabara, of Kabaron (Kebron, Khebron), and 
Asaf (Sev, Ioseph) with the Aasaphara of the City Saphir and not 
of Mt. Saphar; for Asaf was a Syrian God, in the form of man 
and placed on Mt. Safa. 3 It must, however, be admitted that 
Yauk was adored in Arabia in the form of a horse (the Solar 
Mithra symbol), and that he must have been euhemerised is 
evident from Univ. Hist. vol. 18. p. 384. 4 If now we add to 
the name of Yauk the Hebrew word Ab (meaning* father) we 
shall have Yaukab, father Iaqab; for Iach means “ life ” in 
Hebrew; and as Iach was pronounced Yauk, and the Arabs 
adored Dionysus Urotal, Yaukab (Iachoh, Iachab) stands a 
chance of being confounded with Dionysus-Iachos. “ More 
than two centuries before the date assigned by Egyptologists 
to the Exodus the great Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III. 
inscribed upon the walls of the temple of Karnak the names 
of the cities captured by him in Palestine. Among them are 
Yaqab-el, “ Jacob the God,” and Iseph-el, “ Joseph the God.” 5 
Unfortunately for Mr. Sayce’s theory, Thothmes did engrave 
the words Aaaqbaar and Aasaphaar, as one can learn from the 
hieroglyphs given in Mr. Groff’s article in Revue egyptolo- 
gique, quatrieme annee, p. 97, where he prints the hieroglyphs 
very distinctly. The Aaakbaar are the Mighty (akbar = great), 
the Aasaphara are the denizens of Saphir; that is all. Prof. 
W. Robertson Smith had no faith in the reading Iaqabel and 
Iasaphe! (Isepliel), for he observes that if the Hebrews were 
in arms against Egypt 200 years before the Exodus the whole 

1 Cabar Iaqab ought to be as good a formation as “ Cabar Zio” in the Codex 
Nasaraeus, III. 61. The ‘ Sons of Gaber ’ (a district) are mentioned in 2nd Esdras, ii. 
20, 22-25. We find Khabar in 1 Chron. viii. 17. Aa in Egyptian meant ‘ mighty,’ like 
Cabar in Semitic. Compare the Egyptian names, Aa-kheper-ka, Aakhepru-ra, Set-aa- 
peh-ti, Ra-aakheper-ka-senebu, Aakheper-kara, Aakheper-en-ra. 

2 Univ. Hist, xviii. p. 385. 

3 ibid. p. 387. Isaiah, xxxvi. 22, has the name ben Asaf. 

4 Quotes Poc. in not. ad spec. hist. Arab. pp. 94, 101, 338, 389, 390. 

5 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 51. Acbala, a village in Galilee, near Safed, pos¬ 
sibly retains the name Aqabel, Gebal, or Keb. 


68 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


story in Exodus i. rests on extremely defective information and 
has little historical value ; and further, that according' to this 
identification (of these two names) there were tribes of Jacob 
and Joseph settled in Palestine 200 years before the Exodus. 
If these are the Biblical Jacob and Joseph it will be hardly 
possible to resist the conclusion of E. Meyer (in Stade’s Zeit- 
schrift fur 1866), that the sons of Jacob never were in Egypt, 
and that the name of Jacob originally belonged to a Palestinian 
tribe, one of many out of which the later nation of Israel was 
formed. 1 Ezekiel, i. 1, gives us the word Kabar, and obviously 
in the meaning “ great.” 

Israel dwelt in Satim, 2 among the Sadim (Sodom) on the 
borders of Moab by the Midianites. Set was the fire-god in 
Kanaan, 3 and like Asar, was a Phoenician - Egyptian deity. 
The Hebrews made use of Seth 4 as a great ancestor. The 
Asar became Asara, or Ashera, in the feminine productive 
power. Osiris in the male form : so that the two forms are to 
be found among the Adon-worshippers, the Ghebers of Canaan. 
But the word Adan could be in the Phoenician letters easily 
read as Eden and Adin ; and Adonis-gardens were in existence 
throughout the East; so that it was an easy transition always 
from such a conception to the idea of an original paradise or 
Garden of the East. The location of this primal source is indi¬ 
cated as in the east , and was not very closely limited except 
that it was sometimes stated to be in the sides of the north. 5 
The word Adana is the name of a place well to the north in 
Asia Minor, and four rivers, the Phasis, Arasses, Euphrates and 
Tigris in Armenia, were thought to have their headwaters near 
together. But coming down to the south we have the Adonis 
worship in the Lebanon (as too at Byblos) and the tribe of 
Dan in the Lebanon. Then we have Ton ach, Hxmeph, and Dan 
again, further south; and Adana still lower down, nearly 
to the lower part of the Dead Sea. Ton ach is Aton or Adon 
with a termination of locality, while Tuneph is the Egyptian 


1 W. R. Smith, in Contemporary Rev. October, 1887, p. 502. 

2 Septuagint, Sattein ; Hebrew Satim : the Sati or Sethites.—See Numbers, 
xxv. 1. 

3 Joshua, vii. 20, Akan, a man’s name. 

4 Sat (Set) was a Power of the Sun.—Numbers, xxvi. 4. Sed means (Shedim) demon. 
Th and t are merely different ways of pronouncing one Semitic letter. So s and sh 

denote what was, at first, one sibilant. 

5 Isaiah, xiv. 13 ; Ezekiel, xxviii. 13. 


ABRAHAMAUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


69 


name for a district, or place, to the north of Kadesh, which, 
apparently, is mentioned in the Hebrew Joshua, xv. 49, as 
DANah. Tunis and Tun^A are good formations from the name 
Don (Adunai); and the Egyptian d is and has usually been 
written by t. 1 So too was the name Sad or Sed. It was 
as it looks to be, the name of the Canaanite Firegod of the 
Phoenician Sea, and the worshippers of Sad, Sed, Set, or Seth 
seem to have been known in Egypt at an early period as the 
Setou or Sheto. 2 Here, then, we have the early status of the 
Palestine Ghebers at Ghebron and elsewhere as Sethites or the 
Children of Seth in the lands of the Dionysus-Adonis wor¬ 
shippers, extending themselves from Byblus down to" Mem¬ 
phis in Egypt. Here we have the Adanites all the way down 
to the waters of Egypt with their Adanite names dotting the 
land of the Hebrews. When the Lebanon Yenus Ourania (the 
Image of jealousy 3 ) was represented lying downcast, leaning 
on her hand, and her mantle drawn up partly over her head in 
the portico of the Hebrew Temple at Jerusalem, 4 we should 
expect the Adonis worship with the Yenus.—Ezekiel, viii. 14. 
But the later Levitical Law forbade Groves near Iahoh’s tem¬ 
ple 5 and the Jews made a law against the Arab worship of 
planets and stars. 6 ‘The assistants of II who is Kronos 
(Saturn, Sol) were called Eloeim ; 5 Mase was a Loi, 7 therefore 
Mase was an assistant to Saturn-Kronos, who is El. 

In Hebrew, Iachi means “ he lives.”—Deuteronomy, iv. 33. 
In Greek, Iacche means God of life.—So Achiah and Iach 
(the Arab God Iauk the Solar Fire).—Exodus, iii. 14. Achah 
means ‘ to burn.’ Ach = a heater, a fire pot. The ideas, fire 
and life, interchanged in Arabia.—Job, xviii. 5. Take then the 
Arab God, Iauk. The root is Ach, which, here, is written Uk. 
Whence did Josephus-Manetho obtain the word Hukousos 

1 Compare the name Atunis (for Adonis) in Etruscan. Adon in Semitic means 
the Lord, the Sun-god. 

2 Kenrick, Egypt, II. 234, 243; F. Chabas, Papyr. Magique Harris, pp. 48, 50, 234. 
The name of Seti I. is to be compared with the Sati, the Setites, and with Set the deity 
of a Philistine race. 

3 Iakfxbel and Kubele may be considered akin to Adon and Venus or Isis in Phoe¬ 
nicia, the Mighty Mother. 

4 Ezekiel, viii. 3, 5, 14; Gazette Archeologique, 1875, plate 20. The Lebanon 

Venus. 

6 Deut. xvi. 21. 

6 Deut. xvii. 3, 5. Zeitschrift D. M. G. III. 2C8. 

7 Exodus, ii. 1. 


70 


THE GHEBERS OF IIEBRON. 


(Ukousos) except from Kusli?—Gen. x. 6, 7. Judges, i. 31 
gives us Ako and Akaz-ib. By analogy, A preceded in all 
these names, Acli, Iach, Iauk, etc. Hence we assume a word 
Acliaz or Akush, or Akos = Koze. The words Akhu (light), 
Kho (a native of Akko), Khuh (to live) and Kuh (to live) seem 
related to the root ach or ku fire and life (of the Sun, Diony- 
sus-Iacchos). We know not whether the real name was Hukou- 
sos, or whether the real name was thus disguised or hidden by 
Josephus or Manetho. If, owing to communication by sea, we 
might expect to find Phoenicians in the Delta of Egypt at an 
early period the Kara of the shores near Akaron (Ekron) or 
the Sosim of Arabia could arrive at the Nile quite as soon. 
Zeus Kasius would seem to have been Jupiter Pluvius. At 
any rate, the letters Kas agree with Koz in the sound of the 
name of the Cushite deity Koze. Kush and Kanaan were sons 
of Cham (Kerne, Egypt).—Gen. x. The Hukous may have been 
Arabs, Kara, or Canaanites. 

We find as a Gheber the name Aehaz (2 Chr. xxviii. 25) in 
the Myrothecium, II. p. 682 of Scacci ; also in 2 Kings, xvi. 2, 
3, 19. Achas apk a district (Josh. xi. 1), Achasib (xix. 29), 
names containing the root of the word Ach or Iacchos (God of 
Life, Iachi), Achas (Achaz), king in Jerusalem b.c. 743-727 ex¬ 
hibit, like the Hebrew town Iachaz and the name Iachoh (or 
Ialioh), the name of the Lifegod Iacchos at an early period in 
Arabia, Auda, Canaan. At what period was the change of 
name from Iacchoh to lahoh ? When the Pentateuch was 
written, that is, probably as late as the Book of Daniel in the 
2nd century b.c. There was no motive to make such an effort 
until after Audah or Iaudali regained its independence of Sy¬ 
ria. The Bible was the New Constitution of the priesthood 
that was to rule the nation in the time of the Maccabees. 
The Bible describes the previous status under the dualist faith 
during the reigns of the Kings. It was Iacchos and Asherali, 
Adamatos and Aisah, Adonis-Iaqab and Isis, Brahma and Sar- 
achena, Abrahm and Sarach. Cosiba, like Achasib contains 
the names of life and fire Ach and Iach. One of the ways of 
altering the names was to soften the ch to h; as in Iahaz. 
Koze, the Arab raingod, resembles Iachos or Iachoz, and Ku- 
zah the Arab Cloudgod. Dionysus is the raingod nursed by 
the rain nymphs, the Apsaras or Hyades.—Preller, I. 415. On 
the Seventh day of the Succoth, according to the Rabbins, God 


ABRAHAM , AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 71 

determines how much it must rain in that year.—Hospinianus, 
Fest. Jud. I. 53. 

In the rains of latter autumn seeing Arkturus I will proclaim Glad Tidings, 1 
For then thirsty earth is married to Zeus’s rain.—Nonnus, xlii. 291, 292. 


Apion, Chaeremon and others reproached the Jews with 
false statements in their account of their history, and certainly 
with truth, according to the then known works of a Hekataeus, 
Hermippus, Malchus, Eupolemus, Artapanus, Josephus, which 
in.part were full of absurd fabrications and boastings. Owing 
to the high opinion that the Jews had propagated of their 
wisdom, of the high antiquity and preeminence of their peo¬ 
ple, of their sacred books &c. in such writings, Philo Her- 
renius was now induced to confirm the section on the Jewish 
history hi Sanchoniathon with a writer who was an authority, 
who owing to his antiquity and credit could make good a 
claim to credibility equal to that of the sacred scriptures of 
the Jews. The passage so important for the illusory charac¬ 
ter of his Sanchoniathon is in Porphyry as follows : ‘ Sanchou- 
niathon of Beirut relates Jewish affairs most truly and what 
agrees most with the places and their names, having received 
the memoranda from Hierombal the priest of God the Ieuo 
(Hebrew Ieuah) who having, dedicated the history to Abibal 
the king of the Beirutians was received by him and those that 
according to him were examiners of the truth. And the times 
of these fell even prior to the Trojan times and come near 
those of Moses as the successors of the Phoenician kings de¬ 
clare. And Sanchouniathon collecting and composing truth¬ 
fully in the Phoenician language the entire ancient history 
from the memoranda in the city and the records in the tem¬ 
ples was born in the time of Semiramis the Assyrian Queen, 
who is recorded to have lived before the Trojan events or in 
those very times.’ We see as well from this passage, which is 
taken from a scripture of Porphyry against the Christian relig¬ 
ion, as from the preceding words of Eusebius which contain a 
censure upon Porphyry, that Sanchouniathon is put up by 
Porphyry at the expense of the Biblical accounts and his trust¬ 
worthiness extolled in contrast with that of the Old Testa¬ 
ment. Sanchoniathon, according to Porphyry has given a 

i We find Dionysus SotSr, Saviour.—Gerhard, pp. 481, 490. 


72 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


very true account of the Jewish history, for first in him there 
is the greatest conformity with the names and places, with 
those, namely, which also occur in the Old Testament; second, 
Sanchoniathon has his accounts concerning the Jewish people 
from a Jewish priest of Jehova, the Hierombal, who had dedi¬ 
cated his history of the Jews to king Abibal of Beirut, which 
has been examined and found trustworthy by him. The period 
both of Abibal and Hierombal is little later than the time when 
the writings of Moses were made and is still prior to the Trojan 
War. As to the Sanchoniathon, he has used the best sources 
and is a primitively ancient witness in the time of Semiramis 
whether she lived before or after the Trojan War. Movers 
holds that Philo Herennius made up this story in order to 
have for his disfigurements of the Jewish history a just as an¬ 
cient and credible sponsor. Porphyry indicates in the quoted 
passage plainly and positively enough a polemic of Sanchoni¬ 
athon against the Old Testament history; for when he, the 
opponent of Jews and Christians, praises Sanchoniathon he 
means that not in things also does Sanchoniathon agree with 
the accounts given in the Old Testament. Why this urgent 
recommendation of Sanchoniathon ? Movers sees in the refer¬ 
ence to Hierombal a suggestion that Porphyry, in a lost script¬ 
ure, has sought to cast suspicion upon the Pentateuch, and 
that this writing contained legends of the Phoenicians con¬ 
cerning the origin of the Hebrews, as follows : Kronos, there¬ 
fore, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, king of the country, and 
afterwards after the end of his life sanctified into the star of 
Kronos, etc. In this myth what is Phoenician and what is Is¬ 
raelite are mixed up together, and the intent is to exhibit the 
descent of the Hebrews in the usual way from Saturn, who was 
regarded by the ancients as the Israelite Abrahm, through ety¬ 
mological and historical combinations as they are current 
among the people. The oldest traditions of the Hebrews were 
also preserved among the Phoenicians and the other peoples 
of the same race. 1 Abrahm and Israel were known to be names 
of Saturn which Euhemerism declared to be names of men, 
on the ground that the Gods were deceased men. 

When once the doctrine of Euhemerus 2 was admitted (that 

1 Movers, 1.128-130. 

2 Menes and Athothis are Euhemerised deities (MSn and Thoth the Moongod) in the 
1st dynasty of Kings in Egypt.—Compare Sanchoniathon’s Thoth and Palmer, Egyp- 


ABRAHAM , AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 73 


‘ tlie Gods ’ had formerly been men, living on the e,arth until 
their decease) it disposed effectually of the various Sungods 
and other prominent Deities, names, and impersonations, so 
as logically (but not in fact) to clear a space for Monotheism by 
removing the other Gods. If from some twenty of these you 
subtract twenty by regarding them as deceased men you remove 
what stands in the way of the Monotheist idea. Or if one goes 
further and assumes that each Arab tribe had an Ancestor 1 
whose name was the name of the tribe, derived from its prim¬ 
itive founder, we have such an argument as Genesis (chapters 
xxv. and xxxvi.) presents in relation to Nabioth, Admah, Adu- 
ma, Ismael (Shemael, Samael), Laban (Sin), Hanocli (Enoch), 
Keturah (Kuthereia), Hagar, Midian, Massa, Kedar, Teman, 
Itur (Ietur), Kadmah, etc. The Gods had once been men, and 
the tribes bore names of deceased chieftains. Hence a de¬ 
scription of these patriarchs could not well be gainsaid, for 
the opponent of scripture would be put to the work of proving 
a negative in every instance. As the doctrine of Euhemerus 
was late, it marks a period; and the scriptures of the Baby¬ 
lonians, Persians, Egyptians and Hebrews have apparently 
come down to us in the latest shape that they assumed. 2 There 
was only one way of replying to Euhemerism ; that was to 
render it ridiculous in the way that Philo Herennius of Byblus 
adopted. In the Bible, El is a name of the Hebrew God. 

Movers held that the Highest God of all the Semites, El, was 
originally the same as the one worshipped by the Israelites. 3 
The Levite Narrator no longer wished to know that his fore¬ 
fathers knew no difference between the form of offering and 
the rituals to Bal and Jehovah.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol. ii, 249. 4 

Saturn-Kronos among the Phoenicians and Syrians was 
Highest God and Highest Planet. But he was also regarded 

tian Chron. I. 321. Seb, the Egyptian Saturn, appears in the name of the Hebrew city 
Seba/i.—Gen. xxvi. 83. If we trace Osiris to Syria, why not Seb also? 

1 The city Salem had king Salamah, the son of Daud (Taut, God of Wisdom). 
Asah (Gen. ii. 23) strongly resembles the Egyptian name Aso, the Edom name Asau, 
and Saua.—Gen. xiv. 17. Adam is very like the name of the city Adama.—Gen. xiv. 
2; Joshua, xix. 36. With Atamu, Tamus, Thamus, Thammuz, compare the Arab 
tribal name Thamud, Thamudeni. 

2 Compare Leviticus, xxvi. 33, Deuteronomy, xxviii. 25, 37, 52, 57. Euhemerism 
dates (if we have not forgotten) about b.c. 800. 

3 Movers, I. 314, 316. He translates Azar-el ‘the fire of Saturn.’—ibid. 340. He 
also mentions the Herakles-Saturn.—Movers, 267. 

^ Movers, I. 254, 255, 256, 312 ff. 


74 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


as Time itself, the eternal Chronos that was before all things. 1 
So the Ancient of days.—Daniel, vii. 13. The Chthonian 
Hermes has all the appearance of Saturn’s Power. Macrobius, 
I. xix. 7, says that Hermes is the Sun. Hobal is the written 
name of Saturn; yet lia-bal (or hobal) is the name (1 Kings, 
xviii. 22) of Bel (with whom Abel, Apellon, and Apollo may be 
compared). How then is it that Habal can be Bal, Bel, or 
Apollo, but that Hobal is Saturn ? The reason is that “ Bel 
dicitur quadam sacrorum ratione et Saturnus et Sol.”—Ser- 
vius, ad Aeneid, I. 642. Bel is called, by a certain doctrine of 
the rites (or the priests) both Saturn and Sol. He dies or 
sleeps in winter, in spring he renews his vigor, like Horns, 
Apollo, Habol. “ Helios (the Sun) whom they call by the ap¬ 
pellation Dionysus ” 2 is the Winter Sun, Dionysus, Saturn. 
Even Set, in Egypt, seems to have got into the Underworld. 
With Apollo’s temple compare Beth Shems, the Sun-temple.— 
1 Samuel, vi. 12. And the Highplace where Samuel officiated. 
—1 Sam. ix. 12,14,19, 27. Compare the priest’s name Shemiah 
or Shemaiah.—1 Kings, xii. 22; 2 Chronicles, xi. 2. The Chal¬ 
dean Bel was Saturn (Dionysus) in winter, Apollo in spring. 3 
Dionysus and Apollo are one and the same. 4 —Macrobius, X. 
xviii. 1. The Powers manifested in the sun varied with the 
season. The lion is sacred to the sun, 5 the sun is the emblem 
of the Logos, 6 and the Logos was called Hermes. 7 The lion 
was worshipped as God.—Ezekiel, xli. 18,19 ; Exodus, xxvii. 31. 8 
That the Oldest Bel was a Sun-god, and exclusively the Solar 
God of the Semites seems absolutely probable ; and this con¬ 
clusion is strengthened by recent remarks by George Bertin, 
as follows: “Like other Assyriologists, I took up the sub- 

1 Movers, 256, 261-263 ff. On the Babylonian cylinders he carries the ring of 
eternity.—Movers, 264. The Sidonians placed Time (Chronos) first before all.—Mo¬ 
vers, 278. He is the ever like to himself.—Movers, 95. Time without beginning.— 
Movers, 281. 

‘ 2 Macrobius, I. xviii. 18. 

8 Herodotus mentions Apollo’s supposed anger at the interment of a corpse within 
his sacred isle. Serach, Asiris or Israel (El, Hael, Aelios, Helios) rises out of Dark¬ 
ness. 

4 Saturn’s day (dies Saturni, Saturno die) was Saturday, the Sabbath of the Jews. 
Hence they worshipped Saturn, on Saturday ; or their forefathers did. We regard Set 
as Saturn. 

6 Nork, Real-Worterb. III. 178. 

6 Philo, Dreams, 15, 16. 

7 de Iside, 54. Hippolytus, I. 118. 

8 Porphyry, de Abst. iv. p. 54. ed. 1548. Plorentiae. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE I AUDI OB*'ARAB A. 75 


ject with a firm belief in the ancient and world-famed astro¬ 
nomical knowledge of the Chaldaeans. But, after examining 
a great many texts of all periods, I have been compelled to 
arrive at the conclusion that the Babylonians never had any 
idea of the celestial movements, but merely registered the phe¬ 
nomena in the sky together with the events occurring at the 
same time on the earth, in the belief that the same phenomena 
would be always accompanied by the same events.” —G. Ber- 
tin, in £ Academy,’ March 26, 1887, p. 223. Movers mentions 
Saturn-Moloch, and tells how in Egypt Saturn became Typhon. 1 
“ Saturn’s Unlucky Star.” 

Ab is the month nearly corresponding to July, Tammuz 
(Adonis) is the preceding month ; when Adonis dies. Abime- 
lecli is King of Ab (Leo is the Zodiacal sign) who carries 
Proserpina (the Moon-goddess) off at about this time, just as 
Proserpina carried away to Aidoneus (Hades) the Sun-god 
Adonis-Tamus in June. Sahra is the Moon; and St. Jerome 
tells us to read an n an a : we thus get Sarah Luna. After the 
summer solstice the Year-god comes from the Northern to the 
Southern hemisphere to the land of ‘repetition (Garar) and 
ravishment or carrying off (Garar)’ in the annual revolution of 
the heavens,—the dark region of Pluto. Moreover Ariel, Arab, 
Oreb, Urpha have fire (ar, ur-o) as the foundation of these 
names, and Abrahm is represented as a Gheber. Ishmael with 
his herds resembles Shemal (Apollo, with cattle) the Sabian 
Sungod. It was usual with the Old Arabians to regard Saturn 
and Abram as their progenitor, and while looking upon Saturn 
as their father they claimed Sarach (Asarah, Asherah Yenus) as 
their Mighty Mother, for the Moon is the Mother of the 
kosmos, and the poet wrote that “ all things are born of Saturn 
and Yenus.” Ab meant father, Ab-ram (see Abi-ram in Deu- 
teron. xi. 6) meant father on high, ram (high), Bara 2 meant 
Creator, and Abrahm, the Creator of the people (am = people), 
Brahma. The Moon was the place of Osiris and Isis (some¬ 
what as the Babylonian Sin). Abrahm was, then, the father of 
the Arabs and Hebrews. The Hebrews came from Hebron, 
commonly known as Araba, or Kiriath Araba, the “Arabian 
city.” It was a holy place, because Abrahm and Ashera 

1 Movers, I. 308, 309. Typhon is Set, and becomes, like Saturn, the tenant of 
gloom beneath the earth. —Iliad, xiv. 203. 

2 Bar the shining; Abar, the Sun. See Bara Gen. xiv. 2. Abaris. 


76 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(Venus, Sarach) the Mother of the Saracens were buried there. 
In the Scribal period of the Jews, say, about the second cen¬ 
tury before our era or later, it suited the views of the Scribes 
of the Jewish temple to bring- the national literature to book, 1 
and they started with a large reference to their forefathers, 
Abrahm as the parent of the Islimaelites, Iaqab as one of the 
pastoral ancestors, and the Rhaabeni (Rauben) as another. 
The Agubeni and Rhaabeni were Arab tribes living in North 
Arabia, while Gabah was a city to the north-west, nearer to the 
Jews, being west of Mt. Hor. Gaba or Geba appears as a city’s 
name in the tribe of the Beni Amen (Beniamin. Iamin.—Num¬ 
bers, xxv. 12), the High place Gabaon (Gibeon), and very fre¬ 
quently in Palestine, so that when Iaqab went prospecting in 
Palestine and Arabia he dropped his name around tolerably 
often. Thus Ezekiel gives us “ Kub,” in remembrance of the 
Agub-eni, in Arabia. Ieudah (Judah) is Audah, an Arab tribe 
and district, Mt. Khor (Hor) is nearly east of the land of the 
Kharu, the Nabatheans around Petra are Nabioth, the Rhaa¬ 
beni Reuben, Gad the Gadarenes, Asar the people of the 
Tyrian district (Sarra, Aser, = Tyre), Dan (Aden) Eden in the 
Lebanon, named from the Lebanon Adon, Ephraim the district 
Apherema in Samaria, Manasah the tribe of Mt. Carmel an 
elevated tract (nasa = elevated, M-nasa the same), Esau the 
town Saue (compare Aso, Asu, the Devil, Evil Spirit), Lotan the 
tribe of Lot, Hagar the Hagarene tribe, and Ishmael the Shem- 
al worshippers ; all Arabs adoring Shemal (Shem 2 the Sun). 

There was an ancient tradition that the Shepherds of Kush 
had gone down into Egypt; but the Arabs, being the Children 
of Abrahm, descended into Egypt, so that, by not too lively a 
figure of speech, Abrahm himself may be said to have gone to 
Egypt. But Abrahm’s descendants lived, some of them, at or 
near Hebron, and some tarried in Garar (Kliarar = to burn up ; 
Khares = Sol. Gerar, the land of the Kharu-Peleti, or Philis- 
tians), therefore they went to Egypt, as one might suppose of 
the Kara 3 fire worshippers. 

Assuming then that Philo’s Sanchoniathon is a piece of 
irony, a satire upon the prevailing Euliemerism, as it evidently 
is, there is nothing to prevent the introduction into such a 

1 Biblion, Bible. 

2 Samael is the Death angel. —Eisenmenger, I. 855. 

3 See Korah and Korach.—Numbers, xxvi. 0, 10. 


ABRAHAM, AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 77 

pamplilet of matter drawn from Phoenician Mythology and 
current hearsay. Thus Isiris is qualified Inventor of the three 
letters, 1 and Israel proclaimed as Saturn, El being the name of 
Bel Saturn, Asar or Isar being connected immediately with 
Asar (Osiris) and Azar (Mars), the God of Spring, fire, and 
war. The name Israel was doubtless early connected with the 
story of Esau (Asu, Spirit), who among the Phoenicians was 
Mars-Uso, 2 as Set was the Devil in Egypt, the Adversary. 
That this entire combination, elaborated, is brought about 
with the introduction of peculiar Hebrew and even genuine 
Phoenician views we would as little deny as that it certainly 
could not first be undertaken if the Jews were already a people 
so hated by their neighbors ; in that case certainly no one would 
have done them the honor of bringing their ancestors into so 
close connection with the sacred legend. 3 As Porphyry boasts, 
the names Israel, Ieud, Anobret agree in both; and the Isra¬ 
elite and Phoenician legends of Abrahm and Kronos in refer¬ 
ence to the sacrifice of the ‘ Only begotten/ or in the traditions 
of Asu (Esau) and Israel or Uso and Israel, touch one another 
nearly. 4 The unrevealed first cause (das unoffenbarte Urwesen) 
or the Old Bel reproduces himself in the Second, who is like 
Him, according to the passages quoted, both in name and idea. 
Bel the Younger was regarded as the Creator, 5 the Primitive 
Being who in the primitive time gave his Law and was the 
first King among the Semites, as a Manifestation of the Older, 
and consequently his Son. 6 The Son of Kronos was named 
Kronos. 7 The Karthaginian Baal-Herakles is called Son of 
Saturn. 8 The idea of the Babylonian Father and Son is by no 
means as late as many might suppose. 9 The Lion of Mithra 

1 law. See Movers, I. 539, 547, 550. Orelli, Sanchon., 40. 

2 Compare the Egyptian Asu, a female conspirator with Typhon against Osiris, 
and the reverse of the Hebrew Asa (Gen. ii. 23), the Egyptian Isis. 

3 Movers, I. 131, 132. 

4 ibid. 132. 

6 Colossians, i. 15, 16. 

6 Movers, 267. Hesiod’s Kronos comes forward in a way that plainly marks him 
as the Oriental Saturn.—Movers, 273. 

7 Orelli, Sanchoniathon, p. 32. 

8 Movers, I. 267. 

9 ibid. 267. Kronos (Saturn) was called El by the Phoenicians and Syrians.— 
Orelli, Sanchon. Fragmenta, p. 26. El is the Hebrew name for God ; at least, El is 
so translated.—Servius, ad Aeneid, i. 642. Movers, 185. Kronos (Saturn) had his 
Father’s name.—Orelli, p. 32. Here again we have the Father and Son, as in Babylon. 


78 


THE GITEBERS OF HEBRON. 


is the symbol of Herakles and is the Lion of Judah (Rev. v. 5), 
just as the Lion is the Sun (Mithra) in leo, and the Lamb is 
the Sun’s sign in Aries. Now in Rev. i. 13, 16, we have Mithra 
as the Christos (the Sun and Son) in the centre of the Seven 
Planets. 

The reader will be led on to the consideration of the Mithra- 
religion in Palestine 1 and Egypt, from the mythology of 
Asar, Serach, 2 Israel, to the mythology of Isiris, Osiris, Israel, 
to the philosophy of Saturn in the East, the philosophy of 
light and darkness, and to the Dualism of the Asrielites (Isra¬ 
elites) in Syria. Attention is drawn to the background of the 
Israelite picture, the altars of Ariel in Moab and of Sada (the 
living flame of Moloch) in Philistia, to the ‘Wanderers from 
place to place,’ the zuz or Zuzim. 3 The Ghebers 4 of Kliebron 5 
become the Hebers (Hebraioi) of Hebron, the home of Iakoub 
and the Khatti (the Beni Heth), Set 6 and the Sethites get 
connected with the Egyptian Set by an Abrahamic migration 
of the Sosim into Egypt, while in Osirian rites the Rising 
(serach), the Resurrection, of Asar from the realm of Darkness 
is taught. The lion was Mithra’s emblem and he as Kurios was 

1 With the lion-symbol of Herakles, compare the same symbol of Mithra, of Izdu- 
bar, of Judah’s Lion, and the lion of Phoenicia and Egypt. Sachal was u leo ” in He¬ 
brew, and Suhel, Saturn’s name, in Arabic. The Lion is the Sun’s house.—Porphyry, 
deantro, xxii. The priests of Mithra were called leones.—Tertullian, adv. Mark, i. 13. 
Asada was the Messenger of Saturn.—Chwolsohn, Altbab. Lit. 136, 156. 

2 Compare Assarac ; and Assarakus in Homer. The Mythology of the Sunrise.— 
Compare the Hebrew word sahal in Goldzieher, Mythology of the Hebrews, 93. So 
too sahar, zahar, sarach, to shine, be clear, become manifest. Serach in Hebrew 
means the Rise of the Sun.—Compare Sarg-on’s name. The name of the daughter of 
Asar is Sarach.—Numbers, xxvi. 46. The vale of Soraq, whence the Syrians may have 
started to invade the Delta.—Judges, xvi. 4. 

3 Goldziher, p. 53. 

4 Rev. G. V. Garland, ‘Genesis,’ p. 280, Oxford and Cambridge, 1878, writes 
“ Ghebron in the earth of Canaan.” 

5 Xe/3pwi/.—1 Chronicles, xi. 3, 23; ii. 43. Xa/3c6p.—1 Chron. v. 26. Xa0ep.—vii. 31, 
32. Ben Geber.—1 Kings, iv. 13. Geber and the land Kheper.—ibid. iv. 10, 19. Khe- 
bar.—Judges, v. 24. Gabriel presides over fire and the ripening of the fruits.—Eisen- 
menger, Entdektes Judenthum, n. 378, 379. Talmud, tr. Sanhedrin, fol. 95. col. 2. 
This is the Sun’s province. The Sun (Saturn) was the Life-god, Iach, the Gabar or 
Cabar, Cheper, Sol Creator, Iauk-ab, Jacob. And Gabriel is Herakles King of fire. 

6 Compare the name Satnah or Set-an-a, Gen. xxvi. 21. Gen. xxvi. 6, 18, show 
this place to have been in the Sethite or Philistian country, whence the God Set first 
got into Egypt from Syria. Also Set-im (or Satim),—Numbers, xxv. 1. Setim would 
mean Sethite or City of Set.—Asad means lion, the sign Leo and Hermes. The Arab 

tribe Asad worshipped Hermes.—Chwolsohn, II. 404. Asadoth is city of Asad._ 

Joshua, xiii. 20. 


ABRAHAM , AUD, AND THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 


79 


surrounded by the seven planets (Sabaotli), the Lord Sabaotli. 
—Justin, Dial., p. 76. Hence he was, like Saturn, God of 
Time and eternity, Euler of the planets, and therefore Seth- 
Hermes. Mithra is the Fire of the Intelligible Sun, and is the 
Chaldean Logos (Word 1 ). The Sabians derived their religion 
from Seth. 2 3 Khebron was a city of the fire worshippers 8 of 
Sada, Seth, and El Sadi. 4 

As in certain amusements persons were expected to guess 
a word or a story from slight indications half concealed in the 
conversation 5 the Semitic author of Genesis has left scarcely 
any traces by which to connect his narrative with the Mys¬ 
teries ; and yet this method has been selected to introduce the 
readers of scripture to the history of the 4 Chosen People.’ 
The number 7 of the years of Jacob’s wooing (a fourth of a 
lunation) and the Egyptian Mourning are all that we have 
given us to connect the Lover with Adonis, Osiris, Cybele and 
Luna. 6 The Bible is the utterance of a period of law and 
wide-spread civilisation in the East. It is founded on politics 
and religion, and requires but a correct knowledge of the 
ancient language, philosophy, and Semite history to enable 
us to comprehend the purpose for which it was written, 7 the 
theology it inculcates, the theocracy it supports, the philoso¬ 
phy on which it depends,—and particularly the form of causa¬ 
tion 8 that it teaches. 

1 Movers, Phoenizier, I. 390, 391, 553 if. Julius Firmicus, de Err., 5. The lion 
was the representation of Mithra, Apollo, and the Anointed.—4 Esdras, xii. 31, 32; 
Rev. v. 5. 

2 John Jervis-White Jervis, ‘ Genesis,’ p. 107; Hyde, Rel. Vet. Persarum, cap. v. 
p. 125; Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 259. 

3 1 Chron. xi. 1-3; Gen. xxii. 13, 16; Levit. ix. 13; x. 1; ii. 16; Exod. xix. 18. 

4 The Ghebers. 

6 See the puns in Gen. xxix. 32-35; xxx. 6-20. 

6 Irach, Iris, and Rachel. Sarah laughed : Izchaq (Isaak) from Zachaq, laughter. 

i The writers of the Bible were the Jewish Scribes, undoubtedly interested in 
putting forth such a narrative as would benefit their order. They wrote from mythic 
traditions, or have written what reads in parts like a myth. To listen to their account 
is to take their side, to do just what they expected you to do for them and their dom¬ 
ination. But it is not, probably, history, but made to create a special theological bias 
in favor of the priesthood,—in short a partial statement. The ‘making of many 
books ’ (Ecclesiastes, xii. 12) looks not so very ancient, and the bells attached to the 
anklets of the Daughters of Sion seem appropriate to a late period of Jewish pros¬ 
perity.—Isaiah, iii. 16. 

a jer. 1. 5; Gen. i. 2; ii. 7; vi. 3; Ezekiel, i. 27. “In fact, the life of the 
Bedawin, his appearance and habits, are precisely the same as those of the patriarchs 
of old. Abraham himself, the first of the patriarchs, was a Bedawin, and four thou- 


80 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


When, then, we find the “ Mighty ” Jacob (of the Aaqa- 
baara, the Israel Aqbar) led to Mesopotamia from Kebaron 
(Chebron, Hebron) and from there to Memphis, also among 
the Agubeni and the Beni Kheibar as well as other Arabian 
tribes, the Children of the Most High Father Ab Bam repre¬ 
sented by Gabariel (Gabriel) the Angel of the Fire and Power 
of Mithra or Kronos, we can see that Moses has already car¬ 
ried Abram over a vast domain from Aur of the Chaldaeans 
and does as much for Iaqab when he is sent to Mesopotamia 
to Laban the Moongod for a wife, or when Israel is described 
as “ going down ” to Egypt as Keb. When the temple scribe 
marries the Abrahm to Sara’h (the Sarachens, Sarakeni) and 
to Hagar (the Hagarenes.—Gen. xvi. 7, 10-12 ; xxi. 20, 21), and 
his grandson the Shemalite Ishmael is parent of Nebioth 
(Nabatheans), Kedar, Itur (Itnraea), and Kadimah, the mythic 
Masses is used to father the Arabian prospects of Jerusalem 
in the middle of the 2nd century before our era. Iaqab the 
Lover also deprives Asu (Idumea, Esau) of its rights, and al¬ 
though Jerusalem wanted Edom for a long time, she finally 
gets it. These are the children of the Ishmaelites by the 
names of their countries, their towns and their castles.—Gen. 
xxv. 16. There Mases (Masses, or Moses) seems (although 
possibly an ancient mythic Phrygian king) to have proved a 
tolerably far-sighted statesman in the interest of Khebron and 
Jerusalem. He accustomed the Jews in the second half of the 
second century before our era to look forward to a great em¬ 
pire in Syria and Arabia, extending from the Mediterranean to 
Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf at Kadimah. Did he not 
plant Hagar among the Hagarene Ishmaelites, send Iaqab 
among the Nabatheans all the way to Chaldaea to marry a 
couple of faces or phases of the moongod Laban, and after¬ 
wards transport him to the Nile on account of his love for 
Joseph ? Mases or Moses had a statesman’s views when he 
wanted to enslave Kanaan.—Gen. ix. 25-27. The story is a 
good enough ‘ hieros logos,’ but there is considerable politics 
in it. 

The name of the Jews, Iaudi, is found in E. Schrader, Die 


sand years have not made the slightest alteration in the character or habits of this 
extraordinary people. Read of the patriarchs in the Bible, and it is the best description 
you can have of pastoral life in the East at the present day.”—Incidents of Travel in 
Egypt, Arabia Petraea and the Holy Land, New York, Harper, 1837. 


/ 


ABRAHAM , yliVT) THE I AUDI OF ARAB A. 81 

Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, p. 188. It comes 
from Aud, tlie name of the Arabian God with blood-stained 
altars. The country where he was worshipped was called 
Audah. The I in Iaudi is a prefix, such as we find in Eremias 
(Ieremiah), Shemal (Ishmael), Essaioi (Iessaioi); but its use 
reminds one of the plural Greek article ol. The words laud 
and Iaudah were in the Hebrew Bible written mim by a 
Hebrew custom of writing- mentioned by St. Jerome. They 
wrote with a He, but they read it A. This rule turns Ieud back 
again to Iaudi 

Gen. xxix, xxx, contains some surprising double entendres j 
one is very much to our purpose; xxix. 35, Leah conceives aud 
(again); and says “Audah (I will praise) Iahoh.” Ergo, she 
names her last born son Iaudah. What was the necessity for 
Leah to name her last son “ I will praise?” And, unless 
Moses was present at the apparition of Iaudah in consequence 
of the parturition of Leah, how could Moses have transmitted 
to us the very ivords of Leah? Unless we take refuge in a 
miracle, it can be accounted for in this way. This scribe knew 
as well as we do that Aud was the blood-besprinkled Eiregod 
of Kliebron (Hebron) and for the benefit of the scribes he in¬ 
troduced the name Aud three times in verse 35, once as the 
adverb (again, still), then in the verb Audah (the ancient name 
of Judaea), and, finally, in Iaudah “I will praise.” In this way 
Moses accounts for the name of Audah, which seems likely to 
have been the name of Judaea, long before Moses was ever 
heard of. And if a scribe, after these three repetitions, could 
not see what Moses was driving at, he was one of those that 
cannot take a hint. Let the reader notice that i in Hebrew 
is changed in the translation to j in English. 

6 


\ 


CHAPTER FOUR. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 

“ r\\v Trpbs avaroAas vevovaav itAevpav rrjs Alyvirrou irpbs ras airb tt)S Svpias /cal 
rrjs 'Apafitas ififioAccs^ curb JJrjAovcrlou juexP 1 * ‘HA.touiroA.ecus Sia rod ip^/uov. 1 ’ 

“ /ceifi4vr]v p.bv Trpos auaroAijv rod fioofSaarirov irorapLou /ca\ovp.4vr}v S’ airb rrjs 
apxaias ^eoAoyias Ixfiapiv” 


When we find the names Kub, 1 Kobt, Kopt, Koupli, and 
Kuphu (Knfu) we know that they are Arabian-Hebrew, and 
can place Cheops-Khufu, the king whose name was found in 
the Great Pyramid. He was an Arabian or Semite by blood. 
And as iron has been found, or the evidences of it, as also the 
use of jewelled saws, we have a right to infer that Semites 
built the pyramids of the fourth dynasty. Akab, Gob, Keft, 
Keb, Akbar and Iaqab are Semitic names. Iaqab is said to 
have gone to Egypt. It is not necessary to follow the ruling 
line back as far as Men in Egypt or Sin in Babylon, for both 
are names of the Male Moon, Lunus or Adam of duplicate 
gender. It is enough to find Asar, Asari, names of Osiris at 
Gizeh. The same name Movers finds in Phoenicia. 

When Samuel set up a monument of victory between 
Masephali and San, he called it the ‘ Stone of Azar ’ 2 (the As¬ 
syrian Mars). There was (Joshua, xv. 33) a place between 
Libnah and Asdod called, apparently, Asan and Beth Kar 
(temple of Kar). From Asan we obtain the first syllable of 
Sankara, 3 while Kar supplies the rest of the name. This re¬ 
lieves us from going to Babylonia for the name. Mr. Birch 

1 Koub. 

2 Hosea, xii. 4 derives the name Israel from Sarah to contend, to fight, and El = God 
of Fire.—Gen. xxxii. 28. Asarians, Asriel, Israel, a name of the War god (Exodus, 
xiii. 21, 22, xiv. 25), Saturn and the Sun. The Fire-god Azar was the God of war, and 
Mars was the Sun.—Macrob. I. xvii. 68. 

3 Compare Sangarius, the name of a King.—Movers, Phonizier, I. 198. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT . 


83 


and other Egyptologists have been convinced that Sankara is 
Singara or some other Mesopotamian name, being led to this 
by the word nahrena (meaning river district) which they ap¬ 
plied to the land of the Euphrates and Tigris. But the word 
nahr means any river; and the district east of Askalon and 
Akaron (Ekron) was the country of the Philistine Kara, 
watered by the Sorek and Besor, which, when the entire coun¬ 
try was wooded and the trees on the mountains 1 had not yet 
been cut down, were larger streams than now. Then too the 
Egyptians called the mountaineers the Remanen. 2 Sun, moon, 
and stars, many centuries before the time of Homer, entered 
into the Kanaanite fire-worship as primal elements of it; 
Kephira, Kouf and Khafra were Syrian and Koptic names akin 
to (or identical with) the form Iakab or Iacopo ; 3 and when Seti 
I. or Ramses 4 advanced along the sea-coast or passed on to the 
Syrian rising ground between Rhinocorura and the southern 
end of the Dead Sea they were vigorously met by the Ramen 
and the Katti of Iudah. After these, further north was the 
then impregnable fortress of Iebus, which in b.c. 714 was still 
impregnable. Whether these people had ever entered Egypt 
during or prior to the so-called Hyksos period with other 
Syrians, Philistines, Idumeans, or Arabs cannot be stated with 
positive certainty, but it seems probable that the Sos or 
Zuzim may have got there. That the mountaineers (Ram-en) 
specifically Ramah, Iudah and Israel (Isarel, or Azarel) were 
in the Delta prior to the time of Seti I. seems possible, and the 
Amalekites and other Arab peoples must have often got as far 
as the Nile in their forays or migrations. 

But these fire-worshippers carried with them the arks of 
Moloch and Khiun (Life-god), their Adon, 5 and they had, like 
the other peoples of the Delta, their Mysteries, which the 
priests instituted. They took with them from Phoenicia, prob¬ 
ably, a certain knowledge of fixed vocal signs; and it would 
not be safe to deny to Syria the possession of some sort of 
(Syrian) hieroglyphs, since Manetho gives a preference in 

1 Prof. Edward Hull, Mt. Seir, pp. 181, 183 : The Lebanon was snow-clad through¬ 
out the year over its higher elevations, while glaciers descended into some of its val¬ 
leys. Snow falls now sometimes to the depth of J;wo feet.—Hull, p. 170. 

2 Ram = high. Remanen = Hill-men. Not Armenia. 

3 Jacopo and Jacobus. 

4 Both Syrian names. 

5 Lord of the Chionitae. 


S4 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


point of antiquity to the Thinite 1 (Tanite V) and Mem¬ 
phite kings; and we have found the Kefa 2 as far south as 
Memphis. 3 If Maspero has found in the fishermen of Lake 
Menzaleh features like those of the supposed Hyksos-spliinxes, 
broad cheek-bones and daring pouting lips, we will have, per¬ 
haps, to admit these features to be indicative of a primitive, 
native, stock, that at one period predominated in the Delta. 
But there is also testimony to the entrance of Semites into 
the Delta from the earliest times. See Africanus, the Bible, 
Manetho, Movers, Heeren, Chabas, etc. “ And they two fight¬ 
ing with the impure beat them: and having slain many they 
pursued them to the borders of Syria.” 4 The account in 
Josephus which puts back the occurrence into the time of 
king Timaus would seem to imply that the attacks upon Lower 
Egypt from K/ushen or Goshen were not infrequent in ancient 

times, oi Se croXvpuTcu, KareXSovres avv rots puapols twv cuyuTmW, ovrcog 
ai'ocrtoos to is avSponrots Trpocrrjve^rjcrav ware rrjv twv 7rpoa.pr)p,£vwv Kparrjcnv 
Xpvcrbv (or, better, Kpuacrov) <f>aivecr3ai rots rorc ra tovtwv avefirjpLOLTa 

3€up.£vois. Josephus contra Ap. I. p. 1053. The word proeire- 
menon is opposed to touton. Proeiremenon refers to the 
Shepherds driven out to the city Ierosoluma; although it 
might possibly be held to mean the invaders in the time of 
king Timaus mentioned on p. 1039. Josephus, it is true, says 
that Manetho wrote these passages ‘ about us,’ meaning ‘ about 
the Jews.’ What he says, in this case, claiming to give 
Manetho’s words, is ‘ that the aforesaid seemed preferable to 
these last.’ The afore-mentioned are either the persons ‘ of 
obscure race ’ mentioned at page 1039 (whose kings were 
Semite in name) or £ the Shepherds that went out in the reign 

1 Tanite; also Abudos, Abydos, Abot. According to Ammian, Abudum was a 
town in a remote corner of the Thebais. 

2 Movers I. 367, 657, mentions Asis (Aziz) the solar Mars in Edessa. We find the 
Sasu archers in the Desert, like Asasel. (Azazel, the Evil Demon.) Joining with 
the word Hak (leader, melik) the word Asos, we get Hak-Asos, Hukussos, Hyksos. 

3 It is supposed, on the authorities later on quoted and the traditions respecting 
Agenor (the Bal Samem “lord of heaven”) and Kadmus, that the Phoenicians brought 
their knowledge to the Delta with them ; and this is probable from the earlier renown 
of Memphis as well as the superior antiquity of its pyramids. 

The Khati (Hittites) had from remote antiquity a form of picture-writing which 
was known on the road between Ephesus and Sardis, and also from Kappadokia to the 
Egean Sea.—Rawlinson, Anc. Egypt, II. 232; A. H. Sayce, Soc. Bibl. Archaeology 
for July, 1880. 

4 Josephus, contra Apion, I. p. 1054; quotes Manetho. There were plainly two 
sets of Shepherds that Manetho had in view. 


/ 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


85 


of Tethmosis ( i.e . Amosis) to the city called Ierosoluma.’ So 
that, if either Manetho or Josephus could be trusted, we have 
Semites in each case, instead of natives to the west of the Red 
Sea and east of the Nile. Therefore, taking Manetho and 
Josephus for guides, we have only the faces of the so-called 
Hyksos-sphinxes to indicate the existence of Shepherds of 
African tint and feature at Tanis and Bubastis (Zagazig), 
without reference to date. Josephus charges Manetho with 
taking hold of current invented (mythic) stories and applying 
them to his ancestors at Jerusalem ! But, in a controversial 
paper against Apion, Josephus may have felt at liberty to 
take the same license as Manetho did. Josephus said that 
Khaeremon lied, and, if there was any truth in it, it was im¬ 
possible to separate it. 

Josephus (p. 1053) distinguishes between the ‘ rule of the 
aforesaid ’ men (Syro-Arabs) of obscure race and the ‘ deviltries 
of the Solumites.’ It is not impossible that a Semite raid into 
the Delta followed a raid of a native African race, the Berber- 
Copts from between the Red Sea and Libya, between dynasties 
6 and 11. The only suggestion for such a conjecture is the so- 
called Hyksos-sphinx face, the name agazyan (shepherds), and 
the circumstance that Africanus (from whom we get the Ma- 
nethonian clippings) speaks of 'Phoenician Shepherds’ in the 
15th and 17th dynasties. The Egyptian Amosis of the 18tli 
dynasty married an Ethiopian and drove out the Hyksos. 
Moses, too, married an Ethiopian woman.—Numbers, xii. 1. 
Lepsius (Letters, 415) considered it as more than probable 
that the name of Moses was not originally found in the 
Egyptian narrative. Many regarded Jews as the offspring of 
the ^Ethiopians, emigrating when Kepheus ruled.—Tacitus 
Hist., v. 1. 

Saturn-Kronos, Ekron (Accaron) on the Mediterranean, Mt. 
Khoreb, the sun (Khares, Cheres), Aqar (1 Chron. ii. 27), Ache¬ 
ron, Aharon (Acharon, Aaron), Charon, the Kliaru (Karu, Phi- 
listians), and the Egyptian kings Khaires, Akherres, and the 
valley Achor have all the same name as their root, akar, 1 ak- 


1 Elis had old sunworship, namely in Olympia where Kronos and Helios had an 
altar in common. There was a tradition that before Apollo’s times the Delphic sanc¬ 
tuary belonged to Kronos.—M. Mayer, die Giganten und Titanen, p. 72. Here we have 
two Semitic works which tell of Phoenician earliest influence in Greece, El (in Elis) 
and Karan (Kronos) meaning to shine. To which Ach (in Achaia) may be added ; for 


86 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


har or achar , the sun, that rises in the morning and goes 
down (keboa) at night, and in winter was fabled to sleep the 
sleep of death, but in spring, in the sign of the Ram, to rise 
from the dead. From Gaza to Ekron, from Garar (Gerar) to 
perhaps further east the Kara lived. The Egyptians called 
Zeus (Amon) the Spiritus. 2 Amon is interpreted the invisible 
and hidden. When they invoke and summon him to become 
manifest and visible to them they say Amoun. 3 These were 
three forms of the Kamephis, the last one being the Sun ; 
Amon must consequently have been seen in all three of his 
manifestations. Amun-Hor or Horammon is the active and 
generative principle, the seminal principium. He presides 
over misty clouds, rains, exhalations and is the all-saving and 
all-nourishing prime or bloom and temperature of the circum¬ 
ambient air, the seminal principle. As long as fire remained 
the Seminal principle of arrangement was likewise preserved. 
There are three species in fire,—the coal, the flame, and the 
light. 4 The seal of Iar (Horus) calls him the “ light, fire, 
flame.” Ammon is the Creative Mind. 5 The seal of Iar calls 
Iar “ Ammonios; ” and Proverbs, viii. 30 mentions Amun as 
the Creative Wisdom. Brahma is fire, sun, moon, etc. 6 Isaiah, 
viii. 8, calls Iudah’s land Amanu-el. Horus is connected with 
Leo, is the Power of the sun, and has the Lion’s head ; 7 he is 
called the cross, redeemer, freer, and he who transports from 
one place to another. 8 Osiris is the Nile, the Dark Water of 
Hades, 9 but his name was originally Asar, Asari, and in the 
Seal of Iar it appears as Ousir (Oushir). 

Ach meant fire, and, in Egyptian, it meant light. Akhu meant light. Khuti, lights. 
Fire and the Cherubim were Saturn’s symbols in the Levant.—Dunlap, Vestiges, 116, 
117; Movers, I. 260. 

1 King Occhoris was ordered by the oracle of Hammon to purge Egypt of the lepers 
and to remove that class of man into other lands as hateful to the Gods.—Tacitus, 
Hist. v. 1. Occhoris is evidently a name derived from Achor (Akhar) the name of the 
Karu or Philistians. Achares and Occhoris are one word. 

2 de Iside, 36. 

3 ibid. 9. 

4 Philo Jud., the World, 15. 

5 Movers, I. 268. This is the Logos. 

6 Swetaswatara Upanishad, iv. 2. 

7 de Iside, 19. 

8 Irenaeus, I. i. p. 15. 

9 de Iside, 32; Hesiod, Theog. 783-786. Saturn’s temple was outside the city, in 
Egypt. Because he was too close to the Death-god. He was subterranean. Osiris at 
his birth was placed by Saturn in the hands of Pamules.—de Iside, 12. The Pamulia 
was the Spring festival in February, when Osiris entered the Moon. 


THE AS A RIANS IN EGYPT. 


87 


According to Josephus, Ant. I. vi. 2, the Sons of Cham 
(Ham) possessed the land from Syria and the Mounts Amanus 
and Libanus; then they turned and seized the parts near its 
sea, appropriating them as far as the ocean. Clearly, then, 
Cham extended over Egypt, and Arabia and the Negeb, and 
into Syria as far as Mt. Amanus and the Lebanon. This ex¬ 
plains how the Phoenicians could be regarded as coming from 
the Red Sea and renders it possible for the Kanaanites to be 
regarded, as the Sons of Cham. 1 Under the designation Kanaan 
(Gen. x. 6) we must include the Kharu, Gerar, Philistia, and 
Phoenicia, at least part of it. What is curious, we find in 
Achozath or Akliuzzath (Gen. xxvi. 26) another name suggest¬ 
ing Hukussos, as if the Hyksos came from the Kara and Gerar. 
Also the name Satanah or Setanah (Gen. xxvi. 21), which, drop¬ 
ping the termination, ah, appears to be Setan, the district of 
Set. 

The worship of idols and of the orbs of heaven prevailed in 
Arabia, Egypt, Judah, Israel and Syria, and, while not exclud¬ 
ing the Mysteries and mythology, interfered with monotheism. 
The country of the Hebrews once passed, with the Assyrians, 
under the name of Philistia. The Pliilistians, according to 1 
Samuel, xiii. 5, were a powerful people, the Egyptians appar¬ 
ently gave the name Kara to Pliilistians, and Sabians were in 
the Sinaite peninsula. The identity of the fundamental theo¬ 
ries upon which the Phoenician, Philistian, Hebrew and Egyp¬ 
tian religions were based was recognized by Movers, and is 
evidenced by the Lion-man (the faces of lion and man con¬ 
joined at the back of the head) represented on the vail of the 
Jewish Temple, by the Cherubim, by the Lion-man of the 
Sphinxes and the Seal of Iar-Horus 2 of the late Dr. Abbot’s 
Egyptian Collection. Then we have the use of linen by the 
linen-robed priests of both Hebrews and Egyptians. 3 The de¬ 
scription of the Jewish Tabernacle, while in some respects 
Arabian, is significant of an advanced stage of religious civili¬ 
sation, especially in dress and ceremonial. 4 


1 1 Chron. iv. 39, 40. Septuagint. 

2 The lion of Iudah.—Rev. v. 5. The ‘ Star of Iaqob.’—Numbers, xxiv. 17. The 
Semite religions were astronomical. 

3 Levit. vi. 10 ; 1 Sam. ii. 18. 

* Exodus, xxv. 4; xxvi. 1; xxxv.-xl.; Ezekiel, xxvii. 7; Rev. xix. 8, 14. 


ss 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Thou shalt not ‘ taboo’ 1 an Adami, 2 for he is thy brother. 

Thou shalt not ‘ taboo ’ a Masri, 3 for thou wast an alien in his land.—Deu- 
teron. xxiii. 8. 

Adorn came out in force to drive off tlie Asarelites (Israelites). 4 
The Hyksos entered Egypt as Setites (Sethians), bnt came out 
from Egypt as Asirians. That seems to result from the Bibli¬ 
cal data. But ‘Asar’ and ‘Assyrian’ (Asur) are, originally, 
from the East and not from Egyiot. Numbers, xxi. 14, seems 
to lay claim to the renown of the Hyksos by the lam Suph (the 
sea of reeds) and in Moab; for to Josephus the Hebrews were 
the Hyksos. Bamses II. was on record at Tanis as the victor 
over the Shasu, 5 that is, the Sasu or Sos (Bedawin Shepherds), 
and Manetho seems to have recognised these as Phoenicians. 
The fleet of Bamses II. engaged the fleets of the Phoenician 
cities. 6 When Asar (Aser, Asher) stayed in his havens and 
dwelt at the port of the seas 7 we know also that Assur (Syria) 
went down into Egypt, carrying with him his Syrian national 
deity Asar (Ousir, Osiris). In like manner, 

Adad fled, himself and men, Adamaiim (Edomites), of the slaves of his 
father with him to come to Masraim (Egypt); and Hadad was a boy, little. 
And they came up out of Madin (Midian) and went into Pharan, 8 and, after 

1 Tabo means ‘ to detest.’ 

2 Places were supposed to be named after the supposed founders. Askalos founded 
Ascalon. Irad, Jared founded Eridu. The cities Adama, Amara, Sadem are men¬ 
tioned together.—Gen. xiv. 2; Joshua, xix. 36. We may then, perhaps, derive Adam 
from Adama (Admah), although 4 Had am ’ may be Kadmah, Kadmus, written with a 
Ch, later softened to h. The Edom-Idumean branch of the Abrahmites is always 
represented as the oldest.—Gen. xxv. 25, 31. Edom is Atuma, and is written Adorn, 
Adum. Audam is formed from Aud, like Salem from Sal, Sunam or Sunem from Sun : 
vide Shunamite, Shulamite, Salamah. Adam and Brahma were first; each had his 
sakti. Adam is mentioned first, then Seth.—Gen. v. 2, 3. The Sethites were in Moab. 
—Numb. xxiv. 17. Adam (in Hebrew) and Set (Seth) both in Hebrew and Egyptian 
theology were hermaphrodite, being male and female.—Gen. v. 2, 3. The Egyptian 
beetle was the symbol of this condition ; and Plato in his Symposium refers to it as a 
primal status hominis. 

3 Egyptian. 

4 Osirians or Asrielim.—See Numbers, xx. 20, 21, for the name Israel. The Asriel- 

ites are mentioned (Asareli, Numbers, xxvi. 31) and Asarel (Nehemiah, xii. 36). Asar- 
adan.—2 Esdr. iv. 2. 

6 A. Wiedemann, agypt. Gesch. 438. 

«ibid. 437. 

7 Judges, v. 17. “Phoenicians first, before they became Egyptians.”—Palmer, 
Egypt. Chron. I. 50. 

8 See Aphara.—Judges, viii. 27. Compare Abar (the shining Bar), Barah, 1 Chron. 
viii. 18, Afaron, Gen. xlix. 29, Afarica (Africa), Fars (land of light.—F. Johnson, 
Persian and Arabic Diet.; Freitag, Arab-Latin Lex. 1837, p. 465), Bara (Gen. xiv. 2), 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 89 

that, they took Amu (Amim) from Pliaran and came to Masraim to Pharali king 
of Masraim.—1 Kings, xi. 17. 


We see how the Amu made their way into the Nile Delta, com¬ 
ing’ from the east (dwo rw avaroXojv Trapeyivovro^ from over the 
Iardan, in Medbar, in Arabah, from oyer against Supli, be¬ 
tween Pharan and Taupel and Laban and Chazor 1 and Di 
Saab. Judging by the names, Kheth, Khetoura and Kadesh, 
the Katti or Kheta must have extended from Khebron on the 
north to below Kadesh and Arad on the south. 

They bury Sarra (Sarah) in Khebron.—Josephus, Ant. I. 14. 

The Khebrdn in land Iouda. 2 —Septuagint, 1 Chron. vi. 55. 


The nation of the Israel 3 and the rulers and the priests and 
the Levites did not separate the foreign-born nations of the 
land and their impurities from the peoples of the Khananites, 
Khatti, Ferezi, Iebusi, Moabites, Egyptians and Idumeans. 
For they lived with their daughters, both they and their sons, 
and mixed the holy seed (o-7rep//.a to ayiov) among the foreign- 
born peoples of the land. 

And as soon as I heard these things I tore the clothes and the holy raiment, 
and plucked out the hair of the head and beard, and sat down gloomy and very 
sad.—Septuagint, 1 Esdras, viii. 66-68. 

We here notice that the Egyptians and the descendants of 
the Hyksos are spoken of as natives, not foreigners. Compare 
the names Akoub and Akoupha (2 Esdras, ii. 45, 51) with the 
name of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, and with the 
name of the land of Koub (Ezekiel, xxx. 5). 

The Children of Abrahm by Khetoura were among others, 
Madan, Median and Souos; and the Children of Souos were 

Shem-abar (Gen. xiv. 2), Abaris, Pharah (the pharaoh), Pharan (the Desert), Pheron 
(an Egyptian king-name), Phuti-Phar and Phnti-Phara.—Gen. xxxix. 1; xlvi. 20. 
The Greek-Phoenician permutation of the letter b into p, ph (f), v, is derived from the 
East. Kub and Khufu are closely allied; like Aser, Osir, Ousir and Osiris. 

1 See Judges, iv. 17, 23. 

2 * rr)v Xefipuv iv yfj ’lovSa .’ Compare Auda, the name of the Great god of Bostra.— 
Sayce, Hib. Lect. 408. Audam could suggest the land and people of Aud or Audah. 

3 Adan becomes Adam, just as Madian became Madiam, 1 Chron. i. 32. The n 
assimilates with and becomes m. Thus Adam is Adan, the Lord (Adon) who walked in 
the Garden of Aden (Audonai).—Gen. iii. 8. The Deity was regarded as the pure Life. 
Therefore no dead body could be brought within sacred precincts, death rendered the, 
relations impure, and, as wool is an animal product, the priests wore linen. 


90 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Saba 1 and Dadan. 2 The prophetes Malchos Kleodemos names 
three sons of Abrahm by Khetoura: Afera, Asoureim and 
Iafra. Assyria was named after Asoureim ; the city Afra 3 and 
the land Africa after Afera and Iafra, since both marched with 
Herakles to Libya against Antaeus. Their admission to the 
association with Herakles was obtained through the similar¬ 
ity of Abrahm, Kronos, Herakles. 4 From Alexandria (the 
medium between the West and East) and the Aetliiopic Axum 
the Jewish triumvirate has wandered into the South-Arabian 
Myths. 5 

I will praise ( Audah ); therefore slie called his name Iaudah.— Gen. xxix. 
35. 


In the cuneiform writing the Jews were named Iaudi.— 
Schrader, Keilinschr. u. d. Alt. Test. 188. Audah, in Hebrew, 
means ‘ I will praise.’ This reveals the original name of Ju¬ 
dea, the land of Aud. If we follow St. Jerome’s dictum “ to 
write a * he ’ but to read it an we will find that Isaiah, xix. 
17, has “ Iaudali’s land ” instead of Jeudah’s land. By a He¬ 
brew pun, Genesis, xxix. 35, gives us £ Audah ’ as the root of 
the name Iaudah. Aud’s altar was sprinkled with blood. Sat¬ 
urn’s name was Chion, the Living One. Saturn’s altars were 
blood-besprinkled. The horns of Iachoh’s (Iao’s) altars were 
blood-besprinkled on Saturn’s day. The right ears of Aharon 
and his sons, their right thumbs, their right great toes, and 
their garments were sprinkled with blood.—Exodus, xxix. 12, 
16, 20, 21. For the life of the flesh is in the blood.—Leviticus, 
xvii. 6, 11. Chion was the Achiah asur Achiah, of Exodus, iii. 
14, the Living God of Time, Set or Saturn. Compare Daniel, 
vii. 13. For Chion (like Moloch) was the name of the Living 
One! 

Ad (uda, udda) means the light of day.—Schrader, p. 493. 
An altar named Od (Aud).—Joshua, xxii. 34. The land of Ad 

1 Compare the name Saba.—Gen. x. 7; Job, vi. 19. Sabathan.—Jos. Ant. I. 15. 
Sabbathai, a man’s name.—2 Esdras, x. 15. Sabathi the planet Saturn. The planet 
Saturn is called Suhel in Arabic. See Movers, I. 290, 292. 

2 lChron. i. 32, 33. Arabian Dadanim.—Isaiah, xxxi. 13. In Genesis, xxv. 2, 
we have the name Sauach: compare Saua, Sa, and Asau (Esau). 

3 Compare the name Afrah (Judges, vi. 11), Apharorc, Pharah (the name pharaoh), 
Aphara^A ; and Apharah. —1 Sam. xiii. 17. 

^ See Movers, I. 86, 87, 415-450. 

B Bosch, Konigin von Saba, 23. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


91 


runs up to the Dead Sea from the eastern part of Midian. 

‘ Ad ’ or ‘ Aud ’ was perhaps the oldest 1 Arab name. It forms 
part of the names Adan, Adam, Edom (Adorn, Gen. xxxvi. 1, 8, 
9), Atam, the Autei of Pliny, the Aadu or Aatu of the hiero¬ 
glyphs, the Beni Atiyeh of Burckhardt and the Desert of Till. 
The Beni Adah (Audah) extended from south of Madian 
(Midian) all through the country of Esau in Mt. Seir and in¬ 
termarried with the Khati (Gen. xxxvi. 2,16). Numbers, xxxiii. 
6, 7, 8, mentions their town Atham (Etham) near Egypt; hence 
the Aatou or Audou of the Egyptian hieroglyphs of the 
papyrus Sallier I and the Beni Iaudah of Iudea (Audah) where 
the Fire-deity Audunaios-Adon was adored. Kamus speaks 
of the blood-besprinkled altars of Aud and the fire-pillars of 
Sair (Seir.—Gen. xxxvi. 1, 8; Exodus, xiii. 21, 22; xiv. 24). 
They were also called Oadites, and Osiander (Zeitschrift der 
D.M.G. vii.) mentions Wadd (Oad, Ouadd) their God. Ad is a 
very ancient name between Syria and Yemen.—Burton, Gold 
Mines of Midian, 354. Ad’s land was to the north-east of 
Madian city (B. E. Burton, 354). 2 Chronicles, xiii. 22, mentions 
the prophet Ado, and Isaiah, ix. 5, mentions Aud as Father of 
.Time (Abi Ad, or Abi Od), that is, Saturn-Chronos. The Jews 
were named Iaudi. Now the Hebrew El and Adon (Tammuz) 
are names of Saturn. The Babylonian Bel (like the Ancient 
of days in Daniel, vii. 9) is the Boundless Time before cre¬ 
ation, the Unrevealed primal being.—Movers, p. 263. But the 
Old Testament everywhere prefers another Name.—Judges, 
viii. 33. 

The Babylonian Bel is, according to Berosus, 2 a God of the 
gods, the Creator of all things, even of the sun, the moon, the 
planets, and all other things. 3 The Hebrew Bible confirms 
this in speaking of “ the incense burned to Bal, to the sun, to 
the moon, to the planets, and to all the host of heaven.” 4 Ac¬ 
cording to the ‘ Poimander,’ God, the Wisdom in which the 
two sexes are united, created first the Word and, through this, 
the world-creating Wisdom that, as God of fire and spirit, cre- 

1 Univ. Hist, xviii. 370 ; Wright, p. 13. 

2 Berosus in den Fragment. Hist. Graec. Bd. II. p. 497. Saturn was an old man 
and a powerful king. His complexion is black.—Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 671. 

3 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 718. 

4 2 Kings, xxiii. 5. In the Jewish Kabalah there is an archangel to each of the 
seven planets.—Mankind, p. 522. 


92 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


ated the Seven other rulers, namely, the Seven Planets. 1 The 
sublime Power of the Unknown Father is the mystical Hep- 
taktis, the Babylonian Sabaoth,- the Bel Iao who is Dionysus 
and Mithra (Mediator) through whom the souls ascend to the 
Father of Mithra. This is his symbol. The Angel Gabriel 
holds the 7 Lamps, the Seven Planets, in his hand, the Sabaoth. 

The Seven Lamps shall shine.—Numbers, viii. 2. 

Seven Lamps of fire burning before the Throne, that are the Seven Spirits 
of the God.—Rev. iv. 5. 

Mine eyes have seen the King, Ia’hoh Zabaoth.—Isaiah, vi. 5. 

Sabaoth Adonaios will sit on a Great Throne,—is Ariel, the 
Mithra of the Jews. Then follows the Resurrection of the dead! 

Thy dead shall live, my corpse (too), they shall arise. 

Awake and sing, inhabitants of dust!—Isaiah, xxvi. 19. 


Apollo has the glory on his head, and corresponds to Horus 
the Egyptian Redeemer and Apoluon of the Revelations, the 
Freer of the soul from Hades. 


The call of the preacher in the Desert : Prepare the way of the Lord of life, 3 
make straight in Arabah a path for our Alah.—Isaiah, xl. 3. 

Who then was this Lord of life. Cliion, the living El Saturn ! 
The ark started from Babylonia. 4 Babylonia is the land of the 
Garden of Eden. 5 The Euphrates, below Babylon, divides 
into two parts, the Pisanu, the Guchanu; the third is the 
Tigris, which from just there onwards resumes its earlier in¬ 
dependent position (independent of the Euphrates); the fourth 
is the Euphrates. 6 Schrader holds that the Hebrews knew lit¬ 
tle about the Babylonian story, and hebraised, that is, altered 
the account in their own way. 7 

1 Chwolsohn, I. 755. 

2 the Mithraic Lion surrounded by seven stars. 

3 Adonis, Mithra. Ach = fire, vital fire, and life : hence Achians, Achaians, men 
of life and spirit. 

4 Delitzsch, Wo lag das Paradies, p. 45. 

& ibid. 51, 65, 80 ff. 

6 E. Schrader, Keilinschr. u. das AlteTest. 41 ; Delitzsch, 45-83. 

7 Schrader, 43, 44. Schrader, 151, gives Sir’lai as the Assyrian form of the name 
Israel. Isiri is an Osiris-name ; consequently, Sir’lai would be only the dropping the 
vowel A, or O, in Asir, Osir, Osar. The Aadu or Aatu were the ancient inhabitants 
of the Desert-—Chabas, Pasteurs, 27, 28 ; Gen. xxxv. 30, 35 ; Judges, vi. 13-16. Ad’s 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


93 


The tenth chapter of Genesis mentions the Arakim, the 
Senim and the Choi (Chivites, Hivites) all together, and de¬ 
clares them Canaanites ; while the Septuagint Judges, iii. 3, 
writes Euaian instead of the Hebrew Choi, and locates the 
people, there mentioned, on the Lebanon. Now the Canaanites 
extended from Akko (Ako, Acre) to the Lebanon, and that part, 
of the range lying directly to the east of Ako was under the 
control of the Akoi : 

Ha-Choi inhabiting Mount Lebanon ! 1 —Hebrew, Judges, iii. 3 

St. Jerome’s rule, to read the n an A, would give us Achoi 
Cnnn), as it stood in the Hebrew text. Moreover, Genesis, 
xxxiv. 2, places Cliamor (Hamor) as sheik of the land of the 
Aclioi or Choi, having Sichem ben Hamor for his son. The 
Amorites extended from the Khati (’ Heth at Chebron) north¬ 
wards, past Mt. Hamoriah (2 Cliron. iii. 2). The Hebrews were 
Hebronite mountaineers living in the rear of the littoral Kana- 
nites; and the Kananite, Nabathean, Philistian, or Midianite- 
Amalekite element, carrying with them the sacred name Asar 
(Osiris, Asur, Asura, Surya), early entered into Egypt. The 
grammatical character of the Egyptian language is found 
nearly all complete in the Syro-aramean languages. Lauth 
says : If one examines the physical formation of the inhabi¬ 
tants of Egypt so far as the material is present in mummies, 
he receives the unavoidable impression that they belonged to 
the same race as the inhabitants of Western Asia, therefore 
sprung from the same stock. Still clearer is this agreement 
exhibited in the language : the further one gets on in the 
knowledge of the Egyptian idiom a so much closer relation¬ 
ship to the Semitic language is revealed. This circumstance 
does not allow one to think of the Egyptians as autochtho¬ 
nous. In short, they came in from Asia over the Isthmus of 
Suez. They must have brought with them, besides their for¬ 
mation and language which point to Asia, also some of the 

altar was (Ad).—Joshua, xxii. 84. It was anointed with blood.—Exodus, xxix. 12, 
16. Ad’s sacrifice is the ram.—Exod. xxix. 15. This was the emblem of Khnum, 
Amen, and Iahoh or Iao. Hebrew forms of the name Ad are Ati (1 Chron. ii. 36), 
Atiah (Nehem. xi. 4), Adoa (Ezra, vi. 14), and Iaddua who was high priest B.C. 340. 
Auda was the Great God of Bostra.—Sayce, Hib. Lect. 408. 

1 Judges, iii. 3, vi. 33, x. G, 10, 11 shows that the Khatti of Hebron, not the Chatti 
of Karchemis, controlled the mountains west of the Dead Sea. So Joshua, passim, 
shows little states and cities. 


94 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


stock of primitive sagas into Egypt. In the latest develop¬ 
ment of the hieroglyphic writing among the Ptolemys and 
Romans this enigmatic or riddle-sign-writing was wide-spread 
upon public monuments and formed down to my article on the 
subject in the Zeitschrift for Egyptian language and antiqua- 
rianism (1866) a nearly unconquerable obstacle to the under¬ 
standing of the text. As soon however as one has surmounted 
these external and merely graphic difficulties such texts are easy 
to understand because they are very detailed and expanded. 
On the contrary, the older texts offer a tolerably simple sys¬ 
tem of writing, while the concise expression reminds one of 
the lapidary style, and the getting at the meaning is the work 
of labor. If this is true of the usual inscriptions, the dark¬ 
ness increases more than one would suppose in those texts that 
even when they contain no secret doctrine yet have a sort of 
theosophy or philosophy in its nature esoteric, only to be com¬ 
prehended by the Initiated. To make this evident I cite two 
publications of Edouard Naville : “ Texts relative to the myth 
of Horus ” and “ Litany of the Sun.” The first text is exoteric 
and offers few difficulties. But it is different with the other 
publication. It is found in the Kings-graves and consequently 
was only accessible to the priests who at stated times had to 
bring the offering to the dead, on which account the pictural 
representation which here too accompanies the text is much 
more mysterious and apparently has nothing to do with the 
inscription. To what God does this text have reference ? Ex¬ 
clusively to the Sun-god Ra, the Name that presided over the 
city. In an inscription of the 47th year of King Thutmosis 
III. the name Anu is grouped together with Pe-Ra “ house of 
Ra.” The 75 invocations to Ra really belonged to the esoteric 
doctrine, for a certain Pabesa Reparator of Pe-Ra 1 presents 
his homage to Ra and says : Homage to thee, Thou that dost 
give light in the region of the grave, enlightening, when thou 
goest up in the eastern heaven, Lofty One 2 in the mysterious 
cella! O Ra ! hear. O Ra, turn thee round when I repeat the 
list of 75 (invocations) at the judgment place of the Apopliis 
(the evil giant-snake) where his soul is put in the fire and his 
body in the glowing oven of Suchet! 3 


1 Sun-temple, or Temple-city. 

2 Grossmannlicher. 

3 Lauth, Aus Aegypten’s Vorzeit, 66-68. 


THE ASABIANS IN EGYPT. 


95 


We remain, so far, in doubt about the third dynasty of 
Manetho and concerning the origin of the materials which 
make it up. We shall nevertheless see, in all probability, that 
the three Memphian families of Manetho made but one for the 
authors of the Turin papyrus. 1 The Sakkarah table gives as 
nos. 16, 17, 18, 19, Saneferu, Khafuf, Ratatef, Rakliouf. 2 Apis 
is the living image of the eternal and incorruptible soul of 
Osiris, 3 and as the Osiris-religion is the ancient religion of the 
Pyramids 4 the reader can judge whether the Ox-bones found 
in Khafra’s sarcophagus belonged there. Mariette, Tombes de 
l’ancien empire, p. 11, says that ox-bones sometimes are found 
strewn over the floors of the tombs. 

Io Sepli . . . his first born Bull, honor to him.—Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 
17. 

But it is all the inventor’s work. 

Whence came the graces of Dionysus, with the ox-driving dithyramb.—Pin¬ 
dar, 01. xiii. 17-19. 

Sepli, or Sev, is a name of Saturn, M-Seph-ah (Mispah) is, 
apparently, a formation formed from Seb, Sep, or Seph. There 
are many forms of it, Suphah, Saba, Safra (Clementine Homily, 
ii. 1), etc. Compare Saphra, Saophis, Subah, Suphis and 
Suphah or Zubhah. 

Dionysus is the Solar Ray like Ra, Khnum, Adonis, 5 Osiris, 
Kneph. The Sun was the source of spirit, fire 6 and water, the 
moon of water and fire. The creation of the world was held 
to be by spirit out of matter. Philo connects the name Noch 7 
with the Mysteries by the expression DiKaios 8 (Zadik in He- 

1 De Rouge, Recherches, 25, 26. 

2 ibid, plate 1. 

3 de Iside, 29, 54. 

4 Rawlinson, II. 64. Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, I. 401, 402, gives a front of a Baby¬ 
lonian tetrastyle temple and two military standards, one on each side of a representa¬ 
tion of the Moon, and, further, mentions a bust of the God Lunus standing with a 
crescent over his shoulders, and in front of him a standard planted in the ground. The 
Syrian Men seems to be the type of Lunus; at any rate, he is duplex gender, as Lunus 
is. The Moon is the place of Osiris and Isis.—De Iside, 43. 

5 In Phrygia, where the worship of Atys and Kubele was established, Menelaus pro¬ 
poses to Paris to sacrifice to the sun and the earth a white lamb and a black sheep. 
These colors are symbolical.—Mankind, 500. 

6 Herakleitus (b.c. 505) threatened the mystagogues with the fire, regarding it as 
spirit in the fire. All things are born from one fire.—Psellus, 24 ; Piet. 30. The Sa- 
dukee sect denied spirit. 

7 Noach. 

V 8 Gen. vi. 9; ix. 24 ; Dunlap, Sod, I. 39, quotes Plato. 


96 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


brew); also by tlie pouring* of water and the festivals of the 
two equinoxes. 1 By the order of their going out from the ark 
he implies the continuance of generation and life ; but by their 
entrance into the ark the absence of productiveness on earth 
was signified : 2 for the entrance of the Sun-god into the Ark 
signified the hiding and disappearance of water. 3 In the Mys¬ 
teries they bore the box (or ark) in which the vital symbol of 
Dionysus was laid away. 4 Hence Horus 5 has his ark, and Iar 
has the sphere on his head, carrying the handled cross in one 
hand and the sceptre in the other. The lepidotos of Osiris 
and the pliagros and the oxyrynclius swallowed the vital prin¬ 
ciple, the life of Osiris, which had been thrown into the Nile. 6 

Let Isis (Ase, Asat), my good Mother, cry for me, and Neb-ta (Nepthys, 
Proserpine), my sister, (that) 

Salvation remain on my south and on my north.—Papyrus Magique, Cliabas. 

And the robes of Isis, 7 on the one hand, are variegated in dyes, 
for her power is in reference to Matter which becomes and re¬ 
ceives all things, light, darkness, day, night, fire, water, life, 


1 Philo, Quaestiones in Gen. II. 45-47. 

2 ibid. II. 49. 

3 Dunlap, Sod, I. 86; de Iside, 39. The standard of Iudah was planted towards 
the sunrise (the resurrection of Osiris).—Numbers, ii. 3. Ptah, is the creator-spiritus 
divine, the divine Intelligence.—Champollion, pantheon Egyptien. 

4 Eusebius, pr. evang. II. 3. 29. 

5 Horus has on his head the uraeus or basilisk, the emblem of divine and regal 
power, the serpent diadem. 

6 de Iside, cap. 18. Horus is Mars (Iar, Ear) the God of Spring; in one hand he 
holds his emblem, the sparrow-hawk, in the other his spear and lanze. The sun is the 
body of the Powder of the Good.— de Is. 51. The priests received in Mysteries from the 
ancients, by tradition, all that concerns the end of Osiris.—Diodorus Sik. I. 21. p. 24. 
The power of Light is Horus, who is represented w T hite, while Osiris is black (as Hades). 
The Arabians had two sacred idols at Mecca, one white, the other black. The white 
was worshipped when the sun entered the Lamb. The Ammonites brought incense to 
it. The black one was adored when the sun entered Libra (one of the six inferior signs). 
—Mankind, 496. The White Throne appears in Henoch and in Revelation, xx. 11. 
Compare the White Horse of the Rev. xix. 11, 14. Now Horus is White as Light. 
Osiris (the Logos) is black (de Iside, 59) ; but his robe has not a shade or variation of 
color, but simple light-like unity (of color).—de Iside, 77. The bride of the Lamb 
(Solar Logos in Aries) is clothed in white; and the Romanist priests, at Easter, wear 
only the alb.—Mankind, 553 ; Rev. xix. 14. The bride is the company of the Initiated, 
in the Persian Mystery. Mithra was for the Persians what the Word or Logos was for 
the Christians.—Ibid. 553. 

7 Compare the robes of the priests and the colors in the Jewish tabernacle.—Exo¬ 
dus, xxvi. 1 ; xxviii. 5. Diodorus says that Keres is earth ; but it is the Moon's earth, 
for he makes Isis to be Demeter. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


97 


death, beginning, end ; but that (garment) of Osiris does not 
have a shade, 1 nor variety of colors, but unity, single, like 
light; 2 for the Beginning is pure and unmixed, the first and 
mentally perceived. Therefore having once accepted these 
things they store them up and cherish them ; for the mentally 
perceived is invisible and cannot be touched; and they often 
make use of the Isiac (rites). For the things perceived by the 
senses being in use and at hand give many exhibits and aspects 
of them changing sometimes one way and sometimes another ; 
but the mental perception of the Mind-perceived 3 and Absolute 
and Holy, shining through, like lightning, has allowed the 
soul once at some time to attain to and behold! Wherefore, 
Plato and Aristotle call this part of philosophy the epoptic, 4 
since they having by reason 3 outrun these (mere) matters of 
opinion, mixed and of all sorts, spring forth to that Primal and 
Single and Free from matter , and attaining to singly the pure 
truth in regard to It, 6 as in a celebration of the Mysteries, 
think to have the end of philosophy. 7 With the Egyptian 
doctrine in the Mysteries, that Osiris is eV AnKovv ^xoroeiSes, as 
above stated, we may compare the doctrine of Moses that God 
is tovto fxovov (this unity alone) that embraces all of us and 
earth and sea, which we call heaven and kosmos and the nat¬ 
ure of the spiritual existences. 8 And what is this but a speci¬ 
fic adaptation of that consciousness of the divinity of Nature, 
which is implied in all the religious conscientiousness of the 
Old World f 

As Thebes stood towards the Hyksos Foreigners, such was 
the relation of Apet to Memphis, of the Ptam-god Amun to 

1 Athik Iomim, the Ancient of Days, sat, his raiment snow white !—Daniel, vii. 9. 
White was the sacred color of the Sons of light. 

2 Isaiah, xlv. 7; John, yiii. 12; Acts, xxii. 6. See Genesis, i. 3, 4. 

3 Isa. xlv. 15. This is Amun, the Concealed Mosia, Amanuel. They place the 
power of Osiris in the moon.—de Iside, 43. 

4 The epopts were admitted to the third, the highest grade of initiation in the Mys¬ 
teries. It is seeing, Visionary, actual observation! 

6 Mind, Wisdom. 

6 The Noeton, the Mind-perceived unity. 

7 de Iside, 77. 

8 Strabo, 761. Horus was white, as in Rev. i. 14. Mithra was represented as 
Lamb in Aries, surrounded by the 7 planets.—Compare Rev. iv. 4 ; v. 6 ; Numb., xxiii. 
1, 2. In the Mithra-Mysteries we find a Horse White , and a White Throne.—Rev. xix. 
11; xx. 11. All the old myths of Osirianism are revived in such an identical fashion 
intellectually that, put but the “ King ” for Osiris, and the general description of the 
one creed is an accurate description of the other.—Stuart-Glennie in the Morningland, 
p. 377. Horus, as King, holds the sceptre and cross.—Seal of Iar. Abbot Museum. 

' 7 


9S 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Asari, Asarel (Israel), Osiris, Asah, Asat, Set, Isis and Issa ; 
for £ Isis came out of Phoenicia ’ and Israel. The Jews substi¬ 
tuted, for Asriel, Israel; and instead of beginning the Penta¬ 
teuch with Osariel (Osiris) and Isis, wrote the Adam (the In- 
victus, the Unconquered) and Aisah (Josephus’s Issa). For 
Osiris 1 is the adamatos, the unsubdued—according to Plu¬ 
tarch, de Iside, 19,—and rises again from Hades; for it was 
not possible that he should there be conquered. 2 He died on 
Athur 17th when the moon was most full. The Pythagoreans 
call it the day of the antiphraxis (obstruction to the solar light 
reaching the moon). And in what are called the obsequies of 
Osiris, cutting the tree they prepared a boat (ark) shaped like 
the moon (compare the prow of the c Dipper ’); for the moon, 
filled with light from the sun, becomes crescent-shaped when 
the light is cut off from her. But the Apis (compare the bull 
as sacred in High Asia, Persia and Israel), being the ensouled 
image of Osiris, is born when productive light from the Moon 
rushes out and touches the ripened cow. When the Kharu 
came out from Misraim led by Acharon they too made a holy 
sun-bull of Osiris, the Golden Bull of Menes, 3 among the 
Mountains of the Moon, 4 on their miraculous march to Choreb, 
Tunep, Caleb, Chebron, and Sal-em. Christianism, like Es- 
senism, is affiliated to the doctrines of the Egyptian, Dionysi- 


1 Compare Apollo, serving with Admetus in Hades. Like Horus in the Under¬ 
world with Osiris, Seb, or Set.—Plut., de Iside, 19, 41, 44, 52, 54, 69. Horus has the 
lion’s head. This representation of Horus-Apollo is in New York at the Historical 
Society’s rooms. De Iside, 19, implies the lion as his representation. 

2 The Karu gashed their foreheads in the Mourning for Osiris.—Herodotus, ii. 59. 
The Phoenicians of Byblus became eunuchs for his sake.—Lucian, Syria Dea, 15, 27, 
50 ; Matth. xix. 10-12 ; Mark, x. 29. The Egyptian priests in the Mysteries cautious¬ 
ly taught that Osiris is Hades, Dis, Pluto (Dionysus is Hades in Greek Mysteries). 
But, says ‘de Iside,’ lxxviii., ‘He is at the furthest possible distance from the earth, 
unpolluted, uncontaminated, and pure from every nature that receives decay and 
death. And for men’s souls, here indeed surrounded by (mortal) bodies and emotions, 
there is no communion with the God, except so far as to touch an obscure dream by in¬ 
telligence through philosophy; but when liberated (from the body) they remove into 
the incorporeal, and unseen, and passionless and holy (pure) this God (Osiris) is to 
them Leader and King depending as it were from Him and (in spiritual intuition) see- 
ing insatiably and desiring a beauty that is not made known to and unspoken to men. ’ 
—de Iside, 78. The word ‘ King ’ is used of the Redeemer God : Then shall the King 
say (to the righteous) Come ye blessed.—Matthew, xxv. 34. 

3 Lepsius, Letters, p. 413. 

4 Lunus, Sin, Sinai. Kemi or Kemi-t, la “ terre noire,” comme l’interprete tres- 
exactement Plutarque, de Iside, 33. Kem ou kam en copte kame, “noir.”—Lenor- 
mant, les orig. II. 195. Observe the e in Kheops, Keb, Khembes, Khemmis. 


THE AS ARIA NS IN EGYPT. 


99 


ac, Chaldaean, Arabian and Jewish Mysteries (see Ezekiel, 
viii. 3, 10, 12, 14) with the Jewish doctrine of the Messiah su- 
peradded. The Jewish Mysteries resembled (in the doctrine 
of Darkness) the Osirian.—Ezekiel, viii. 8-12. 

Wherefore, not incorrectly, they tell the myth that the sonl 
of Osiris 1 is eternal and undying* but that the Devil often tears 
asunder his body 2 and makes wajf with it; but that Isis roam¬ 
ing about seeks after it and puts it together again. For the 
divine essence the mentally-perceived and good is superior to 
decay and change; but the images with which the visible and 
corporeal (substance) is stamped by the Mentally-perceived 
Essence , as, too, the conditions, forms, and likenesses assumed 
by the corporeal (part), just like impressions in wax, are not 
always permanent. 3 But to the mind the tunic of skin is, 
symbolically, the natural skin, that is, our body (as in Gene¬ 
sis, iii. 21). For God, making first the Intellect, called it 
Adam ; next he created the outward sense to which he gave 
the name Eua 1 (Life). He gave to the first-formed Woman 5 
the name Eua, since She was to be the fountain of universal 
generation in future. 6 Bishop Hippolytus tells us that the 
Assyrians 7 call Life Adonis. 8 The Adon was a combination 
of Mind with Life in the abstract. For the Architect of the 
world of fire is Mind of Mind. 9 The primal fire up above did 
not enclose his power within Matter by works but by Mind. 10 
Incorruptible fire was supposed to perform its workings in the 
heaven, 11 and the soul was supposed to be, by the Father’s 
power, a radiant fire. 12 

1 The Ra-ka-f, or Kha-f-ra. Osiris-Lunus appears in mummy-form, the lunar disk 
upon his head.—Maspero, Guide, p. 174. Compare Sour.—Gen. xxv. 18, and Sour 
(Tyre) with Asur and Osir. 

2 “the body of the Good Principle is'the sun.”—de Iside, 51. The Sun is father 
of Osiris, but Osiris is closely connected with the moon.—de Iside, 12, 13, 18, 33-35,40, 
41. He is the Lunar Kosmos.—ibid, 41. 

3 de Iside, 54. 

4 Philo Judaeus, Quaestio I. 53. 

5 Issa, Isis, Hebrew Isah, the Lunar Mother of the world, Astarta, as a Spiritual 
Mind-perceived Lunar entity. Spirits without bodies.—Gen. iii. 21. 

6 Philo, Quaestio I. 52. 

7 read Syrians. 

8 Hippolytus, lib. V. 7. 

9 Patah, Ptah. 

10 Proklus in Theol. 333; in Tim. 157. See Cory, Anc. Fragm. 

11 Proklus in Plato, politeia, 399. Cory. The Orientals did not understand elec¬ 
tricity and lightning. Khut means fire, khuti fires, in Egyptian. 

12 Psell. 28 ; Piet. 11. Here is the poor authority for the recent assertion that the 


100 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Quapropter, qui Materiem rerum esse putarunt 

Ignem atque ex igni summam consistere solo 

Magnopere a vera lapsi ratioue videntur.—Lucretius, I. 636-638. 

Fire and tlie cherubim in the Levant were symbols of Saturn. 
See Dunlap, Vestiges, 115-117; Movers, 154, 259, 260; Ezekiel, 
i. 4, 22, 26, 27 ; Daniel, vii. 9, 10. The flaming fire (Sada) 
rolled in upon itself to keep the way to the Tree of Life (the 
Adon) in the Gan Odin (the Garden of Adin); for the Ghebers 
of Chebron, Phoenicia, Philistia, and Egypt followed the doc¬ 
trines of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians concerning 
the Garden of the Lord in the sides of the North and the Ghe- 
ber fireworshippers were akin in some things to the Brah¬ 
mans. Conceive the first plain aspect of the composites fire, 
life, light, in the Semite mind. God being a globe of fire is 
Intelligence and the soul of the world, said Damaskius. 1 In 
the Chaldaean doctrine the primal being is considered the 
Creative Mind , the Intelligence that forms the world. This 
primal being encloses the type, idea and form of the to be cre¬ 
ated world and produces it out of himself, 2 just as Iambli- 
chus 3 and, earlier, Plutarch 4 conceived Annin. 5 Ammon is 
the Creative Logos. 

Ach, in Hebrew, means fire, heat, burning ; Iach (Iauclii = 
“ he lives ”) means life, vital fire. Aku (Akko, Acre) was a 
Gheber city, where the fire-worship prevailed. Akuu (in Assy¬ 
rian) meant “ I burned.”—Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch., I. 282. In 
Hebrew, Kuh means “ burned.” In ‘Egyptian akh meant sun 
shedding rays, fire, light and spirit (breath or vital air). 6 He- 

dissimilar properties of mind and matter establish the existence of two distinct sub¬ 
stances. By this little ruse, the preacher assumes that mind is a substance ! He might 
as well have argued that sound is a substance. Sound and voice are not substances, 
but, like mind and vitality, are qualities appertaining to matter in certain states of or¬ 
ganization. The copper wire is a material substance, but the voice and words con¬ 
veyed by it are unsubstantial; in a similar way the physique is substance and the mind 
which it exhibits is its tone. 

1 Cory, Anc. Fragments. 

2 Proklus in Parmenidem, V. p. 47. 

3 de Myst. viii. 3. 

4 de Iside, 9, 62. 

5 Movers, 268. 

6 G. Massey, the Natural Gen. II. p. 507. Egypt, vocabulary. When Acharon 
(Aharon, Aaron) ascended Mt. Chor, or ’Hor, he was in Negeb, but still, perhaps, in 
the land of the Karu or Charu.—Compare Numbers, xxxiii. 37-39. He was 123 years 
of age. We have the sun city of CharSs.—Jer. xlix. 36. The temple Kur.—Schrader, 
214. Asu (Esau) is Idumea ; and Qarach is an Idumean.—Gen. xxxvi. 8. But Qarach 


THE ASAPIAN.S IN EGYPT . 


101 


pliaistos (Patah, Ptah) is the Yital fire in nature; his Son, 
Erichthonios, the fire of Hades. 1 Achn (compare the Greek 
Auge and kliu, the soul as fire) means the glorified. 2 It is an 
expression (according to Lauth, 94) applied to “ Thoth (Tliuti 
with the moon’s crescent on his head) the glorified, endowed 
more than all the glorified.” This reminds one of the Mighty 
Angel Gabariel, lunar angel of the Jews, who takes the place of 
the Logos. He is the “ Wisdom in the moon.” Philo’s re¬ 
mark, therefore, that “ God making Intellect first, called it 
Adam,” was the received doctrine of the ancient Egypt, the 
true Kabalah; for Adam was described as the Wisdom, “ horn 
of Mene,” the true Menes out of whom issues the Lunar-rib, 
Etia, the feminine spiritus. Now the moon-god was known as 
“ Men ” throughout Asia Minor, 3 Sin (Lunus) in Chaldea. Com¬ 
pare Genesis, ii. 23, where Adam admits in himself the union of 
the two sexes (as and asah, = Adam and Issa, Isah, Isis), Ais, 
“ man,” and Ishah (the Woman-principle of life, in fire). 

We find the cities of the priests with the brothers (fratres) 
in their orders, in 2 Chronicles, xxxi. 15. A deity, regarded as 
the pure, holy fire, cannot be approached by the ordinary man ; 
a priest-caste is requisite, to which the preservation of the 
sacred fire-place is entrusted, and which by mortifyings (of the 
flesh) and torments self-inflicted must make itself worthy of 
the access to the deity and its revelation. We find among the 
Old Canaanites no proper priesthood, but everywhere in Pal¬ 
estine, according to the Scriptural accounts, where the Chal¬ 
dean fire-god Moloch was adored. 4 

was born in the land Kanaan (among the Kharu).—Gen. xxxvi. 5. Qargar a city in 
•Judges, viii. 10. Who then are the Karukamasha ? Syrian Kareki Kamus-worshippers. 
Compare Astor-Kamos.—Schrader, 177. 

1 Rinck, I. 122. 

2 Lauth, Aus agypt. Vorzeit, p. 94. Khu means “ light.”—Rawlinson, Egypt, II. 

272. “ The Heptaktis is no other than Sabaoth and the Hebrew God Iao ” (= lachoh). 

—Movers, Phon, 552. 

The Logos was with the God, and God was the Logos. But in it was Light and 
the light was the life (John, i. 4). The baptism of the Logos is in Holy Spirit and fire ! 
—Matthew, iii. 11. Thy luminous is with thy brothers the Gods, O Teta !—Pyramid of 
King Teti; Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, V. p. 18. Thou dost cry to the Luminous 
(spirits) : Come to me! Come to me ! Come towards Hor, him who defends his father 
Osiris ; for Teta is thine Initiator!—Ibid. V. p. 19. The followers of Monoimus the 
Arabian say that the Beginning of everything is First Man and Son of ‘ Man,’ and that 
the created things, as Moses says, were not produced by the First Man, but by the Son 
of the 1 Man,’ not by the whole of him but by a part.—Hippolytus, x. p. 522. 

3 Sayce, in Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch. VII. 256. 

4 Movers, Phon. 859. See 1 Kings, xviii. 88 ; 2 Kings, i. 12; Ezekiel, i. 27. 


102 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


To say, too, that all things are fire, and that no true 
Thing is evidently existing, in the nature of things, but Fire. 1 

—Lukretius, I. 691, 692. 

Fire is then the Beginning, because it is the source of all things ; and the End, 

Because, too, into it all things are resolved. 

—Plutarch, placitis pliilos., I. iii. 25. 

Adonai, thou hast been our place of abode in generation and in generation, 
before the mountains were brought forth and the earth formed.—Psalm, xc. 1, 2. 

The lion represents fire 2 and its force. Hence lions were 
kept in the temple of Horns and, under his name Iar, he is 
represented with a lion’s head, and called the “ light, fire, 
flame ; ” Philo 3 held that there were three forms or species in 
fire: the splendor (light), flame, coal, which he calls auge, phlox, 
anthrax. Since the lion is a symbol of the ingneons principle 4 
in nature, and since the fire is found in the interior of this 
planet, it in Hades proceeded to the genesis of the world, con¬ 
taining within itself all the spermatic logoi or causes of genera¬ 
tion and the life. In Hades 5 the fire of Sarapis was believed 
to exist, in lion shape, and the symbolic cherubim have the 
lion’s among their four faces. 

The first men in Egypt formerly looking upon the kosmos 
and the nature of things, having been struck with wonder, sup¬ 
posed that there are Two immortal and primal Gods, one of 
w T hom they called Osiris, the other, Isis. 6 This Isis (Greek) is 
the Hebrew Isah, 7 whom Josephus calls Issa; and who is the 
Hebrew Euah, 8 the Septuagint Eua, 9 and the “ Eua ” in the 
Dionysian Mysteries, as we see elsewhere. 10 

1 Adonai, thou hast been our abode in generation and generation.—Ps. xc. 1. 

2 the fiery principle, Mithra, the Vital Fire ; Ar, Iar, Ariel. The principle of fire is 
double-gendered in Mithra, Ptah, the Hebrew Chochmah, Arich Anpin and Ericapaios. 
—Dunlap, Vestiges, 228, 250. 

3 On the World, 15 ; ed. Mangey, II. 504, 616. The Stoics held that God himself is 
resolved into fire ; the ekpurosis is Stoic.—Justin Martyr, pp. 142,143. 

4 Lenormant, les origines de l’histoire, I. 246, 247. Judges, vi. 21, 23, describes 
Adonai Iahoh as fire. 

5 In the Depth.—Isaiah, vii. 11. The Goddess Ker?s was in Hades.—Herodotus, 
II. 122, 123. 

6 Diodor. I. 11. Assur was regarded in Assyria as a “king above all gods.”—Sayce, 
Hib. Lect. 122. 

7 Gen. ii. 23. 

8 Gen. iii. 20. mil 

9 Gen. iv. 1. Sept. 

10 The fast to ‘iV v Evav.’—Clemens Alex. Cohort ad Gentes, 11, 12; Gerhard, die 
Anthesterien, p. 204. The Thea pherekarpos of Nonnus, III. 281, the Ioh-KerSs or 
Lunar horn associated with, and to, the Adam. 


THE AS ART AN8 IN EGYPT. 


103 


Small things please goodKeres if only they be pure.—Ovid, Fast, iv. 412. 

White coverings suit Keres ; put on white garments at the Kerealia.—Ovid, 
Fast, iv. 619. 

Shouting out that Eua!—Clemens Alexandrinus, Cohort, ad Gentes, 11,12. 

It is Anna, exclaims Achates!—Ovid, Fast. iii. 607. 

“AndKeres with clamor they shall call from the roofs ! ”—Virgil, Georgies, 
I. 347. 

Usus abest Veneris: nec fas animalia mensis.—Ovid, iv. 657. 

Some regard Her as Luna since She fills the year with months.—Ovid, iii. 

658. 

But Isis is also Yenus, the Pharadatta or Giver of fruitful¬ 
ness. 1 Isis, however, is described, in the Euhemerist way, as a 
woman, Osiris is described as a man. She is buried at Mem¬ 
phis, receives divine honors, and her sepulchre was shown 
down to the time of Diodorus. 2 Gerhard also mentions a Yenus 
Proserpina. 3 Aphrodite’s temple at Memphis was the temple 
of the Moon (Selene, Luna).—Strabo, 807. Consequently Isis, 
Eua, Yena, Yenus and Keres are identical, as Luna, in heaven, 
or in Hades. The Mourning* for Adonis was performed on the 
roofs, according- to Aristophanes, Lysistr. 363 ; Jeremiah, xxii. 
18, has the Hoi Adon. Aristophanes represents the women 
dancing- on the roofs, while Jeremiah mentions incense burned 
on roofs to Bal. 

A peculiar monotheism was once the foundation of the 
Egyptian Religion. At Tell-Amarna, Aten is often styled the 
One God. Since the Egyptians admitted that their Osiris- 
Typhon myth formed part of their Mysteries it is impossible 
for the Jews to deny that the very same myth , the Abel-Cain 
story, was a portion of the Mysteries of Jewish hidden wisdom. 
The Apokalypse mentions a great White Throne, also a White 
Horse ! White the Menes bull. White indicated mental per¬ 
ception concerning Gods in Egypt. 4 The Jews wore white , the 
mystic garb. 5 White were the priests of Osiris, white the 


1 Diodorus, I. 11, 14. Ta is the Semitic root meaning “ to give ; ” da is the Sans¬ 
krit, Greek and Latin. The Egyptian t has to do the work of d. On the roofs they 
called Astarte (KerSs, Venus), poured out incense to Bal (Bel) and mourned Adonis.— 
Jeremiah, vii. 18 ; xxxii. 29 ; compare xxii. 18; xlviii. 38. 

2 Diodor. I. 22, p. 25, Wesseling. As the female names were merely different 
names of the same divinity, it is safe to regard Eua as Keres also.—Compare Diodorus, 
I. 25, p. 29, and Gerhard, p. 204. 

2 ibid. 201. 

4 de Iside, 3. The pure must not be touched by what is impure.—de Iside, 4. 

6 J. G. Meuschen, p. 294. 


104 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


color of Homs, and white was Mithra’s throne. Diodorus Sic¬ 
ulus relates that the priests received from the ancients in 
hidden mysteries the account concerning* the death of Osiris, 
but that once on a time what was “ unspoken ” was by some 
made public. For they said that the lawful king* of Eg*ypt, 
the Osiris, was made way with by his brother, Typlion, who 
was violent and wicked! A writer of the first century, describ¬ 
ing the Mysteries of Egypt, says : “ For nothing unreasonable, 
nothing mythical, nor the result of superstition, as some think, 
was made the foundation of the Religious Services ; but, on the 
one hand, matters having their raison d’etre in ethics and wants, 
on the other, things not devoid of historical and physical re¬ 
finement. So about the onion. For Diktos, the foster-child of 
Isis, tumbling into the River and perishing as he was gather¬ 
ing the onions, is to the last degree absurd ; for the priests 
shrink from, and feel disgusted, being on their guard against 
the onion, because it is accustomed to do well and grow lux¬ 
uriantly only when the moon 1 is decreasing ! And it does no good 
to the fasting or the festival-keepers, to the former, because it 
causes thirst, to the latter, it makes those who come near shed 
tears.” 2 

Herodotus seems to have been very much impressed by 
these mysteries of which he only speaks with manifest fear and 
repugnance. 3 The initiated could not touch upon these subj ects 
except with extreme reserve. Herodotus was so affected by 
them that he copied the respectful brevity of the Egyptian 
priests and did not dare to permit himself to speak the name 
of the God of whom the Khen of Sais concealed the sepulchre. 
The Ritual cites in the number of the greatest mysteries the 
manifestations of forms which took place in the night during 
wdiich the thigh, the two legs and the heel of Osiris were in¬ 
terred. 4 

1 Mene, Selene, Sillah, Zillah. The Egyptians made a small image in lunar shape, 
to indicate Osiris and Isis, and that these Gods are the essence of water and earth.—de 
lside, 39. The crescent was made of earth and water mixed. Osiris is Eros —de 
Iside, 57. Osiris is the Goodness, the Good principle. Kupris is the primal Mother 
(Eua).—Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas, 140, 141. 

2 de Iside, 8. Osiris is the Intelligible Sun, Mithra, the Intelligible Light.—de 

Iside, 77. With Egyptian lunar mysteries compare the new moons of Judah.—Isaiah, 
i. 13, 14 ; Numbers, x. 10. ’E»/ rtp ur/ui Aiovvaov opyiov. —Lucian, Dea Syria, 16. 

2 Chabas, 102, 103. 

4 Chabas, 118, 114; Herod. II. 170, 171. With the name Osir, compare Sirah.— 
2 Sam. iii. 26. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


105 


A great mystery wliicli should be neither seen nor heard ; he who performs 
it must be washed 1 and purified ; he must not have drawn near a woman nor 
have eaten meat or fish.—Ritual, cap. 64. 2 

I am Shu, 3 under the figure of the Sun, seated in the midst of the eye of 
his father.—Papyrus Magic, vii. 4 In heaven Ra creates a place of delights, 
the Fields of Aalou, which he peoples with stars. Entering into repose, Shou 
succeeds him as king, administering the heavenly affairs with Nout.—Lenor- 
mant, I. 452. 

The Egyptians considered the heaven a vast sea, as in Genesis, 
i. 6. The sun goes through the heaven in a bark, of which he 
occupies the centre. The celestial sea which environs all parts 
of our universe has been the theatre of the first divine mani¬ 
festations. 5 

All moisture they call simply outflow of Osiris.—de Iside, 86. 

As-ra her mou : 

Osiris (is) on the water. 6 —Papyrus magique. Cliabas, 119. 

The call of Ia’holi upon the waters ; El lia-kabod makes to thunder.— 
Psalm, xxix. 8. 

Iaholi sits upon the flood. 

The voice of the Lord upon the waters.—psalm, xxix. 3, 10. 

Thy way (is) in the sea, and thy path in the Great Waters, 

And thy footsteps are not known.—psalm, lxxvii. 19. 

He made Darkness his secret place : his pavilion about him dark waters.— 
psalm, xviii. 11. 

El thunders with his voice.—Job, xxxvii. 5. 

Dionysus was worshipped among the Old Kanaanites and 
Arabians—“ where the Bacchic fire of the God leaps forth.” 
This fire is that of Bal Melkarth or Moloch. The worship of 
this Tyrian Fire-god Herakles (Archal) was carried to Tarz 

1 Exodus, xix. 10, 11, 12 ; 1 Samuel, xxi. 4, 5. The “bundle of life” with Ia’hoh 
(1 Sam. xxv. 29) is the union of the souls with Osiris! 

2 Chabas, Reponse, p. 41. 

3 Shu (So) : the o is ou and u in Hebrew and Egyptian. S and Sh were ex¬ 
pressed by one and the same letter in Hebrew. The Egyptian Sh is replaced by s.— 
Lauth, Egypt. Chronol. p. 77. Herakles is called Soter, Saviour ; so are Apollo and 
Abel Ziua the first-begotten Son. 

4 Chabas, 96. 

5 ibid. 51, 53. il lui etait donne uneetoile an ciel.—ibid. pap. magique, 24. Horus 
is the Spring, saving all things.—de Iside, 38. Shu is the Sun-god.—Rawlinson, I. 
351; II. 118. 

6 The moist nature (phusis) was beginning and the genesis of all things from the 
beginning.—Chaldean Oracle. The Egyptians call the spirit Amon.—de Iside, 37. 
Proverbs, viii. 30, mentions this Amon. The Sun (Osiris, Amon) is full of fire and 
spirit.—Diodor. Sic. I. 11. Horus (the Kurios) is the light, fire, flame.—Seal of Iar 
with the lion’s head. 


106 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(Tarsus) and to Greece. Astarta Molocli-Heraldes was identi¬ 
fied at Tarsus, with Athena. Here we have the Semite fire- 
deities. Astarta with her doves, and Athena-Astarta, or 
Melechet. Melechet is the fire-goddess, the Asah = Fire.— 
Movers, 319. In the Old Canaanite worship the spirit 1 ap¬ 
pears in the flame, Astarta is fire-goddess and also the Giver 
of birth (phara-datta or ha-phara-datta) the Bestower of in¬ 
crease, like Luna, Hekate and Yenus. The sun counted for 
the unit (Achad, 2 to ev, Apollo 3 ), the Moon for the duad (Hek¬ 
ate, Artemis). These are two great fire-deities. As (Wagen- 
seil, Sota, p. 387) and Asah or Asat (or Ashah, Aishah, Asat, 
Issa, Isis, and Ashat). Hence we learn to know why the great 
enemies of Egypt, the Sheto, were so named : they adored Set 
the God of fire. Astar meant a fire Star, like aster in Greek ; 
hence Astareta, Astarta, Ashtoret, Astarte. The asteres were 
“ heaven’s bright lights,” 4 the “lamprous 5 rulers ” of the great¬ 
est of poets, 6 and Astarta was their Arabian and Phoenician 
Queen, the “ Queen of heaven ” to whom the Israelites used to 
make cakes. Iuno, regina deum, is the Syrian Queen of 
heaven. 7 As-iri and As-et (Osiris and Isis), the active As and 
passive As, show the unit dualistically divided into the two¬ 
fold principle of sex. 8 

Sada meant “ fire.” From Asad (Asat, in place of Asad) we 
derive Asatel, 9 Setel, Sat., 10 Set, Seth God of fire of Tyrians, 
Kananites, Kenites, Philistians and Egyptians, the God of the 
Hyksos-kings that the Egyptians feared as the Devil. Asata 
is Uesata, Hestia, Yesta, Tstia, 11 and Sate. 


1 Ash = fire.—S. Sharp, Hebrew Grammar without points, p. 44 ; Wagenseil, Sota, 

p. 387. As, Ash, “ fire,” Ase (Issa, Isis, Eua), the source of fertility, HCJW- With 

Pharah-ditS, compare phero “to bear,” “to bring forth.”—Homer’s Athena courses in a 
fiery chariot, “ the flame-girt bark of the moon.” 

2 Compare Achates, from Achad, or Khatti. In Philistia and Egypt t replaced d. 

3 de Iside, 75. 

4 Ezekiel, xxxii. 8. 

5 Shining. 

6 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, soliloquy of the watchman. 

7 Jerem., vii. 17, 18. Istarati is a warlike goddess.—Schrader, Keilin. u. d. A. T. 

177. 

8 Lauth, Aeg. Vorzeit, L 38, 40. 

9 Asatal, at first. Compare Ashtaol (—Joshua, xix. 41) and the Sethite name 
Asaton.—1 Chron. iv. 11, 12. 

10 Seth is Bal, Baal, Apollo, Bel. Astarte has her emblems the doves.—Dr. A. 
Milchhoefer, Anfange d. Kunst in Griechenland, pp. 8, 87. 

11 Esat, in Ethiopic, means fire, and isatu “ fire ” in Assyrian.—Dr. Paul Haupt, 


THE AS ART ANS IN EGYPT. 


107 


Taking* the divine Monad as the starting-point, which 
everywhere impresses ns as the Original, the duplex character 
of the principle of sex brings us to the duality of Osiris-Isis, 
just as we have above divided ‘AS ’ the root of the name Life. 1 
In the same way, eloliim 2 is divisible into Osiris and Isis, 
Adam and Eua, Man and Woman, As and Asah (Ase, Issa, 
Asat). 

Apollo 3 is the Monad.—Plutarch, de Iside, 10. 

If to Ach meaning fire or Akhu “ light ” we add Abel (Abe- 
lios, Apollo) we obtain Akabel, a name of Iakoub, to mate with 
Kubele. 4 

The more wise concealing it from the many, call “the change into fire” 
Apollo, on account of the oneness (unity) ; but Plioibus, because it is pure and 
undefiled.—Plutarch, de El apud Delplios, 9. 

The Sethites marched out of Egypt with the fire-pillars lead¬ 
ing the force. Sad is Hermes ; Sada, a flaming fire (John¬ 
son’s Persian Diet. p. 690), and Sadem (Sodom) the Fire-city of 
Genesis, xix. 24. The Egyptians considered fire a living ani¬ 
mal. 5 

Qui ignem Materiem rerum esse putarunt. — Lukretius, I. G36. 

Those who have supposed that Fire is the elementary substance of things. 

Hermes was named Asad in Arabia.—Univ. Hist, xviii. 379. 
There was an idol of Sad.—ibid. 387. The Arab tribe Asad 
adored Hermes.—Chwolsohn, II. 404. Asad means ‘ Lion ’ and 
the Zodiac sign ‘ Leo.’—Richardson, Persian Arabic Diet. II. 

Phonology, pp. 177, 178, in “Hebraica,” vol. I. Jan. 1885. Syriac Asata “fever.”— 
ibid. I. 178. With the Hebrew Asah, Asa (the Issa of Josephus) and the Hebrew 
Asat “woman” we can compare the Assyrian Assatu “wife” (P. Haupt, 175) and 
the Wife-principle Isi, Esi, or Isis, the moon as Bena, Venah, Venus or Pharahdatta 
the Lunar Wisdom, the feminine principle of vitality. 

1 Lauth, aus Aegypten’s Vorzeit, I. 40. 

2 Gen. i. 1. elohim is dual. 

3 Kroisus sent a Golden Lion to Apollo.—Herodotus, I. 50; Nork, III. 178. The 
Lion is the Sun’s house.—Porphyry, de Antro, xxii. They represented the Lion-man 
on the vail of the Jewish Temple.—Ezekiel, xli. 18, 19; Exodus, xxv. 18, xxvi. 31. 
Hermes is a Power of the Sun. Macrob. xviii. xix. 285, 305. Asadoth (Joshua, iii. 20) 
looks like a city of Asad, where Sad (Sat, Set, Seth) was the tutelar deity.—The Lion 
sacred to the Sun.— Nork, III.'178 ; Philo, Somnia, 15, 16. 

4 Compare the Asherite name Kabul not far from Kadesh in latitude 33, in Gali¬ 
lee. 

3 Herodotus, III. 16. Set is Apollo-Bal, Habol. 


108 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


45; I. 432. Zadus (Sad) is the planet Merkury’s name. The 
Lion-man was represented on the vail of the Jewish temple. 
Sad and Seth are names of Hermes as originator of writing 
and science. The lion was adored as God. 1 

Nec tu aliud Vestam quam puram intellige flammam, 

Nataque de flamma corpora nulla vides. 

Jure igitur Virgo est quae semina nulla remittit 

Nec capit, et comites virginitates liabet.—Ovid, Fast. vi. 

To Virgil’s lines, 2 in which Hector delivers the sacra to Aeneas 
together with the potent eternal fire of Vesta we have the re¬ 
mark of Christopher Landini that the temple was truly great, 
having in the centre an altar 3 on which fire burned on every 
side and watched by two vestals. On the top of the temple 
was the figure of the Virgin which held in arms an Infant. 
To this, Scacchi, an Augustine monk, adds : Deus noster ignis 
consumens est, and considers the figure that of the most holy 
Virgin. For, says he, the Gentiles received prophetically 
from the divine oracles many things under those veils and 
enigmas, which, in order that they might not be disfigured or 
contaminated among the vulgar, they handed down, involved 
in fables, to the nations to be cherished. But if they should 
not at all have venerated Vesta’s statue for that reason, we will 
not have the slightest fear to regard it as an image of the Vir¬ 
gin Mother of God. 4 An Etruscan mirror shows Venus (Turan) 
embracing Adonis (Atunis) who is here represented as a Boy 
looking up at her with intense affection. 5 

The Hebrew and Phoenician languages are practically iden¬ 
tical. 6 Isaiah xix. 18 exhibits the Hebrew as the language 
of Canaan. 7 Israel is represented as an Arab sheik, not re¬ 
mote from the tribes of Ismael, Potiphar bought Ioseph ! 

1 Porphyry, Abst. iv. 54. 

2 Aeneid, II. 293, 296, 297. 

3 Leviticus, vi. 13, mentions the eternal fire. The Jewish Lion represented the 
Christos.—4 Esdras, xii. 31, 32. They ornamented the temples with leonine open jaws, 
de Iside, 38. 

4 Scacchi, Murothecium. L p. 48. 

6 Dennis, Cities, etc. 429. Turan, Turanus, Turnus. 

6 Jos. contra. Ap. I. 22, considers them the same. See the Moabite Stone and the 
Inscription of Eshmunazar. Also Dr. P. Schroder, Phon. Sprache, p. 7 ; Bibl. Arch. 
II. 236. 

7 Munk, Palestine, 87, 88. The Canaanites were a civilised and advanced people. 
—ibid. 86. Had chariots of iron. 


THE ASAR1ANS IN EGYPT. 


109 


He was a pharaonic officer, a captain of tlie Egyptian guard. 
These are Egyptian designations not Semitic! Yet we might 
have expected Semitic ones if the Phoenicians, Syrians, Idu- 
means, Philistines or Hyksos had then been the rulers of 
Egypt. In this case, we should have to admit, as Lepsius 
says, an anachronism which cannot easily find a parallel. The 
captain of the king’s body-guard was an Egyptian, Pete- 
phres, or Petphra, and the king himself is always the pliara 
(or pharaoh),—titles by no means Semitic, scarcely suited to the 
Hyksos regime. Yet Ph-Pah give Ioseph an Egyptian name. 1 
“ How is it possible that a Semitic king, who, like the six in 
the list of the so-called Shepherd-kings, must undoubtedly 
have borne a Semitic name, would have given Ioseph an 
Egyptian name, to do him honor ? ” His wife’s name is Se¬ 
mitic (being from Assana in 1 Esdras, v. 31, Asan, San, Beth 
San, San-Tanis). Petphra (his father in law) was Highpriest 
of Heliopolis, which is an additional and more certain proof 
that the Semitic nation of the Hyksos were not reigning here, 
for they would at first have destroyed all the Egyptian tem¬ 
ples ; and they would hardly have permitted the worship of 
Ha 2 to continue in the neighborhood of Memphis, whose High 
priest must give his daughter to Ioseph for a wife, in order to 
show him particular honor and to naturalise him completely. 3 
Therefore the account derived by Josephus out of Manetho is 
worthless. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, had the 
same disinclination to eat with the Greeks that is mentioned 
in Genesis, xliii. 32. If the Shepherds ruled in Egypt how 
could the Shepherds be an abomination ? Therefore, it is ob¬ 
vious that Exodus here has in view the time of Ahmes or 
Meneptah, or the period when Exodus was written, which was 
late; unless as early as the time of Alexander the Great, or 
derived from some dim tradition. 

This Isarel (or Israel), when he learns that Ioseph is still 
living and in Egypt (where Asari, Isiri, Idris, or Osiris was 

1 Gen. xlL 45. But paneach, zephonath are Hebrew. 

2 Helios. 

3 Lepsius, Letters, 476-479. Since Josephus (c. Ap. I. 1039, 1051 f.) maintains 
that the Hebrews are the Hyksos, which opinion Dr. G. Seyffarth held, and regarding 
the whole story as a Hebrew myth or hieros logos, told for the purpose of decorating 
the expulsion of the Sethite Hyksos from Egypt, Zaphnath paneach, seems to be best 
translated from the Hebrew : ‘ North, a Revealer. ’ Seph (lo Seph) is a Diviner of se¬ 
crets.—Genesis, xli. 39; xliv. 15. 


110 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


worshipped), concludes at once to make a forced march to 
Egypt taking with him his flocks and herds (all that the 
Amalekite Shepherd possessed), to see Ioseph again before he 
died ! 1 It looks like a disguised raid of the Hyksos that is 
here put forward in the historical-novel dress ; for the Ea 
(Pharaoh) is informed that the Israeli are “ Shepherds ” every 
one. 

Wa iamaru al pa-Rah, rah 2 zan ebedik gam-anocheno gam-abotliino. 

And they said to the king : pastor of cattle your servants ; both we and our 
fathers !—Gen. xlvii. 3. 

They seek to pass for Arabs; not as cultivators of grapes, 
fruit and grain. The Philistine Shepherds (tradition says) fed 
their flocks at Gizeh, opposite Memphis. They were the 
Egyptian abomination, although the Egyptians had cattle. 
The temple scribe, in seeking a remote ancestry for his peo¬ 
ple, thought first of Saturn (Israel, la Kub) who was king of 
Egypt, next of the Phoenician Isiri or Isiris, then of the Shep¬ 
herds in Egypt (the Hyksos); last of the recent history of 
Ioseph (who obtained the good will of Ptolemy) : and then 
began his story. After prescribing to Iakob 3 the desire to see 
his son, then the drought in Palestine; he suddenly develops 
his scheme in the significant words : Fear not to go down in¬ 
to Egypt; for I will there make of thee a great nation ! The 
Kaphtorim and the Kasluchim were in the mind of the scribe. 
Notwithstanding the Egyptians had retained such an unpleas¬ 
ant memory of Philistine Shepherds that every being of the 
sort was an abomination to a native Egyptian. 4 The men (are) 
Shepherds ! 5 And the land Iudah shall be a terror unto Mis- 
raim ! 6 This is the Hyksos ! There is no date in Genesis and 
Exodus, nor to the Egyptian dynasties. Hence an undefined 

1 Gen. xlv. 28; xlvii. 1, 4. 

2 rah (roh) means a friend; a pastor (roia, or raia); then the alliteration of pa 
Rah and rah. It is the novelist style of the eastern writing. 

3 Keb is Kronos, Saturn. The Egyptians mourned for him 70 days.—Gen. 1. 3. 
Iokab is Saturn. Further on, the scribe compares him with the setting sun.—Homer, 
Iliad, viii. 479 ; Hesiod, Op. et D., 167 ; Pindar, 01. ii. 128; Gen. 1. 10, 11. 

4 Gen. xlvi. 34. 

5 haanoshim rai (roi) zan.—Gen. xlvi. 32. Though a Shepherd, Iaqab takes as 
much interest in his tomb as a born Misraimite would, and had it excavated during his 
lifetime.—Gen. 1. 5. 

6 Isaiah, xix. 17. Iacob speaks out the main purpose of the Scribe’s narrative, 
the preservation of Israelite posterity.—Gen. xlvii. 29. 


THE ARABIANS IN EGYPT. 


Ill 


vagueness as to time pervades them. Taylor speaks of the 
sharp Semitic profile of the Hyksos, while, according to Uhle- 
mann, Hyksos and Israelites are represented alike on the 
monuments. 1 Osiris 2 is Asar 3 among the Ghebers of Phoeni¬ 
cia, the Kef a, Goub and Israel. “ The body of Osiris (die lie- 
gende Mumie) is beheld lying in a boat, two eyes above it! ” 

In adytis habent idolum Osiridis sepultum—Julius Firmicus, de Errore, 2. 

We have Saturn as God of time and eternity in Genesis, xxi. 
33, wdiose day was 44 Saturno die,” Saturday, at the Temple of 
Saturn (El Oulom). 


Saturn whom they also call Sun.—Servius, ad Aeneid, I. 729. 

Whom some call Sun, others Jupiter.—Servius, ad Aeneid, I. 729. 

Bel is called Saturn and Sol, owing to a certain theory of the rites.—ibid. 
I. 729. 

In the sun El has sethis tabernacle.—Vulgate psalm xix. 4. 

In the sun he has set his tent.—Septuagint Psalm, xix. 4. 

Hang them up to Iaghoh, before the sun.—Numbers, xxv. 4. 

Asad means 4 Lion ’ and the zodiac sign 4 Leo ’; 4 and the Lion 
is the 4 house ’ of the Sun. 5 The Arab tribe Asad worshipped 
Hermes 6 and Asada (the Messenger or Angel of Merkury) 
composed prayers and hymns, Hermes being the Author of the 
services in the temples of Egypt and Arabia. 7 Hermes, the 
Divine Wisdom, is that 4 Power of the Sun ’ which is the author 
of speech 8 being the Logos and nearest Planet to the Sun. 
Hermes is consequently the 4 el Sadi ’ 9 of the Jews, their ear- 

1 Taylor, I. 143 ; Uhlemann, Israeliten und Hyksos, 76; quotes Denon, pi. 133. 
Uhlemann’s calculations by Phoenix-periods, following Tacitus, Ann. vi. 28, would date 
Ramses II. about B.c. 1253, and Ahmes-Amosis about b.C. 1904. — ibid. p. 89. If we 
should happen to consider that the Saites of the 16th or 17th dynasty was the “ Salatis ” 
at Memphis, according to e7ose/> Aws-Manetho (contra Apion, I.), then the Amosis-Moses 
might be expected to commence the 18th dynasty. But our reliance is neither upon 
Jew nor Egyptian in this case. 

2 Osiris replaces Set. The name Asari is written in place of Set in the names Seti 
I., Seti II., and Setnecht. Set is the Kheta God.—Meyer, Set-Typhon, 51-57. 

3 The Syrian Lord. See the proper name Asara.—1 Esdras, i. 31. Asar is Osiris.— 
Movers, I. 43. Sur.—1 Sam. xv. 7. 

4 Richardson, Persian and Arabic Diet. I. 432; II. 105. 

5 Porphyry, de Antro, xxii. 

6 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 404. 

7 Chwolsohn, Altbab. Lit., 136, 156. 

8 Macrobius, I. 285, 305. 

9 Exodus, vi. 3. 


112 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


liest Ancestor Set, or Seth, the God of Phoenicians, Sabians, 
and Egyptians. The Hebrews adored Bal (Mithra who rolls 
round the Wandering* Planets), the sun, moon, and the (five) 
planets. 1 Consequently their symbolism placed a Gold Candle¬ 
stick with seven lamps to indicate these Sabaoth. Therefore 
the Jews, like the Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, were 
Sabians and adored Mithra standing on a Lion. “ The Lion is 
worshipped as God.” 2 “ They worship the Lion, and they or¬ 
nament the gates of the temples with leonine open jaws.” 3 
The conjoined heads of ‘lion and man’ were represented on 
the vail of the temple of the Jews. 4 The Jewish Lion repre¬ 
sented the King Christos. 5 Kroisos sent to Apollo, at Delphi, 
a golden lion. 6 The priests of Mithra were called c leones,’ 7 
as the ‘ leones ’ were an order in the Persian Mysteries. In 
this and in the next following extract a resemblance to the 
mysteries and theory of early Messianism may perhaps be 
traced. 

ADDRESS OF RAMSES II., IN AN INSCRIPTION TO HIS FATHER SETI I.: 

Thou art the Sun-god, thy body is his body, no king is like to 
thee, thou alone art like the Son of Osiris. . . . Thou dost 
rest in the Deep like Osiris. . . . Thou hast entered into 
the realm of heaven. Thou dost accompany the Sungod Ba. 
Thou art united with the Stars and the Moon. Thou dost rest 
in the Deep like Unnofer 8 the Eternal. Thy hands move the 
God Turn in heaven and on earth, like the Wandering Stars 
and the fixed Stars. Thou dost remain in the forepart of the 
bark of millions. When the Sun rises in the tabernacle of 
heaven thine eyes behold his splendor. When Turn goes to 
rest on earth thou art in his train. Thou dost enter the Secret 
House before his lord. Thy foot wanders in the Deep. Thou 
remainest in the company of the Gods of the under world! 9 

1 2 Kings, xxiii. 5. 

2 Porphyry, de Abst. iv. p. 54. 

3 Plutarch, Iside, 38. 

4 Ezekiel, xli. 18, 19; Exodus, xxvii. 31. 

5 4 Esdras, xii. 31, 32; Rev. v. 5. Ariel means * God’s Lion.’ 

6 Herodotus, L 50; Nork, III. 178. Labo ‘lion,’ lab ath ‘flame,’ lab ‘heart,’ leben 
‘ to live. ’ 

7 Tertullian, adv. Mark, 1. 13. 

8 the Good Opener, a title of the rising sun. Un =» to open.—Massey, II. 89, 90. 

9 Brugsch, II. 39-41. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


113 


The Sun is the father of Osiris. 1 The primitive, primal power 
(Urkraft), the unit, has created all that floats around us : 2 

Makes As 3 (Arkturus), Kesil (Orion), and Kimah (Pleiads)and the secret re¬ 
cesses of Teman. 4 —Job, ix. 9. 

Let them he for signs and for festivals, and for days and for years.—Gen. i. 
14. 

The three stars Kappa, Iota, Theta, in the western hand of 
Bootes, formerly, when Alpha Draconis was the Pole Star, in 
descending rather skirted the horizon than absolutely sunk 
beneath it. They must have been invisible, and the whole con¬ 
stellation disappeared in that low latitude for about three days 
while the Search was going on and the Kananite and Jewish 
women mourned the Lord. After this period the three stars 
would immediately reappear below and to the eastward of the 
Alpha Draconis. The detachment of Arkturus was an indica¬ 
tion of the loss of a special conspicuous symbol of Osiris. 5 
Precisely at the moment of the heliacal rising of the brilliant 
star Spica, the Alpha of Yirgo and near the middle of her 
figure, rose the Alpha (Arkturus) of the Husbandman Bootes. 
In the Aethiopian latitude, more than forty eight and a half 
centuries ago, on the very morning after the acronical depart¬ 
ure of the last of the stars of Bootes, Aldebaran rose with 
the vernal Sun. Adni, Adonai, the Loim called! When they 
shouted “ Bejoice, we have found him ; ” 6 the Sun arose with 
the splendid Aldebaran. 7 In this respect Arkturus is practi¬ 
cally, and to our purpose, the same materially as Bootes, Diony¬ 
sus, 8 Adonis, Hunter Orion and Nimrod. 

1 Plutarch, de Iside, 12. 

2 Nork, I. 211. Art. Baukunst. Bal (Adan) in Semite theory is both Sungod and 
Saturn, like El Eljon and Israel. The chief seat of the Adonis worship was Phoenicia, 
and Dan was on the coast originally.—Comp. Judg. v. 17. El is Saturn. His day is 
Saturday = die Saturno. 

3 Ash, fire. Asat, brightness. Arkturus near the tail of the Great Bear. Kesil in 
Lenormant, Origines, 247, 331, means the strong, arrogant, man, the Gebar (Giant) of 
the Arabians. 

* “ Subter praecordia fixa tenetur 

Stella micans radiis Arkturus nomine claro 
—cui subjecta fertur 

Spicum illustre tenens splendente corpore Virgo.”—Cicero’s Version of rat us. 

6 de Iside, 18. 

6 Osiris Found. 

7 John Landseer, Sabaean Res. 179-184. 

8 Orion is compared with Dionysus.—Movers, I. 498. Orion is Nimrod.—Nork, 
Wdrterbuch in das A. T. 347. 

8 


114 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Star of your Alah.—Amos, v. 26. 

Great Osiris, greater PlirS—the Light, Fire, Flame—, greater greater Iar 1 
horn in Epiphi, now very luminous! 

Thou art the quickly from-the-sun-coming God.—Seal of Iar. 

But the coffin of Osiris was Orion , at considerable distance from 
Bootes and the Great Bear. After finding Osiris, Isis gives 
him burial. ... In the innermost recess where the uninitiated 
cannot approach they kept the idol of Osiris buried; this 
they annually mourn with laments, they shave their heads, in 
order to deplore the pitiable misfortune of the King with the 
deformity of their disfigured heads, beat the breasts, lacerate 
the arms, cut again the scars of former wounds, in order that by 
annual Mournings the grief of the fatal and pitiable murder be 
reborn in their minds. And when they have done these things 
on the appointed days they then feign that they find the re¬ 
mains of his torn body, and when they have found Osiris, as if 
their griefs had ended they rejoice ! 2 Vulcan 3 advised Orion 
to always go through the sea to meet the Sun, and Orion thus 
recovered his sight. 4 

PRAYER TO THE ASSYRIAN GOD, MARDUK. 

May the Sun, Greatest of the Gods, receive the soul into his holy hands.— 
Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archaeology, II. 30. 

A swathed Osiris, dweller of the West, Lord of Abot. 5 —Trans. Soc. Bibl. 
Arch. VII. 354. 

Herakles Sandan was worshipped in Orion, and so, apparently 
was Dionysus. 6 

Osiris comes to thee (king Pepi) as Orion!—Inscription in Pepi’s pyramid. 
Maspero. 

The Bridegroom Sun comes as Adon.—Psalm, xix. 4, 5. 

To the meeting of the Great King, 

Bring the shining torches ! 

Their faces towards the east, and they prostrated themselves towards the 
east to the sun.—Ezekiel, viii. 16. 

We have found him (concealed in the arms of the sun).—de Iside, 52. 

1 Horns. 

2 Jul. Firmicus, de Errore, 2. 

3 Patach. 

4 Nork Real-Worterbuch, III. 347. 

6 Abydos. 

0 Movers, 497, 498. 


THE AS API ANS IN EGYPT. 


115 


Star-robed Sun, 1 King of Fire, Chief of the kosmos, 

Helios, long-shadow-casting Shepherd of mortal life !—Nonnus, xl. 370. 

The Lydian Herakles was, in the Persian myth, the Orion 
transferred into the heaven. 2 Orion proceeded to the east 
and there the God of the sun is met by him. Osiris descends 
in the west to Sheol, he reappears again in the rising sun 
(Serach). After death, Dionysus rises from Hades to heaven. 
Life, death, resurrection and immortality were there in front 
of the pyramid, with the Sphinx (an emblem of the setting 
Sun, Turn) gazing directly at the coming sunrise ! The lion’s 
body with a man’s head, holding a temple (the emblem of re¬ 
ligious faith) between his extended forepaws, guards the scene. 
The intellect of man in the lapse of time never has produced a 
greater symbol in testimony of his belief in a resurrection. 
The pyramid bears evidence, in Lauth’s opinion, of a knowl¬ 
edge of the 36 decans presiding over thirty-six weeks of ten 
days each. The 36th layer in size and height is distinguished 
from the rest, and something in the color of its casing outside 
may have marked it. Lauth counted 216 layers (to each side, 
probably); for he multiplies 36 x 6 = 216, giving six times 
360 days to each side, and to the four sides 24 years of 360 days 
each,—which is, he says, just the duration of the reign of 
Sanefru, according to the Turin papyrus. The black summit 
suggests the night-heaven, which renders visible the distin¬ 
guishing stars of the decans. 

He thinks that the region was worked to represent the Ely- 
sian Fields and with a conception of the Isles of the Blessed, 
richly watered by a stream brought from the Nile at im¬ 
mense expense through the primitive rock. Till now two 
grandiose cuts have been uncovered, lined with enormous 
stone blocks. “ If one 3 thinks a moment about the statement 
that Cheops rests in the pit 4 one must, since the sarcophagus 

1 Herakles-Mithra-Kronos, ’He'Atov irvpoevra. —Nonnus, xvii. 9. 

2 Movers, 472. 

3 Lauth, p. 147. 

4 Herodotus, II. 124, speaks of the underground chambers on the ridge, the 
burial vaults that Khufu made for himself on the Island, and his canal from the Nile. 
Things must have continued in good condition, at least externally, else Thothmes III., 
Thothmes IV., and Petuchanu of the 24th dynasty would hardly have felt any interest 
in Gizeh. The casing on the Great Pyramid was intact in the time of Strabo and con¬ 
tinued so down to the time of the Caliphs, else the Arabs would have found the entrance 
on the north side. 


116 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in the upper grave-chamber of the Great Pyramid teaches us 
the contrary, come to the opinion that thereby is meant the 
placing his image in stone on the Island of the Field Aalu 
(Elysium) by the great Sphinx.” As to the condition of the 
Elysian Field in ancient times we do not care to speak, but 
Mr. Petrie has found no pitch in the pinholes of Cliufu’s sar¬ 
cophagus in the Great Pyramid; even if the cover never had 
been fastened in like Kliafra’slid the sarcophagus might have 
held an artificial body. Herodotus, II. 127, distinctly says 
they say that Clieops himself lies in the Island into which his 
channel flows from the Nile. 

The days are coming, dictum of Iahoh, and I will cause to spring up to 
Daud 

A Branch Just, who shall reign King and prosper.—Jeremiah, xxiii. 5. 

Lofty Power or primal branch of the Unknown Father 1 
Great honor of nature and affirmation of the Gods, 

Whose right it is to look upon the Father beyond this world 
Thee Latium calls Sol. ... 

The Nile venerates thee as Serapis, Memphis as Osiris 
Discordant rites (as) Mithra, Pluto, and savage Typhon. 

Thou art Atys too and Boy of the curved and bountiful plough 
And Ammon of sandy Libya and Adon of Byblos. 

Hail true form of the Gods and the Father's face ! 

To whom a name of three letters 2 with the numeral sum G08 
Completes a sacred name, an appellation, and an omen.—Martianus Capella. 
Helios the Greatest God he sent forth 3 from himself 4 in all respects like 
himself.—Julian, iv. p. 132. 

Kepheus was called Inflammatus and Flammiger (flame- 
bearer).—Ideler, Sternnamen, p. 43. Zacliel (or Zaclial) means 
Lion in Hebrew; while Zuhhel (Suhel is a name in Arabic of 


1 Araun. 

2 Iao. Cham (Sol) is in Semite letters Q J"l (H = 8 I D = 600). Bel Chamman. 
Khamos. 

3 he caused to appear, he exhibited. 

4 Kub, Kouph (Keb, Seb), Khnum, Noum, Kneph, Bel-Saturn. The Holy Mourn¬ 
ing for Saturn-Kronos in Egypt is mentioned by Plutarch, de Iside, 32. Hence he must 
be mourned in his temple. See de Iside, 29. The image of Osiris is in lunar shape (de 
Iside, 39), consequently, with horns.—Nonnus, ix. 27, 54. 

Thy little bull has deserted, O Samaria !—Hosea, viii. 5. 

The little bulls of Beth Aun.—Hosea, x. 5. 

Thy God, O Dan, lives !—Amos, viii. 14. 

(Moses) beheld the little bull and the music.—Exodus, xxii. 19. 

They were dancing in choruses and singiug to the Golden Bull of Dionysus, as we 
learn from Herodotus was the Arabian religion. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


117 


the planet Saturn. Kepheus was therefore a sign in the 
heavens for Keb, the Kef a, and Khebrons, or Ghebers. Ke¬ 
pheus is the hidden Sun (Saturn), consequently King of the 
Fire-land in the South, 1 and Khafu, Chufu, bears his name. 
Petrie discovered the standard 2 of Khufu. “No trace of a 
Sphinx in statuary, tablets, or inscription, is to be found until 
the Hyksos period ; and such a form was not common until 
after that.” 3 We could therefore assume that the Sphinx 
dates the period of the Khufu erections at Gizeh, and that 
they are of Syrian, Semite, origin, the work of the success¬ 
ors of the conquerors of Memphis. Osiris, Isah (Issa in Jo¬ 
sephus), human-headed serpents (one an impersonation of 
Herakles), Menes, Athothis, Kenkenes, Semenses, Kabeh, 
Khaires, Kheneres, Benothares 4 Tot, Taaut, Tahutmes (the 
name, merely) are all, like the Kadmus myth itself, Asiatic and 
Phoenician in character, and we are compelled to see Philis- 
tian, Amalekite, or Phoenician inspiration in the wonderful 
constructions connected with the names Khufu, Khafra and 
the Sphinx, as a result of the invasion of the Kefa, 5 or the 
Hyksos, and the occupation of Tanis, Xois, Sais, Aun (On) 
and Memphis at a period perhaps not removed by many cen¬ 
turies from b.c. 2000-1800. Josephus claims the Hyksos as 
Hebrews, and says: It is clear from the years mentioned, 
reckoning the time, that the so-called Shepherds, our fore¬ 
fathers , inhabited this province 393 years before Danaos went 
to Argos. 6 The resemblance in the roots of the words Amen, 
Men 7 Men-es, Men-tu (Syrians), Amen (1 Kings, xxii. 26) the 
early civilization and strength of the Kanaanite power, the 
root Asar (Osor, Seir, Ousir) in Osir-is, the early presence of 


1 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, I. 332. We can follow in Homer and the myths the 
Descent of Saturn to Hades and the rise of Zeus to heaven. 

2 Petrie, Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, 153. Diodorus Siculus expressly states 
that Menkaura was a son of Khufu.—ibid, 155. Who then is Kha-f-ra ? 

a ibid. 157. 

4 Benon signifies the son of the Sun,—Ben Auni.—Gen. xxxv. 18. Benothar-es 

is the Egyptian form of Ben-Adar. Adar is a name of “Herakles-Mars ” and Diony- 
sus-Moloch. 

6 Pelestaiim from Kaphtor.—Amos, ix. 7. The Philistians must have entered the 
Delta of Egypt. 

6 Jos. c. Apion, I. p. 1041. The village Adan in the Great Plain.—Robinson, Bibl. 
Res. II. 319. 

7 Amonel.—Codex Nasar. I. 56. Mena = a name of the Sun’s bull. Meneuis, the 
first legislator. Men and Menti = Hyksos in the inscriptions.—Sayce, Her. 325. 


118 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Dionysus Sabos and Seb (Saturn) 1 in Egypt, the migrations 
of the Phoenicians and Pliilistians (with their Gods Mentu, 
Atumu, Turn, Adon, Aton, Adad, Daud, Taaut, Asad, Sada, 
and Set, or Seth) to the west as far as Tunis and Kartago, the 
Phoenician or Philistian royal names Saul-at-is, Hapa Kanana, 
Benon, Arakles 2 Apapi, 3 Staan (Sat, Set-aan), the fact that at 
least two dynasties of the Phoenicians, Pliilistians, or Hyksos 4 
entered Egypt, indicate that Arabs or Kananites once ruled 
in the Delta of Egypt. 

Isis (Hebrew Issa) was buried at Memphis (—Diodorus, I. 
22. p. 25) just as Sarah was buried at Hebron. According to 
Strabo, 787, the Egyptians derived their geometry, reckoning, 
and arithmetic from the Phoenicians by means of the trade and 
business. Meinecke left out the article before vrjcros, which 
was required in Strabo’s description of the Delta to identify it 
with the island Keft ur (Caphtor). Petrie puts the destruction 
of the temples at Gizeh between dynasties seven and eleven. 
There are two things in the case of Khufu and Khafra that de¬ 
serve attention ; one is that Herodotus and Diodorus put them 
after Bamses III. ; thus conflicting with what is supposed to be 
Manetlio’s meaning: 5 and the other matter is that Herodotus, 
II. 126-128, states that the Egyptians hated these kings and 
spoke evil of them : “ Kheopa went to that degree of wicked¬ 
ness,” “ every sort of evil was among the Egyptians, 6 and the 
temples at such a time having been shut up were not opened. 
And the Egyptians through hatred are not very willing to 
name them, 7 but too they call the Pyramids (those) of the 
Shepherd Philistios, who during this time possessed cattle in 

1 the Kronos of the Karu (Syrians), Akaron (Ekron), and Karians (Caria). 

2 the Phoenician Archal. 

s Apopi and Aphobis ; or Apophis in Egypt, the Serpent of Egyptian and Phoeni¬ 
cian mythology. Setach is Egyptian for the solar “year,” as shanah is “year” in 
Hebrew ; Set and San (Sun) being solar names. 

4 see Sayce, I. 460, dynasties, xv. and xvii. The Homeric Odyssey, v. 125-127, 
dates Menelaos under the reign of Polybios at Thebes in Egypt,—a Greek word. 

5 No authoritative table of the kings existed.—Rawlinson, Egypt, I. 298. 

6 “During these 106 years.” — Herod. II. 128. Some considered the Huksos 
(from Hak and sos) to be A'rabs. Sos means “horse” in Hebrew. Sosia means 
“ horse ” in Syriac. The Saracens were the Amalekites and their dependencies (includ¬ 
ing the Idumeans), extending from the banks of the Nile to the Euphrates.—Jervis, 
Genesis, 465. 

7 As they were Philistians, or Phoenicians. The Karthaginians, a Phoenician 
colony, ultimately, before the time of Herodotus, ascended the Nile to Thebes and did 
great injury to the monuments of Egypt. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


119 


these places.” It is not surprising that Knofcel, with such a 
plain charge against the Shepherds , did not hesitate to claim 
the dynasty of Khufu as Hyksos, nor that Manetho made com¬ 
plaints against the Hyksos, nor that the Bible should say that 
Shepherds were an abomination to the Egyptians, 1 nor that Jo¬ 
sephus should have claimed the Hyksos Shepherds as the ances¬ 
tors of the tribes of Isiri-Cheopha-Kepheus or Iacopo-Israel, 
the Kopt. 2 We now have the tribes of Moab, Seir, Idumea, the 
Amalekites, Philistians, Cliaru, Amu (Aimim), Sosim (Zozim), 
Khal, Kadesh, fronting the Egyptian border in Hyksos raids." 

I will stretch out my hand upon the Philistians and will cut off the Khare- 
tim 4 and destroy the remnants of the sea coast.—Ezek. xxv. 16. 

Their children remember their altars and their groves by the green trees 
upon the high hills.—Jeremiah, xvii. 2. 

1 Genesis, xlvi. 34 ; xliii. 32. Mariette, Tombes, p. 11, says du caveau d’un mas- 
taba : Qnelquefois des ossesments de boeufs jonchent le sol. 

2 The form Qobt appears. Compare the change of b and p in Jacob and Jacopo. 
Melek of Kliafr in Joshua, xii. 17, points toward the Egyptian Khafra and the Kefa; 
at least the names are similar. 

3 Ptolemy, by the Saracens, is supposed to mean the Edomite tribes in their stretch 
across the neck of the entire Arabian peninsula, from the Arabian to the Persian 
Gulf.—Jervis, Gen. 465. 

4 The Khari and Pheleti. 2 Sam. xx. 23. Kharetim, Peleti and Gati.—2 Chron. 
xv. 18. The Idumeans are here mentioned with the Charu, Seir and Moab.—Ezekiel, 
xxv. S, 9, 12, 13. The ‘sons of Charea’ are mentioned.—1 Esdras, v. 32. Iacob’s 
tents extended from the Arnon to Gilead. Having thus laid a foundation for connect¬ 
ing the Idumeans (in Ezekiel, xxv.) with Moab and consequently with the Arab Shep¬ 
herds (the Hyksos that entered Egypt), we may not safely however quote 

The Sosim in Cham.—Genesis, xiv. 5. Compare Numbers, ii. 32, 36. 

The Aem im (Ommaioi, Amou) in Soah (Savrj) Kiriathaim.—Gen. xiv. 5. 

Genesis, xiv. 17, shows the Valley of Saua to be at the bottom of the Dead Sea in Asau 
(Esau) near Sodom, and Genesis, xiv. 6, shows the Chorites (worshippers of Chares, 
the Sun) in Seir (Esau) and on Mt. Chor. Gen. xiv. 7, mentions Kadesh and the 
Amalekites. Amalek gave name to the whole race of Aesau —Jervis, Genesis, 465. 
The turbulent Bedawi tribes about Petra have by some been supposed to be Simeonites 
or other Beni Israel. They retain not only the distinctive physiognomy but many of 
the customs of the Jews, such as wearing the Pharisaic lovelocks.—R. F. Burton, 
Gold Mines of Midian, p. 323. What Herodotus, II. 133, says about ‘an oracle from 
Buto ’ implies temples and a priesthood in full sway throughout the Delta in the 4th 
dynasty, probably derived from the temples of Syria, Philistia, or Atuma. The 
foreign tyrants (Hyksos) must have appeared to the kings of Upper Egypt in no envi¬ 
able light, yet on a memorial stone of the time of Amenhotep I. a Theban family em¬ 
ployed in the temple of Amon is represented for six generations back with Semitic 
names. Even the original ancestor is called pet-Baal ‘ servant of Baal.’ If we are to 
draw any conclusions from such striking appearances they cannot be in favor of the 
(Josephus) Manethonian tradition.—Brugsch, I. 255, 256. London ed. 


120 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Spoil all the Philistians (and) cut off from Tyre and Zidon every helper that 
remains.—Jer. xlvii. 4. 

I will kindle a fire 1 in the temples of the Gods of Misraim to burn them 
and make them captives.—Jer. xliii. 12. 

M. Chabas says that neither the monuments nor the papyri 
have delivered the slightest mention relative to the conquest 
of Egypt by the foreign barbarians. The earlier period is 
mythological. Manetho completely divests the time of any 
historical character by making it cyclical. 2 On examining the 
earliest monuments of dynasty XVIII. we are startled by their 
astonishing resemblance to those of dynasty XI., a resem¬ 
blance which would, had we no historical evidence on the other 
side, justify the leap of the Tablet of Abydos from dynasty 
XII. to XVIII. 3 According to the Turin book of the kings the 
reigns towards the end of the 13th dynasty scarcely lasted on 
an average four years, and the existence of collateral dynas¬ 
ties is very probable. 4 The Egyptians, not excepting the col¬ 
lege of priests of the Theban Amon, in the time of the Hyksos 
and the following dynasties gave their children pure Semitic 
names. They did not hesitate to adopt the names of the 
Hyksos kings. There could have been no deep-rooted hered¬ 
itary enmity against the Syrians, and the Manethonian tradi¬ 
tion is not easily upheld. 5 In the inscription on the rock- 
tablet of the twenty-second year of king Aahmes, the Eenekh 
(Phoenicians) are mentioned as a foreign people 6 to whom 

1 As. Ash. 

2 Encycl. Britannica, Art. Egypt, p. 730; Brugsch, I. 62. Compare Lauth, Aeg. 
Chronol. 8, 9, tables II, III. It is agreed by all Egyptologists that the founder of the 
Egyptian state is no legendary personage. He changed the course of the Nile, to gain 
the ground on which Memphis could be built. Was killed by a hippopotamus. “ All 
this has a distinctly historical aspect! ” Athothis was a physician and wrote astro¬ 
nomical books ! Is this historical , or the mythology of Thoth ? The circumstance that 
dynasties of the Gods were introduced into the lists of the kings and that Mina (Menes) 
leads all the lists adds no credibility to the lists, but suggests the idea that the priests 
tinkered them according to a general plan. Manetho’s numbers are cyclical.—Saal- 
schiilz, p. 30, quotes Boeckh. 

3 Encycl. Britannica, Art. Egypt. 

4 Brugsch, I. 198. 

s ibid. I. 255. 

0 ibid. I. 258, 277. When the Hyksos were driven out of Egypt the Charu re¬ 
mained, and though regarded as a foreign people, were evidently on terms of friendly 
intercourse with their new rulers. Thus the first monarch of the eighteenth dynasty, 
Aahmes, the king who expelled the Hyksos, speaks in one of his inscriptions of “ stones 
drawn by oxen which were brought hither and given over to the foreign people of the 
Fenekh.” Hence it is plain that in lower Egypt there were, in addition to the Hebrews, 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


121 


stone is delivered. The name Ramses appears to be the Sy¬ 
rian ‘ ram,’ ‘ ramas,’ and the name Merira, in Egyptian, bears a 
strong resemblance to Merari in Hebrew. The Shepherds 
were, it is said, expelled by king Ahmes. 1 


In tlie fourth generation they shall return here, For the distress of the 
Amorites is not yet completed.' 2 —Genesis, xv. 16. 

When a boy, Esau (Set) rode upon an ass. —Kabbala Denudata, II. 209. 

Typlion (Seth) fled away on an ass from the battle, for seven days, and 
(then) begat the boys Ierusalem and Ioudaeus.—De Iside et Osiride, 31. 

Idmnaeus and Iudaeus were said to be sons of Semiramis. 
—Stephanus Byzantinus. Esau (Asu, the Evil Spirit) in¬ 
cludes the Amalekites; Jervis says (Genesis, 466, 467) ‘ the 
names of the sons of Aesau are still legible on this whole tract 
of country from Egypt to the Euphrates, being preserved in 
the national denominations of the great Arab tribes which 
people it at the present day.’ There is a tradition that the 
Amalekites anciently conquered Lower Egypt. ‘ Arabian 
tradition is constant in affirming the flux and reflux of the 
Edomite tribes, 3 under the general name of Amalekites 


two distinct populations of Semitic race—the Charu or Fenokh, and the Hyksos or 
Shasu, who were as different from one another as were the Sidonians and the Edomites 
to whom they were respectively akin.—I. Taylor, I. 151. 

1 Sayce, Herodot., I. 32<, 328: Chabas, les Pasteurs, 43-47. Aahmes, is Amosis. 
Seti and Ramses are Semitic names. These, like Aahmes, fought against Pelusium and 
the Philistines. But, as Exodus, i. 11, states that the Ghebers or Hebrews from Hebron 
(from Abaris ?) built Ramses, and as Ahmes leads the xviiith dynasty while the first 
Ramses begins the xixth dynasty, the Exodus could not have happened in the time of 
Ahmes unless the two dynasties were contemporaneous. Compare ha Bar-im, 2 Sam. 
xx. 14, with the ancient deity name Abar or Bar. 

2 This obviously refers to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt. Because the 
Amorites (and Khatti) were strangers in Egypt, ‘ in a land not their own.’ Moreover, 
Ramses II. fights the Khatti ! 

3 All the melechs (kings, chiefs) of Arabia, and all the melechs of Harb that dwell 
in Medbar (the Desert).—Jeremiah, xxv. 24. 

Harb covers Nabathea, Arabia Petraea and Inland Arabia, from Kasim towards 
Medineh and Mecca. The Beni Harb composed the main population of the Hijaz, now 
as of old. The Harb nation, as described by Burckhardt, is subdivided into, at least, 
twenty great tribes ; distinguished from each other by as many denominations, family, 
characteristic, or territorial; and occupying a tract of country, extending in its great¬ 
est length north and south, about seven degrees and a half, between Heymediyeh, on 
the borders of Kasim, and Hali on the confines of Yemen ; and in its greatest breadth 
east and west nearly five degrees and a half, from Kasim to El-Khedheyreh on the 
coast of the Hijaz.—Jervis, Genesis, 192, 384-387 ; Dunlap, Sod, I. 202; Wetzstein, 
88. Carb is derived from kerabh ‘war’ and kaurabh ‘to fight.’—Jervis, 3S6. Kie- 


122 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


throughout the entire length of this country.’—Jervis, 471. 
See Ockley’s Hist. Saracens, I. 57, 58. 

My sword shall be bathed in heaven, lo it shall come down upon Idumea, and 
upon the people I have anathemized, to judgment.—Isaiah, xxxiv. 5. 

Thus Asau dwelt in Mt. Seir. Asau, Edom! —Genesis, xxxvi. 8. 


The priestly order in the Delta was in close sympathy with 
if not derived from the temples of Pliilistia, Syria and the 
Negeb. The Philistians or Phoenicians may have erected the 
pyramids, 1 and the Arabs have come in later as Horsemen or 
Hyksos. 

Prof. A. H. Sayce says 2 that “ The name (Dumu-zi) was 
translated by the Semites ‘ Tirnmuz (or Dimmuz) of the flood ’ 
(W. A. I. ii. 47, 29), and the solar character of the deity was in¬ 
dicated by writing his name with ideographs that signified 
‘ the maker of fire ’ (i tim-izi ).” The matter begins to look more 
serious when we find in Josephus, contra Apion, an Egyptian 
king Timaus (Tammuz-Timmuz ?) mentioned by Manetho in 
the 2nd book of his history ; when no Egyptian king’s name, 
resembling Timaus, is found except Manetho’s Tamplithis of 
the fourth dynasty. It follows, then, that, by Timaus, Mane¬ 
tho meant either Tammuz or Tamphthis. In the one case, his 
account of the Hyksos period is confessedly mythic ; in the 
other, Heeren’s and Knotel’s hypothesis is confirmed, that 
the Syrians built the pyramids, entering Egypt at least as 
early as the 4th dynasty. Compare the name of the Hebrew 
priest Merari 3 with that of Merira, an Egyptian Priest-king of 
the Sixth dynasty, whose pyramid has been found within 
about seven years. 

The list of Tunra appears on his tomb 4 at Memphis. For 

pert’s Map places the ‘ Beni Harb ’ as far south as towards Mecca, about latitude 22. 
C. Ritter. Berlin, 1852. 

Genesis, xxii. 5: Et fuit mihi bos et asinus, quasi diceret Esauum et Iismaelem 
fuisse sub ipso ; quin et innueret illorum surculos qui sunt serous et ancilla.—Kabbala 
Denudata, II. 209. 

1 They shall remove the corpses of their kings far from Me.—Ezekiel, xlii. 9. 
This refers to the burial of the Hebronite-Khethite and Kanauite kings in the High 
Places of Judea and Phoenicia. 1 All the kings of the Khatim ’ is an expression in 2 
Chronicles, i. 17. 

2 Sayce, Hibbert Lect. 1887, pp. 232, 233. 

3 Exodus, vi. 16. Ar and Ra are solar names. Mer means “loved ” in Egyptian. 

4 But Tunra (Don Ra, Adon Ra) mentions Ramses II. oE the 19th dynasty. De 
Rouge does not understand why Tunra leaves out the first five cartouches (beginning 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


123 


some reason he does not begin with Menes, 1 but skips the first 
five kings that Manetho mentions. Living at Memphis, Tunra 
ought to have know7i the line of earliest Memphite kings Vetter than 
the Thebans who lived after the destruction of the Memphian in¬ 
stitutions at Ghizeh; 2 better than Manetho of Sebennytus who 
lived in the time of Ptolemy 2nd. The priests in the time of 
Seti I., like Manetho, began the list of kings with Mena. They, 
if they had known earlier kings than Mena , would of course have 
mentioned them in their lists! The fixing upon Mena as the 
first king exposes their hand; for the Tunra (Sakkarah) list 
begins with the fifth king after Mena, showing that the first 
five king-names were not in the Memphite list, but in another 
list of as late a period, inscribed under a hostile dynasty. 
Manetho has thus limited the line of Egyptian kings to Mena, 
while the Sakkarah monument limits it to Merbaipen. Mane¬ 
tho drew up his list of dynasties partly in accordance with the 
Theban records of the 19th dynasty. 

Ever since Kepheus 3 dwelt in the land of the South.—Nonnus, II. 682. 

Now Abrahm left the neighborhood of Khebron (Hebron) in 
the Mountains of the Amorites above the Khatti and jour- 

with Menes) in the list of Seti I. at Abydos. Perhaps he had not heard of them, or, 
being informed, looked upon the introduction into the historical annals of such names 
as an innovation, or considered these names mythic. 

1 Men is the Moongod of Asia Minor. There were more than 1300 years between 
Mena (Menes) and Solomon.—Josephus, Antiq. viii. 6, 2. This would make Mena 
reign before b.c. 2300. 

2 Tunra’s list has been said to have been less carefully made. His record clearly 
varies from that of Seti I., and is not written with the same hieroglyphs. But, in spite 
of this, Tunra’s inscription would not have left out the names Mena and Teta if it 
was universally admitted by the priests of Memphis at the commencement of the 19th 
dynasty that Mena, Teta, Atota, Ata, Khetkhet (Kenkenes) preceded Merba-Mer- 
baipen. Having got up so near to the head of Seti’s list, the probability is that Tun¬ 
ra’s list would have included the commencement of it if Seti’s canon had been gener¬ 
ally confessed to be the true record at the time Tunra’s inscription was made. The 
Sakkarah tomb leaves out a king’s shield that in the table of Seti stands between 
Merba and Kabeh.—See De Rouge', Recherches, plates I., II. 

3 The Giant constellated in the North is Kepheus. Orion, says the Jewish legend, 
was not drowned during the Deluge. He was so tall that he waded through the waters. 
Og as a remnant of the Giants left his bed in Rabbath (Deut. iii. 11).. The rabbins 
tell how the Giant Og (Aug) escaped destruction during the Deluge because he was so 
tall.—Massey, II. 245. AugS means light; and Aug’s name shows him to have been 
one of the Sons of Light, the Star-Angels, or Constellations. 

Asa mere name, Keph seems to be allied to Kef a, Kotiph, Khufu, Iakouph, Akub, 
Iakoub, and Iakab. Thus we have the terminations in eb and ef, Horeb, Tunep. 
Joshua, xi. 1, Achasaph. 


124 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


neyed thence to the land of the Negeb and settled between Kad- 
esh and Sur. As Sarah had an Egyptian maid, Abrahm’s jour¬ 
ney seemed to be on the direct road to Egypt, just a straight 
route from the Midianites near the Salt Sea at the Ghor, pick¬ 
ing up the Amalekites on his way, to Egypt. The Kliatti, the 
Amu, and the Shasu 1 were, very likely, with him at Kadesli. 
Whether this account of Abrahm’s movement to the South 
(Gen. xx. 1) has any sub-reference to the first entrance of the 
Shepherds into Egypt, who knows! At all events these Desert 
people were Shepherds and Nomads (Munk, Palest. 356, 357). 
Kadesh is ‘ Ain-mi-Saphat,’ not remote from Beer-Saba (Saba- 
tun ?), near the Amalekite country. The Amalek had Egyptian 
slaves, and may have supplied Abrahm with such. 

In tombs of the first three Egyptian dynasties unknown and 
unusual forms of hieroglyphs are common. They look of 
older character. The specimens of their language are too few 
to form an opinion. Certain formulas that later are common 
appear wanting (semblent etre inconnues). The functions of 
the deceased are often peculiar to the period and untranslat¬ 
able. All in the writing as well as in the sculpture presents 
something strange to the eye. 2 3 4 

And the Abrahm (Shepherds) went down into Misraim. 

And then the unspeakably great burning Aither was elevated 

And all the stars are seen : and the Shepherd rejoiced in his heart.—Homer, 
II. viii. 559. 

Abrahm is Father of the Idumeans, the Kub, and the laqab. 
The Ivhoubu Iacobites got into Egypt. Moving from Abaris 
upon Xois the Shepherds took it and founded there a Xoite 
(Choite ?) dynasty 484 years before Aahmes 3 (b.c. 1667), that 
is, 2151 b.c. They take Memphis 4 B.c. 2120. They conquer 
Upper Egypt two years after. Shepherds and Thebans reign 
together 5 451 years. 6 Monuments belonging to the fifth and 

1 Shos, Shasah, in Hebrew mean to rob, plunder, and pillage. Therefore the 
Egyptian Shasu were the Amalek. 

2 Mariette, Tombes de l’Ancien Empire, p. 13. 

3 See Heeren, Africa, II. 191, 411. 

4 From Menes, B. C. 2224 to 1932 when the Shepherds took Memphis the Memphite 

line lasted.—Palmer, Egyptian Chron. I. 291, 300. 

6 Saulatis rendered the Theban kings tributary.—Jos. contra Apion, I. 1039. 

6 Knotel, System, 33, 38. If we doubt Manetho (and Josephus puts the stay in 
Egypt at 511 years) it is obvious that Saulatis (19 years), Benon (44), Hapa Kanana 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


125 


sixth dynasties have been found in Memphis and Elephantine ; 
and the colossi of the 13th Theban dynasty have been discov¬ 
ered at San 1 (Tanis), which Mr. Sayce thinks inconsistent with 
the view that the 13th and 14th (Xoite) dynasties were contem¬ 
poraneous. The Thebans finally succeeded in making- them¬ 
selves masters of all Egypt. Then occurred the first expulsion 
of the foreigners from Egypt after the victorious Thebans had 
penetrated into the Delta. One of the selected temple-lists 
(from the catalogue of 38 Theban kings in Eratosthenes in the 
3d century b.c.) calls Menes a Theban, which shows plainly the 
source from which it was derived. 2 Therefore the priests in 
later times had a motive to make as much of a show for The¬ 
ban antiquity and dynasties as they could, on paper. It looks 
as if, while he excluded the Theban kings that were contempo¬ 
raneous with Manetho’s 21st dynasty at San, very little was 
known to Manetho, except vague traditions, prior to the pyra¬ 
mid period of the fourth dynasty at Memphis ; and the con¬ 
quests of Ousirtasen I. in Nubia (in the 12th dynasty) have a 
tendency to show that the rule of the Memphian kings above 
Philae had not amounted to much that was permanent in that 
direction previously. In fact, the collapsed fragments of dy¬ 
nasty names, strewn over pages 466-468 of Sayce’s Herodotus, 
in their ruin leave room to suspect more than we perhaps can 
verify in reference to Manetho and the chronographers who 
have made use of him. One thing at least we can get from 
Josephus, and this is his opinion that there were kings in the 
Thebaid, and that considerable forces could be raised : for he 
says that “ the kings from the Thebaid and from the rest of 
Egypt rose up against the Shepherds.” 3 Seth, identified with 
Bal and probably with Taut or Tot, the God of the Hyksos and 
Kananites, is found at Memphis and Lake Moeris. His symbol 
is found immediately after the sparrow-hawk of Horus in the 
local cults, and he is located in Abaris and Tanis. In Lower 
Egypt the Seth-cultus belonged more particularly to Mem¬ 
phis and the north-eastern Delta. No evidence that it existed 
in Upper Egypt.—E. Mayer, Set-Typhon, 47. 

(36), Arakles (49), Staan (50), Apapi (61), did not live all that time, and some consci¬ 
entious individual may have added another Hyksos dynasty of the same names as a pro¬ 
test against Egyptian chronology in general. Vide Sayce’s Herodotus, p. 460. 

1 Sayce, p. 316. 

2 Sayce, p. 318. 

3 Josephus, contra Apion, 1040. 


126 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


In the nature of thing's, there is every reason to hold that 
there were several invasions by the Syrians and Arabs. Not 
only does “ Exodus ” indicate a tendency in the direction of 
Egypt on the part of the Arabs, but the proximity of the Karu 
and Karetim (Philistians of Gerar and Accaron, Ekron) invited 
them to enter, following' the line of the coast; and Africanus 
especially mentions the “ Phoenician kings ” in Memphis. 
Then we have the Menephthah campaign; and, still later Mr. 
Sayce puts the “ recovery of the kingdom from the Phoenician 
Arisu ” under User-ka-ra Sotep-en-ra Set-nekht Merer Mi- 
Amun, the first king of the twentieth dynasty. 1 

Thebes is the capital of the Middle Empire, and a new 
deity, Amun, the God of Thebes, presides over it. Its princes 
were long the vassals of the legitimate dynasties of Herakle- 
opolis. The first of whom we know, Entef I., claimed to be no 
more than a simple noble. His son, Mentuhotep I., still calls 
himself hor , or subordinate king, and it is not until three gen¬ 
erations afterwards that Entef IY. throws off the supremacy of 
the sovereigns in the north, assumes the title of monarch of 
Upper and Lower Egypt, and founds the Eleventh dynasty.— 
Sayce, Herod., 323-325. 

Manetho held that the fourth Egyptian dynasty was a for¬ 
eign dynasty. 2 August Knotel believed 3 that there has been 
but one dog-star period in Egyptian history altogether, the 
known one from b.c. 1322 to a.d. 139, after they had invent¬ 
ed an intercalary day once in four years ; that, therefore, all 
earlier dog-star periods have only an astrological value. The 
Shepherd Philition (Philistion) is a collective name of Phoeni¬ 
cian or Philistian Shepherds, hence Cheops (Goub, Khufu) and 
Kephren (Khafra) are put forward as Shepherd Kings. The 
hatred which the Egyptians felt towards their pyramids, the 
severe repression of the religion and the oppression of the 
whole people by Cheops (Khufu) and Kephren (Khafra) make 
this seem probable, and Knotel considers the first three dy¬ 
nasties as the Old Monarchy and Manetho’s fourth dynasty the 
first Hyksos-dynasty. Consequently, all the following dynas¬ 
ties to the twelfth (Shepherd dynasty) were kings of foreign 
origin but wdio had become completely established in Egypt. 4 

1 Sayce, 469. 

2 Heeren, Africa, II. 197, 411. 

3 with Boeckh. 

♦ Knotel, 10, 12. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


127 


Abrahm means Phoenician Shepherds and Arab nomads. 
Josephns had made np his mind probably, when he replied to 
Apion, that he should endeavor to show that the Hyksos were 
his own Jewish ancestors. 1 And, as far north as Hebron, he 
was perhaps correct. Josephus would have accepted almost 
any Phoenician or Chethite Shepherd King as a forefather, it 
is supposed, since he either suspected or well knew that the 
ancestors of the Memphian, Xoite (Choite) and Herakleopoli- 
tan dynasties had been either Phoenicians, Philistians, Karu, 
Amalekites or Arabs. But he had Exodus, i. 11, before him, 
which made it desirable to get a Hyksos 2 ancestry a little 
later than the time of Bamses (as the city Ramses mentioned 
in Exodus, i. 11, was not an easy obstacle to get around). 
Hence he wanted something posterior to b.c. 1500-1400 on 
which to rest his argument. 

A perishing Syrian my father, and he ‘ went down ’ to Misraim. — Deu¬ 
teronomy, xxvi. 5. 

According to Petrie, p. 209, each of the three greatest pyra¬ 
mids at Gizeh has a temple on the eastern side of it. The 
ruins of the temples of the Second and Third pyramids still 
remain; and of the temple of the Great Pyramid the basalt 
pavement and numerous blocks of granite show its site. Khu- 
fu’s temple is more destroyed than the others, the causeway of 
it being larger and more accessible from the plain than are 
the causeways of the temples of Khafra and Menkaura. In all 
the tombs of the age of the Pyramids the kings are called the 
Great Gods 3 and had more priests than any of the original 
deities. 4 On the walls of the burial chambers of Una, Teta, 
Merira, and Merenra, of the 5th and 6th dynasties, incised in- 


1 Dunlap, Vestiges, 265 ; Josephus c. Apion. I. 1040, 1041, 1052. 

2 Sayce, Herod. I. 460, gives the Semitic names : Saites (19),Benon (40), Arkles 
(30), Aphophis (14), = 103 years. Petrie, Tanis, I. p. 12, admits that the Hyksos are 
a Semitic people ; so does Josephus. The latter derives his origin from the Khati 
(the Beni ’Heth).—Ezekiel, xvi. 3. The Arabs deduce descent from the mother's side. 
The Khati bore sway from Khebron (’Hebron) to Arad on the south, to Gaza 
(Azah) on the west; very much as the Sheikh Arari to-day (of a countenance somewhat 
Israelitish) rules over nearly the whole of ancient Edom from Mount Serbal in the 
Sinaitic peninsula to the neighborhood of the Dead Sea. So that the Khati may have 
been Hyksos, enough to suit Exodus and Josephus, and Audah. 

3 nuter aa. No incised inscription in the three largest pyramids at Ghizeh. But 
one on the lid of Menkaura’s coffin. 

4 Petrie, Pyramids, p. 209. 


128 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


scriptions abound. But the Phoenicians, Philistians, Amalek- 
ites and Shasu poured in, carrying 1 with them the Palestine 
habit of erecting temples on High Places, which in Egypt 
would have to be made artificially, not having such natural 
elevations as those of Gabaon, etc. Diodorus tells us that 
“ although the kings built them for their own burial it hap¬ 
pened that none of them was interred in the Pyramids. Eor 
the masses, both on account of severe labor at the works and 
many cruel and violent acts done by these kings, indignantly 
held them to blame, and threatened to tear the bodies to 
pieces and despitefully cast them out of their tombs. And 
therefore when he was dying each directed his relations to 
bury him in an unknown place and secretly.” 1 This is one 
way of concealing what the priests did not choose to tell. 
They were proverbially uncommunicative; and such a story 
about the greatest works of man leads us to suppose a religious 
motive for the erection of the two largest pyramids at Gizeh. 
But the king may have been buried in the Great Pyramid. 
As the Bible mentions that the Kananites buried their kings in 
the High Places, it is not unreasonable to assume that around 
Khufu’s Pyramid others would be built. To Saturn and Osiris 
the power over Darkness was ascribed. Osiris-S^liou, God of 
the star Orion, was conductor of souls in the other world. 2 The 
God Aton was at Memphis. 3 The Semite beheld his Saviour 
in Mithra-Adoni-Ia’hoh. Osiris w r as the Egyptian Saviour, 
their Light of the world. Typhon is the darkness of night. 4 
The Mount of Adon was near where we see the Dipper . 5 

1 Diodor. Sic. I. 58, p. 74. 

2 Maspero, Guide du Muse'e, 161. 

3 ibid. 42. Adon as a mere name was called in Egypt Aten, and Atunis in Italy ; 
(compare Tunep and Tunis). With Aton compare the name TonacA in Joshua, xxi. 
23, 25. The doctrine of Light and Darkness (symbolized in the story of Adonis) was 
familiar to the Egyptians. It was the main theory of the Oriental Philosophy, appear¬ 
ing not only in the myth of Iacchos but even in the account of paradise.—Gen. i. 5- 
16; ii. 8, 9; iii. 15-24; Isaiah, v. 20. 

4 noctu venantem.—de Iside, 18. The Hindus fear the spirits of night,—the reign 
of darkness. 

I form the Light and create Darkness.*—Isaiah, xlv. 7. 

Thou dost fill at daybreak the place of his secret eye in On.—Litany of Shu.—Rec¬ 
ords, x. 139. 

Ra commenced with the earth, and passing through the heaven stops in the region 
of the Depth Hades, in which he seems to wish to stay.—Lenormant, les origines, I. 452. 

6 Massey, II. 169 ; Isaiah, xiv. 13. The Qiblah of the Iezidi and Sabians is the 
pole star.—Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 299. 

* The One principle of the universe, according to the Egyptians. —Cory, p. 321. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


129 


Starting from the ascertained datum of the Menophres-era, 1 
according to which in B.c. 1322 the heliacal rising of Sirius 
took place on the first day of Thoth, and reckoning backwards, 
it follows that in the years B.c. 3010-3007 the 9th of Epiphi of 
the lunar year (Wandeljahr) happened on the first of Tlioth of 
the fixed year ; which event the Papyrus Ebers marks as oc¬ 
curring in the 9th year of king Ba-kerh-ra (Bicheris, in Mane- 
tho) of the 4th dynasty, being next but one to Men-kau-ra, and 
next after Batoises, in Manetho’s list. 2 A glance at the Aby- 
dos and Saqqarah lists shows that what Manetho wrote Bat¬ 
oises the other lists wrote (Tatefra or) Batatef. It shows that 
Kha-f-ra in these two lists immediately followed Batatef, while 
in Manetho’s list Bicheres follows next to Batoises. The vari¬ 
ations are striking, but the resemblances even more to be 
observed; for a comparison between the names Tat-ef-ra 
and Kha-f-ra might be instituted, with a resulting suspicion 
against these names as possibly manufactured. Another 
thing is not to be left out of sight. There were many pyra¬ 
mids besides those ‘three largest one& at Gizeh ; ’ but is there 
any evidence that the others, such as the pyramid at Abu 
Boash, or those of Dahshur, had temples annexed to them on 
the east side, as at Gizeh? Mr. Petrie mentions temples to 
the three great pyramids at Gizeh, the remains of them are 
there. These are all that he speaks of. So with the pyram¬ 
idal tombs of Pepi and Merenra, no temples 3 to them that 
we remember seeing mentioned; Sanefru (Snofru) had no pyr¬ 
amid and no annexed temple. Khufu had both. The superb 
temples annexed to the three pyramids at Gizeh seem to have 
indicated something more religious than the deification of a 
king or kings; and the Pitcher and Bam are symbols apper¬ 
taining to a deity, like Num, Kneph, Seb, Osiris, etc. It is to 
be noted that Khnoumu-Khufu (scrawled in red ochre) was 
not written where it could be seen, but in one of the * chambers 
of construction,’ one of the attic spaces left vacant to prevent 
too much weight resting on the ‘king’s chamber,’ and only 
reached by difficult climbing up a perpendicular well. So 
that at the quarry some workman must have written it on one 

1 Lauth has shown that the era of Menophres, mentioned by Theon, came to an 
end in b.c. 1321, and Menophres must have reigned b.c. 2781.—Sayce, Her. 350, note. 

2 See Diimichen, Die erste bis jetzt aufgefundene sichere Angabe liber die Regier- 
ungszeit eines agypt. Konigs aus dem alten Reich, pp. 8-16. 

3 No temple annexed to the tomb of Teta, first king of the Sixth dynasty. 

9 


\ 


130 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of the blocks while the pyramid was in course of erection, 
otherwise it would have been written or incised in the ‘ king’s 
chamber ’ or at least some accessible portion of the structure. 
Now the sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid bears no inscrip¬ 
tion, and is too large not to have been placed in position before 
the roof was put on, as it is nearly an inch too wide for the 
beginning of the ascending iiassage.—Petrie, Pyramids, p. 
216. It is hardly probable that the scrawls of Khufu’s oval 
may have been intended to represent Bal, who, by a certain 
theory of the priests, was regarded as Saturn (Adon, Rimmon, 
descended to Hades), Osiris, and Sol. 1 Still the pyramid’s 
temple was located towards the east in order to face the ‘ Sun¬ 
rise of the Resurrection,’ and the North Gate faced Orion. As 
Mena and Teta had their priesthoods, there is no reason why 
every king should not have had his priests. But Mena and 
Teta are open to the suspicion of being names of the Moon- 
god and Tat (Taut, Hermes); while Khufu seems to be an 
altered name of Kub (Saturn). This makes the difference be¬ 
tween the Gizeh names and other kings’ names. The Great 
Pyramid was in a graveyard of the priests and nobles. 

Savage Saturn (Kronos 1 ) devourerof young children, 

Born from heaven, earth’s hollow concealed.—Nonnus, xxvii. 54, 55. 

Khufu’s cartouche was found on the blocks of the Great 
Pyramid, and it is sometimes spelled Kh-f-u (Kefu). But 
Kheops built the vast monument of his religion at a period so 
remote from the time where the certain data of profane his¬ 
tory begin, that we have no measure with which to estimate 
the width of the abyss which separates the two epochs. The 
Fourth Egyptian dynasty appears in the presence of extreme 
civilization. Khufu marries Sat-t (Sat, with a feminine ter¬ 
mination t) the daughter of Sanefru (at a period when the 
obelisk was already erected to the Sun). Sate was God of 
Light. Set was the Sun, sada meant fire, flame, el sadi, 
“the mighty” firegod Sat-uranos, Saturn (Karanos, Kronos), 
while Asat (Ashat) is firegoddess Asata, Hestia, Uesata, 
Yesta ! Consequently, Sat-t, the daughter (?) of Saneferu and 

1 Iliad, xiv. 270, 272 mentions ‘ all the Gods beneath, around Saturn,’— 4 that dwell 
under Tartarus.’ Compare 4 Gods ascending out of the earth.’—1 Samuel, xxviii. 13. 
The Hebrew here presents evidence of an acquaintance with something resembling the 
Eleusinian Mysteries. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


131 


wife of Khufu, has the name of Satis the firegoddess of Syria ; 
for Esat, in Ethiopia, and isatu, in Assyrian, mean “ fire.” 
The accompanying deities of this period of the Fourth dy¬ 
nasty are Saad, Set, Taut or Tat, Khem, Seb (Sev, or Seph), 
Saf, an ancient Goddess of books and, perhaps, chronology (?), 
at Memphis; Kneph, Khnum, Hor, Osiris, Apis, etc.; and all 
points to a later period than it has been customary to se¬ 
lect as the date of the pyramids. In fact, the profile of the 
‘ hand with the thumb * is read d and t; so that Khufu’s 
wife’s name was probably Sad-t. Diodorus gives Khufu’s 2nd 
successor the name Khabrues (Herodotus gives Chephren) 
which can as well be referred to the Phoenician-Hebrew roots 
cdbar , gheber or chaber, cabir, as to the Egyptian root kheper 
or khopri. Tunra of Memphis, priest, and perhaps author of 
the Sakkarah list of kings, has clearly the name Aton, Atunis 
(Adon Ra); he must have lived after Ramses II. in the nine¬ 
teenth dynasty. 

Kal Kpovov u/iTjffrripa , vecov Ooivfjropa iralSwy, 

ovpavcdev yeyaura, Kareicpvcpe k6\ttos apovpijs. —Nonnus, xxvii. 54, 55. 

Neither the natives nor writers were agreed as to who built 
the Great Pyramid. Some said that it was constructed by 
Khufu, others that these were erected by other kings, for in¬ 
stance, the Greatest by Armais, the second being the work of 
Amosis, and the third that of Maron. 1 Nonnus, Dionysiac, 
xviii. 49, mentions Maron as Charioteer of Dionysus-Bromios. 
The tomb of Kronos (Saturn) was in the Caucasus in the 
mountains, where he was represented as the devourer of chil¬ 
dren. 2 Saturn-Kronos came into the country of the South 
and gave the entire Egypt to the God Taaut. 3 “ Kronos, there¬ 
fore, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, king of the country, 
and subsequently, after the end of his life, established in the 
star of Kronos, having an only-begotten son (by a native 
nymph called Ain Obret 4 ) whom on this account they called 
Ieoud, the Only-begotten being even now so-called among the 
Phoenicians, when very great dangers befell the country owing 
to war, adorned his son with the regal apparel and, having 

1 Inaron in Diodorus, I. p. 75, § 64. 

2 Clementine Homily, v. 23. 

3 Orelli, Sanchon, p. 38. 

4 An overflowing spring. 


132 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


erected an altar, sacrificed him as a victim.” 1 We here see 
what was done on Saturn’s altars, even in the cities of the 
dead to the west of the Nile. His temple in Egypt was out¬ 
side the city limits: compare the location of the Great Pyra¬ 
mid outside the city limits, in the west, in the mountain. It 
was the common idea of the Gods in Egypt, Phoenicia and 
Babylonia, that they wandered about there during their 
earthly life, taught men useful inventions and arts, where 
cities and monuments built by them and even the places of 
their birth and death were everywhere shown. 2 The Great 
Pyramid, like the others, faced the north, but its orientation is 
not exact. The setting out of the orientation of the sides 
would not be so difficult. 3 The attempt at correct or incorrect 
orientation had its origin in religious views, probably con¬ 
nected with the relation of Orion to Osiris. Blessed is He 
who comes from the valley of the shadow of death a corpse 
and mummy, yet rises from Sheol in Orion and comes out from 
Orion, preserved, in the east of heaven ! 

Kadmah le Shems !—Ezekiel, viii. 16. 

Seven miles to the southeast from upper Bethhoron is 
Gabaon, 4 whose conical summit is just hidden by the loftier 
peaks of Benjamin. 5 There was the Great Highplace at Ga- 
baon, sacred to the Lord of “ lightning and thunderbolt.” 6 

The Great Waters in Gabaon.—Jeremiah, xli. 12. 

The temples of Mene in the cities of Asia Minor stand nearly 
always on heights. 7 

The name Api (Hapi) was already given to the Sacred Sym¬ 
bol of Water when the oldest pyramids were erected near 
Memphis. The pyramid age precedes the 11th and 12th dy¬ 
nasties and seems to represent the Philistians or Phoenicians 

1 Philo ; in Eusebius.—Movers, p. 130. The Jews were called (in Assyrian) Iaudi 
and Iaudaai.—Schrader, Keilin. u. d. A. T. 188. Compare the name Ieoud, Judah. 

2 Movers, 124. 

2 See Petrie. 125, 126, 211, 212. 

4 Gibeon. Compare the names Iakab, Akabah, Gaba, and Keb, or Kebo, the set¬ 
ting Sun. 

5 Newman’s Travels, p. 280. 

6 Genesis, ix. 14, 16; Exodus, xix. 16; Judges, i. 7: Adoni-bezek, the king’s name. 

7 Blau, BeitrSge zur phonikischen Miinzkunde, in Zeitschr. D. M. G. ix. 89. With 
Mene compare the names Ar-mene (Lunar Mt.), Armenia, Harmene (name of a city), 
and Harmonia (Spouse of Kadmus). 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


133 


in Egypt. In ail the tombs of the pyramid age the kings are 
called Great Gods (nuter aa), and had more priests than any 
of the original deities. 1 To Khufu’s oval are prefixed the 
creative signs of Saturn, the water jug and the ram. The 
Kufa (probably from Negeb, Philistia, the Red Sea, or Lower 
Egypt) in name resemble Khufu and the Kefa. 2 The ram be¬ 
longs to Amen, the water to Osiris, while Kneph (Klinum- 
Khufu) has both signs. Old heavy-kneed Kronos, lancing 
rain, would have both symbols, the water-jug and the ram. 
In the case of the Great Pyramid the ancient and modern 
authorities lead to a doubt whether Khufu ever was buried 
there. 3 The fact that Khufu’s grandson has the hieroglyphs 
ka-ar-u immediately following Khufu’s cartouche suggests 
the reading Khufu-Karu ; agreeing with what Herodotus said 
about the presence of the Philistine Shepherd and his flocks 
around the pyramids. Khufu built the Great Pyramid (per¬ 
haps as a tomb of Saturn) expecting to be buried in the tomb 
of Khnum according to Palestine custom. In the two cham¬ 
bers of the Great Pyramid there were, according to Edrisi, 
two vessels found; no body nor any indication of its former 
presence remains, and Khufu’s sarcophagus is without a lid, 4 
although three pin-holes are seen by which one might be fas¬ 
tened on. The Second Pyramid has the resin still remaining 
in the pin-holes and a piece of the cement is left sticking in 
the grooves, which show that it had been fastened strongly, 
while the violence employed to break the sarcophagus so as 
to get the lid off showed that it had been used for something. 
Some bones were found in it which proved to be those of an 
ox. 5 Now the use and occupation of the Second Pyramid, in 
some way, can thus be proved ; but in the circumstance that 
the plug blocks were let down firmly into their places, exclud¬ 
ing all access, there is no evidence that Khufu or some one 
else was placed in the sarcophagus now to be seen in the 
Great Pyramid. That the Arabs in the time of the Caliphs 
carried the ox-bones into the Second Pyramid and placed 
them in Khafra’s sarcophagus cannot be maintained because 

1 Petrie, 209. 

2 Kenrick, II. 186. 

3 Petrie, Pyramids, 216 ; Diodorus, I. 64, p. 73. 

4 Kenrick, I. 103. 

5 ibid. I. 108, quotes Belzoni, I. 426. When Cambyses killed Apis at Memphis 
the priests buried him secretly. 


134 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Mariette found ox-bones on the floors of some ancient tombs 
and because the Apis and the Meneuis (Mnevis) were sacred 
and divine symbols of Osiris-Dionysus, or Hermes, and we 
do not know that the ancient priests did not put them there. 
In this uncertainty it must not be forgotten that the Sphinx 
shows that Gizeh was holy ground, and this is further evi¬ 
denced by a temple added to each of the three largest pyra¬ 
mids ; consequently, beyond the fact that Osiris was wor¬ 
shipped in that locality, we cannot know what the priests did 
with either the first or the second pyramid. 1 Petrie makes no 
mention of any resin remaining in the pin-holes of Khufu’s 
sarcophagus; but he found one end lifted up on a pebble, 
which indicates that a secret passage was sought and the peb¬ 
ble had been brought in from outside, 2 before any smashing 
was done in the pyramid. 

On the high places of Iudah incense was burned to the 
planets, sun, moon, and stars. 3 The high places of Isarel be¬ 
longed to the Mithra worship and the Osiris worship. On them 
were “ all the Bethi ha-bamoth (all the temples of the high 
places)” in the cities of Samaron.—1 Kings, xiii. 32. 

The bamoth. Ann (the high places of On), the sin of Isarel, shall be destroyed. 
—Hosea, x. 8. 

Petrie found the fragments of the statues of Khufu and Kha- 
fra at Gizeh. There were Gods (statues) placed in the temples 
of the high-places and they were worshipped there.—1 Kings, 
iii. 2 ; 2 Kings, xvii. 29, 32. The Bamoth Bal, Beth El and 
Gabaun (Gabaon), were the Hebrew high-places, natural pyra¬ 
mids ; the greatest was Gabaun. 

1 The quarries of Tourah and Masarah (not too far away) were doubtless employed 
to supply these pyramids with building material, but the earliest inscription is to 
Amasis of the 17th or 18th dynasty. No cartouche corresponding with the names there 
inscribed has been found.—Kenrick, L 118. In connection with the victories of the 
Theban dynasty at a later period over the Hyksos it may be here stated that Adolf 
Erman (Aegypten, p. 61) puts Ramses II. in the 13th century B.C. and Totmes III. in 
the 15th century b.c. The ancient priests are said to have entered his tomb and rifled 
the mummy of this last king. 

2 Showing that there were no broken pieces of stone (used in the construction of the 
pyramid) then at hand inside, as there were at a later period after a forcible entrance 
was made. Petrie hence infers that the attempt was made (to open the sarcophagus) 
long prior to the time of Herodotus. This would imply that the secret entrance was 
known to the priests, but not to the public; Strabo knew the entrance on the North 
side well. 

3 2 Kings, xxiii. 5, 12. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


135 


Sun on Gabaon, be still; and Ira’h (Moon) in valley Ailoun!—Joshua, 

x. 12. 

The Egyptian pyramids were high places, probably, of the 
Kefa. The pyramids of Khufu and Khafra 1 had temples at¬ 
tached to them, which cannot fail to remind us of the temples 
of the liigh-places in the cities of Samaria. But it may be 
said that “ a pyramid is always found in a cemetery,” and 
that the pyramids are places of burial. So were the liigh- 
places ; they contained the bodies of the kings.—Ezekiel, xliii. 
7. Phoenicia even exported to Egypt the acid used in mum¬ 
mifying the bodies, the pyroligneous acid mentioned by G. 
Seyffarth. 

There were two especial names of Saturn, the Earth-god 
and God of Sheol-Hades, deserving some attention in this con¬ 
nection. They are Seb 2 and Keb. 3 Kebo is the descending 
(ad Inferos) Sol-Saturn. How far Kebo is connected with the 
Kefa as Tum-worshippers, and how closely Kebo (Kefa) and 
Khufu 4 are to be connected, may be a question possibly, but 

1 Compare Kephirah, a Canaanite town, mentioned in Joshua : Baroth (with 
Abaris), and Iarim (with Harameias, Hermes, Huram) with Ram, Ramas and Ramses. 
The entire 3d Egyptian dynasty has Syrian names. 

2 All things are born from Saturn. See Hesiod, Theogony, 783-786, for the Water 
of Life in Hades ! From the abyss below.—Deut. xxxiii. 13. Seb is, according to 
Massey, II. 5, Star-god, as well as Earth-God. Compare Seba (Gen. x. 7), the names 
Sabos (Dionysus), Sabi, Saba, Io-Seph: also sons of Asoub, Sons of Souba, Sons of 
Sabie, Sons of Subai, Sons of Safui (—1 Esdras, v. 30, 31, 33, 34), Asubah (—2 Chron. 
xx. 31), Wahab in Sufa (—Numb. xxi. 14), Shufu, Asaph, Suphis and Seb (Sev, Saturn). 
—Records, vi. 105. In Syriac, Seb means to be old.—Jervis, Gen. 168. Supha is 
Saturn’s land; also Suphach in 1 Chron. xix. 18. Herodotus and Diodorus make no 
great use of the dynasty lists. Diodorus makes no pretensions of the sort. In one of 
the chambers of the Great Pyramid is found the shield of Khufu, but, prefixed to it the 
jug and the ram. These are found Avith the figures of the ram-headed God of Thebes, 
commonly called Kneph, Knoum, etc.—Kenrick, II. 112. 

3 Brugsch, Zeitschr. fur Agypt. Sprache, 1881, p. 9; Egypt, I. 27. Dionysus Sabos 
(Saturn, Kronos) was adored in Arabia, and probably at the Water of Saba, Beer 
Sheba. 

4 compare such names as Akub, Iakab, Qeb, Kebo, Akibal, Akabos, Iakobus, Ig- 
abSs (1 Chron. iv. 9), KebSs, Akbal, Gebal, Kubele, Iakouf, Kufu, Akouf, Akkaba, 
Akbos.—1 Esdras, v. 31, 38, 39. Keb is Seb.—Lepsius, 1851, Berlin Akademy. Isaac 
Taylor has Kefu. 

Kepheus, wretched son of Palinurus.—Aratus, phainomena. 

For he says that Kepheus is Adam. And, too, the bird, the Swan who is with 
the Bears, is the pneuma in the kosmos,—a musical being, a symbol of the spirit.— 
Hippolytus, p. 122, Duncker. Adam is Adonis, Mithra, Osiris; not to say Kepheus, 
Iakoub (Iakoub, Kub), and Khufu. Bal, by a certain doctrine of the priests Avas both 
Saturn and Sol. Zeus, Hades, Helios and Dionysus were one and the same. 

Saturn was the God of Hades, in Homer, Phoenicia, Israel, and Egypt. He corre- 


136 


THE GHEBEtiS OF HEBRON. 


Suph is a derivative of Seb (Saturn); consequently the name 
Kliufu in hieroglyphs and the name Supliis in Manetlio are 
both forms of the names of Saturn, like Kebes (Plioenician- 
Greek), Khembes and Khemmis 1 into which Keb and Khem 
have been changed. Petrie found two separate specimens of 
Khufu’s standard and a part of his cartouche. Many defects, 
instances of neglect and want of care in finishing the interior 
of the Great Pyramid, surprising in “ such a magnificent 
piece of work,” were noticed by Petrie. Kneph is, however, a 
God of Hades, like Osiris. 2 To Khufu’s oval are prefixed the 
creative signs of Saturn, the water-jug 3 and the ram, which also 
belong to Kneph. There is no similar prefix of a determina¬ 
tive to a king’s name in any other instance out of the hundreds 
of names, and thousands of variants, known (Petrie, 152). 
Kneph w^as the Creative Power, he presided over men, ‘ the 
God who forms on his wheel the divine limbs of Osiris ’—‘ the 
sculptor of all men ’ (Kawlinson, I. 331). On the monuments 
bearing the name of Khnumu Kliufu at Giseh and at Wady 
Maghara, there also occurs, with different titles, the name of 


sponds to Set in Palestine and the Eastern delta of the Nile. To Saturn-Moloch the 
Israelites, Moabites and Phoenicians offered up their children. His name was El in 
Phoenicia, from elah to “go up,” “ ascend,” in the heaven, as the sunrise ; and the Is¬ 
raelites were, at least at a late period, directed to perform no manual labor on Satur-day, 
Saturn’s day ! In Egypt, Saturn’s temple was erected outside the city. Like the dead, 
he belonged outside ; like the pyramids, his place was towards the sinking sun in the 
west. 

G. Massey asserts that “the language of monotheism reaches its climax in the 
hymns and addresses to Amen-Ra, the one god, one in all his works and ways.” 

Elah is a valley's name in 1 Samuel, xvii. 19,—perhaps meaning “ ascent; ” the re¬ 
verse of Turn and Kebo or Keb. 

1 Diodorus, I. § 64, again alters the name Khemmis to Armaios, Ivhafra to Amasis 
or Ammosis, and Mukerinos to Inarun ; leading to the suspicion that something is con¬ 
cealed here. Pliny could find out nothing of their history. Here/owr names, at least, 
are found for the reputed builder of the Great Pyramid. Diodorus, I. 87, 88, shows 
himself to be no blind follower of Herodotus; but he puts Khufu and his two succes¬ 
sors posterior to Remphis.—ibid. I. 62. Diodorus and Herodotus seem, however, to 
have rather followed the Theban line in some particulars, as the making the greatest 
pyramid builders subsequent to the Theban Sesostris of the 19th dynasty. See Heeren 
Africa, II. 208, as to Diodorus being under Theban influences. 

2 Rawlinson, I. 329. 

3 The water is poured on the wheel with which Kneph forms the divine limbs of 
Osiris. See Isaiah, xliv. 3, xxix. 10. Kneph is the leader of the celestial gods.—Ken- 
rick, I. 303, 314. Kneph is the God of life. The queen is led by the God Kneph and 
the Goddess Hathor, who stretches out to her the key of life, to the puerperal bed.— 
Kenrick, II. 200. Ia’hoh (Iachoh) is the potter (—Isaiah, lxiv. 8) as Kneph was, in 
Egypt. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


137 


Kliufu himself. 1 In the inscription on Hermapion’s obelisk 
the Sun is called the Great God and Lord of heaven, Lord of 
Time, Homs (Lord of Light), all which appellations belong 
to Osiris (as Saturn-Chronos, or Lunus and Sol). Osiris is the 
Persian Mithra who formerly reigned at Heliopolis. The 
name Khnuma-Khufu, ‘ he who is united with Kliufu,’ would 
imply the union of the soul of Khufu, ‘ the fabled builder of 
the pyramids ’ with Khnum—a not uncommon idea in the case 
of the dead united to Osiris. Or it might, taken literally, 
mean that Kronos was incarnate in Khufu. The pitcher and 
ram are Saturn’s emblems. See Hesiod, Theogony, 783-786; 
Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 13. Saturn’s emblem in Arabia was a 
black stone. 

In Egypt there were many tombs of Osiris. 2 His sufferings 
and death were represented in what were called the Mysteries 
of the night 3 and it was natural that the Egyptians should 
have his tomb. The Great Pyramid is so placed that its faces 
front the four cardinal points. Hence, if we suppose a square 
whose sides are infinitely prolonged so as to extend to the 
four cardinal points of the world, we shall have an immense 
cross which cuts the circle of the horizon in four places. It 
was in the centre of this cross that the tomb of Osiris was 
placed. This tomb was that of the beneficent Spirit of Nature, 
of Osiris who had been put to death by Typhon. The floor of 
the ‘ King’s Chamber ’ is very irregular in its level, not only 

1 Petrie, 152. Of course, this is not easily explained. Although Khufu, Khafra, 
and Men-kaura were deified, and temples stood before their pyramids, yet the word ar¬ 
chitect (fecit) stands only before Khufu’s name, not before the other two names. But 
if the other two had as much right to make their own tombs as Khufu, why is not the 
fecit prefixed to their names ? The ram = Creator. The pitcher = “to pour.” Both 
apply to Saturn at the Styx.—Movers, Phon. 159, may also be compared with Hesiod, 
783-786; Gen. ii. 7; Homer, II. vii. 99. 

2 de Iside, 20, 21 ; Diodor. I. 21. 

9 Mankind, p. 607-609; Herodotus, II. 171. zjzj; the pyramidal cross. Kneph, 
from some point of view, is the Sun.—Compare Kenrick, Egypt, I. 302, 303, 314, 315; 
which identifies him with Saturn and Osiris. See Nork, Real-Worterbuch, I. 224, IV. 
158, 159. The placing the sides of the pyramids facing the cardinal points is carried 
out in every ancient temple in Asia, even to China. It is the same with the Jewish 
temple. Mosaism, regarding the form of its cultus in general, belongs to the circle of 
the old religions and shares the views of antiquity.—Nork, I. 220; Bahr, Symb. I. 
102. If we had all the sources that mention his miracles, Zoroaster’s life would ex¬ 
hibit surprising parallels to the life of Moses.—Nork, IV. 482, 483. There is a striking 
analogy between the posterior rites of Egyptian sepulture (described by the textes of 
M. Dumichen) and the “ Rituel domestique des funerailles en Annam” (traduit par 
M. Lesserteur).—Eugfene Revillout, in Revue egyptologique, III. p. 194. 


138 


THE GI1EBEBS OF HEBRON. 


absolutely, but even in relation to its courses. The floor over 
the undermined part (beneath the coffer) at the West end is 
1| inches higher in relation to the first course than it is at 
the S.E. corner; and along- the South side where it has not 
been mined it varies inches in relation to the first course. 1 
But it was meant for a tomb, not a temple. It faced the 
North. 

Adod, Dod, 2 Daoud, Tot, Taut, Thoth, Men, Neith, Neb, Seth, 
Amon, Asar, Osar, Anubis and other deity-names, together 
with the star-gods, show an emigration into Egypt from the 
East, an emigration of religious ideas at the same time. Saba- 
ism poured in. Brugsch, Histoire d’Egypte, I. p. 24, men¬ 
tions ‘ Sabians of Pharaoh, priests in monuments of the time 
of the pyramids.’ 3 Anubis is the horizon-ring that indicates 
the sepulchral-worship at the pyramids. The sun is led by 
Anubis from the world of light to darkness and from dark¬ 
ness again to light. He is Hermes psuchopompos, the body 
watcher of Osiris. 4 Thebes worshipped in the Bam the Vernal 
Equinox. 5 The Arab tradition assumes that Sabi, the mythic 
founder of Sabaism, is buried with his father Seth and his 
brother i Henoch under the pyramids. 6 The ram-headed, 
Khnum is the Living Breath, the Lord of the distributions of 
water. 7 Chnemu is Kneph, and Kneph is ram-headed, at 
Thebes, like Zeus and Ammon. 8 Chnemu Chufu (the name) 
is already written with the known figure of the ram (Chnemu, 
Kneph). 9 And the ram is the emblem of life, identifying 
Kneph’s vitality with that of Khufu. So that the ram-worship 
was in existence already at the time when the Great Pyra¬ 
mid was being finished. The Osiris-worship and the worship 

1 Petrie, 82. The coffer in the Great Pyramid is not finely wrought.—Petrie, 84. 
The top of the coffer is broken away all at one corner.—ibid. p. 90. 

2 Compare Tud-eus, a proper name in Homer. 

3 Knotel, Chufu, p. 103. Sabu n peraa. 

4 Knotel, p. 105. 

6 ibid. p. 101. The Ram indicates the Divine Mind and Creator.—Rev. v. fi; 
xxii. 3. 

6 ibid. p. 103. 

7 ibid. p. 107, HI. 

3 ibid. p. 100, 117. 

9 ibid. p. 100. Neith, the Goddess of Sais, was also represented as a female Kneph 
with ram’s head. Knotel, 100; quotes Champoll. Pantheon pi. 6. Quin. Knepli 
(being ungenerate and immortal) is the Supreme First Cause.— Se3 de Iside et Osiride, 
21. p. 359. 


THE ASAMAN,S IN EGYPT. 


139 


of Pliatha (Phtha) of Memphis were very ancient in Egypt. 1 
The obelisks that were oldest in Egypt were nothing else but 
the Two Pillars that the Phoenicians 2 were accustomed to set 
before their temples, and only later worked with Egyptian 
art, according to the custom of the country, until they ap¬ 
peared as an entirely peculiar Egyptian structure. The obe¬ 
lisks devoted to Amun-Ra, the mystical Sun-god, exactly cor¬ 
respond to the Hammanim in the Israelite Bal cultus, the 
two pillars in the temple of the Tyrian Herakles. 3 Kneph is 
the ram-headed Num-Ra. 4 The kings worship the Gods of 
the country and build temples to them, and Osiris takes his 
place as the Great Ruler of the dead, 5 so that the water-jug 
and ram must refer to the resurrection. 

The name Khafrah is very like the name of the Hebrew r 
city Khafirah. 6 Having, therefore, disposed of the Sosirn 
(Zuzim), the Amim (Amu), and the Sati (Seth), we may put in 
the Sos, to compete with the Achasah or Achasou for the 
right to be regarded in the composition of the name Hyksos. 

The original name of the Chief of the Exodus mentioned 
in Manetho’s story has very much the appearance of having 
been Osarsiph. Ioseph could not have been the minister 
under a Shepherd (Hyksos) king, else Shepherds could not 
have been said to be the aversion of the Egyptians (Gen. xlvi. 
34). The unfounded opinion that the Hyksos Shepherds were 
the Scythians has long been refuted (Lepsius, Letters, 476, 
478, 479; see the Academy, March 24, 1888, p. 211). A Hyk¬ 
sos king would not have given Ioseph an Egyptian name to do 
him honor, because the Hyksos were Arabian or Pliilistian 
Semites. Ioseph would hardly have advised his brethren to 
tell Pharaoh that they were Shepherds, if every Shepherd was 
an abomination to the Egyptians to be quarantined in Goshen 
or Kush and kept out of sight. The story looks unreasonable, 
but written, like a novel, with the knowledge of Amalekite tra- 

1 Knotel, 101, 114. 

2 Like the Jews.—1 Kings, vii. 15-21; 2 Chron. iv. 12. 

2 Knotel, 110, 111. 

4 ibid. 114. 

6 Rawlinson, II. 84, 85; De Rouge, Recherches, 47-49, 65. Knoum was adored as 
far south as the Egyptian border, and at Semneh.—See Maspero, Hist. Anc. 98, 113. 
If Kaneph (Kneph) has any relation to the name and land Kanan, with the termina¬ 
tion in ep (like Tunep), he would then, perhaps, have to be regarded as a God of the 
Lowlanders or Canaanites, Saturn. 

6 Joshua, xviii. 26, Ha Kheperah. Compare Kabira. 


140 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


ditions (as in I. Samuel, xxx. 13-15). That the Book of Gene¬ 
sis is not pure history throughout, but contains a certain 
amount of matter closely allied to folklore, is an opinion for 
which there is a great deal to be said on grounds independent 
of the critical analysis of the sources of the book. 1 The first 
and most certain results of modern Biblical study—says Prof. 
W. Bobertson Smith—are that the oldest parts of the Bible 
were parts of a popular literature. 2 The older account of the 
Exodus presents all the marks of a traditional story from which 
geographical detail has been lost through lapse of time. 3 
Oral tradition transmitted through so many centuries could 
hardly preserve a full picture of Egyptian life and institutions 
as they were in the time of Ioseph or of Moses and at no later 
date. 4 The Pentateuch represents the Egyptian priesthood to 
us as they were in later times. The Book of Genesis paints 
the life of the priests just'as it was known to be in later times. 5 
No sober critic could doubt that the geography of the Exodus 
is real geography and also of much too detailed a kind to be 
handed down for several centuries by mere oral tradition. 
The geography of the Exodus is not derived from tradi¬ 
tion but from research ; the names of the stations were known 
to the writer or supplied to him by others. 6 Compare the 
journey of Joseph into Egypt by caravan in the time of Ptol¬ 
emy Euergetes, 7 in the third century before our era. There is 
nothing, that we remember, to hinder the Pentateuch being 
written as late as the Second Century before Christ. The 
Israelites, and probably the population of the districts where 
the Israelites settled, adored El as Moloch (that is, as Asad, 
Saad, Sada). 8 It is quite possible that (Sd) is a perversion 
of Sada the Fire-god Herakles el Sadai; for Slid means de¬ 
stroyer, spoiler, and demon, like Satan and Seth or Set. See 
Bodenschatz, III. 165,166. Sthim (Numbers, xxv. 1) may mean 
the Sethim. 

1 W. R. Smith, in Contemp. Rev. Oct. 1887, p. 500. 

2 ibid. 501. 

3 ibid. 498. We rather think that Exodus was drawn up after b.c. 165, and later 
than Daniel’s prophecies. 

4 ibid. 496. 

s Movers, Phoenizier, I. 112, 113. 

6 Cont. Review, p. 498. 

7 Jahn, Hebrew Commonwealth, 196; Josephus, Ant. xii. 3, 4. 

8 Movers, I. 33, 318. Judges, xi. 34ff; Micah, vi. 7 ; Amos, v. 26; Numb. xxv. 4. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


141 


The Egyptians being voluptuous and lazy in regard to 
labors and slaves to the other pleasures, and that in particular 
which has to do with the love of gain, it happened that they 
were very mad with the Hebrews through envy of their pros¬ 
perity. For seeing the race of the Israelites flourishing and 
through merit and adaptation to the labors, now distinguished 
on account of the plenitude of wealth, they suspected that they 
increased to their detriment. And of them some had done 
well under Ioseph but in the course of time had forgotten 
(their obligations), and, the sovereignty having passed to 
another house, were excessively impudent to the Israelites 
and contrived various injuries for them. For they ordered 
them to cut the Nile into many canals and build walls for the 
cities and mounds (elevations above the River) to keep it back 
from overflowing when it went out over them. And building 
up pyramids they wore out our people. 1 But the pasturing of 
flocks around the Great Pyramid was in the time of the Shep¬ 
herd Pliilitionos. 2 Exodus, vi. 24, gives Asir TDK, while the 
third pyramid at Gizeh has surrendered the name of Asar, Osar 
or Ousir (Osiris) on Menkaura’s coffin lid, and Movers I. 43, 
341, finds Asar idk in Phoenicia as a deity-name. The name 
Ousir appears on the Seal of Iar in the Abbot Egyxotian Mu¬ 
seum in the possession of the Historical Society of New York. 
Chabas (— Papyrus Magique, p. 208) gives us Asarel; for 
the hatchet, in hieroglyphs, stands for El = God. Chabas 
says that the name of Osiris, in hieratic writing, is As-ra. 
But the vowel a is understood. Osiris is the element, water 
(life). Compare the “ well of Hasarah ” (or, reading the n 
by St. Jerome’s rule, Asara). —2 Samuel, iii. 26. See Asur ; — 
Gen. x. 11. and the Beni-Asar.—Joshua, xix. 24. Asrael 
(Azrael), Asar, Osiris, and Osrain are names one of the Arab 
Death-angel and the others of the God of the Dead. Set was 
worshipped in Philistia 3 and the Delta. Set was Typhon ; 
and Abaris was a Typhonian city. The ancients and chiefly the 
Egyptians held that the Jews worshipped Saturnus-Typhon. 

1 Josephus, Ant. II. 5. Anyone can see that this speech of Josephus is a pure 
piece of Rhetoric, and that he was entirely ignorant of the status of the Hebrews 
(Abars, or Hebronites) in Egypt at a very early period, if they ever got there. 

2 Herodotus, II. 128. Imagine the wealth ascribed by Josephus to people described 
as forced by their overseers to cruel labor. 

3 A place named after him, Setenah, or the ‘ Well of the Adversary.’—Gen. xxvi 
31. Set = Satan. 


142 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


The name Abarah, or Abaris (the Hyksos fort), is so old as to 
have been lost in later times, and according to Lepsius, must 
have been taken from ancient writings. The narratives about 
the Hyksos have a legendary aspect, seemingly popular 
tales in reference to former wars for the possession of Lower 
Egypt; and these legends may have acquired shape in times 
subsequent to the wars of Aahmes against the Syrians in the 
Delta and at Memphis. 1 That these Syrians should have been 
regarded as intruders, particularly by the natives of Upper 
Egypt, was to be expected. That stories in regard to their 
expulsion should refer to them as lepers 2 and connect their 
£ march out ’ with the Jewish Commonwealth is not surprising, 
and that the name Mase, Mse, should have been borrowed from 
that Aahmes, Masses, or Amosis, while Miriam’s leprosy 
serve . ^o maintain the connection between the Hebrew narra¬ 
tive and the Egyptian account, at the same time that an oppor¬ 
tunity was afforded the Hebrew theologian to plant the flag of 
the Law amid the thunders of Mt. Sinai. The scribe’s motive 
was to create a great people under the Law, 3 under the priest¬ 
hood, not under the Kings ; and how render the Law more 
sacred in the eyes of the people than by representing it as 
divinely given amid the clouds on that awful spot amid whose 
desolation there could be found no sustenance for man unless 
miraculously given by the God of Life, the ever-living C I AM.’ 
According to Deuteronomy, xiii. 5, the Hebrews were thought 
to be the Hyksos, and Joseph expressly says so. 4 But ‘ Exo¬ 
dus ’ makes the Hebrews march from Ramses to Sinai, while 
Josephus (Manetho) lets the Hyksos march from Abarm to 
Jerusalem. Genesis, xlvi. 34, refers to the Hyksos, and is 
against the identification of the Hebrews with the Hyksos.— 
See Boeckh, 292 ; Exodus, i. 11. 

Manetho’s “ dynasties of Gods ” 5 are so entirely opposed to 

1 Compare Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, &c. 423-427 ; Chabas, Pasteurs, 51. 

2 Josephus contra Ap. I, 1052, 1054 ; see Amenophis. 

3 Gen. xv. 5, 18; Deut. xiii. 5 ; xxviii. 24. 

^ Contra Ap. I, 1052, 1054, 1040. 

5 Die Manethonischen Gotterdynastien ohne Zweifel aus einer sehr spaten Zeit 
herruhren. — Dr. Max Uhlemann, Handbuch, III. 46. Alte Schriftsteller sprechen 
geradezu von mehreren gleichzeitigen Regenten in Aegypten (Isaiah, xix. 13).—ibid. 
III. 50; Jos. contra Apion, I. 14. In Manetho’s list of dynasties the Phoenician Shep¬ 
herd kings are given as a separate dynasty although they only spread themselves in the 
Delta, never ruled over all Egypt, and a native dynasty of Theban kings ruled at Thebes 
contemporaneously with them.—Uhlemann, III. 50. But there are Egyptian extracts 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


143 


the idea of a Philistian or Phoenician origin of the Egyptian 
nation that it might perhaps be assumed that his and the other 
priests’ hostility to the idea lay at the bottom of his state¬ 
ments. It must be observed that he never gives the slightest 
hint of a Philistian or Phoenician origin of his nation, nor even 
mentions these peoples before the 15th, 16th, and 17th dynas¬ 
ties, and then as a late invasion. But he uses a system of dynas¬ 
ties, beginning with the Gods and going back for ages so as to 
effectually dispose (as far as was in the priests’ power) of a 
Phoenician-Philistian-Semite origin ! His article about the 
Hyksos to which Josephus refers (Manetho wrote something 
about the “Hyksos”) 1 was probably conceived in this anti- 
semite spirit. Aware of this, the Jews countered with their 
‘ ancestors ’ Seth, Abrahm, Iakab and Ioseph,—coupled with 
the “Exodus.” So that we may, after all, have to do first with 
Egyptian assumption, then with the counter of the Jewish 
Scribes, and finally with the “ contra Apion ” of Josephus. It 
is somewhat doubtful, on the evidence, what was the Hyksos 
Invasion (as described in Josephus contra Apion, I.). There was, 
it is held, an attack upon Egypt in Meneptha’s time, both by 
sea and land, by the allies. But this is a very different story. 
To enter Egypt in the time of the 15th dynasty with an army in 
great force sufficient to overwhelm the natives, it had to be in¬ 
vaded from Midian, the Red Sea coast, the Delta or by the road 
of the Philistians to Pelusium. Deuteronomy, ii. 9,10, mentions 
the Lotanese and the great people of the Amim (the Amu). 

I liated Asau (the Esau, Asa or Sa in Mt. Seir and in Idumea).—Malachi, i. 3. 

that seem to show that the 17th dynasty (at Thebes) was subservient to Apapi, a Hyksos 
King. 

Lepsius seems, at one time, to have regarded the first and second dynasty as con¬ 
temporaneous and Menes not as sole ruler, since he lets the first two kings of the sec¬ 
ond dynasty rule with him.—ibid. III. 94, 95. But these are merely unsupported con¬ 
jectures.—ibid. 95. The tables of Abydos and Kamak have shown by the succession 
of the royal ovals (cartouches) that the kings of the 12th dynasty joined on to the family 
of Menes, and that consequently the 2nd down to the 11th dynasties must have reigned 
contemporaneously with the first in different parts of the country, so that we are led to 
suspect that right after Menes eleven different kingdoms were existing in Egypt to¬ 
gether, which later were united in two and finally in one kingdom.—Uhlemann, III. 95. 
The ten dynasties that Manetho gives reigned before Sesostris (who belongs to the 12th) 
and together with the Menes family afford a sequence of 184 kings with only their names 
and regnal years given. So Herodotus gives a similar list of 300 from Menes to Sesos¬ 
tris about whom he knows next to nothing. The entire 7th dynasty reigned but 70 days, 
but had 70 kings.—ibid. 95. 

1 Chabas, Pasteurs, p. 29 ; Dumichen, Inscrip, hist. pi. 4, 37 et sqq. ; Chabas, p. 17. 


144 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


How could these Arabs or Phoenician Shepherds have got 
across the Nile without an invitation ? We have to suppose 
that they had friends in the Delta who were hostile to the 
Memphite regime. The Shepherds held Lower Egypt. 1 
Africanus testifies that they were Phoenicians. 2 

The story that Suphis (Khufu) was disdainful (vTrepoTrrr/s) to¬ 
wards the Gods (confirmed by Herodotus and Diodorus) is of 
a piece with the account of the Hyksos, that they were cruel 
to the people and hostile to the temples of the Gods. The 
Wahabee Arabs (O-h-b, Oahab) were in Suphah (to the east 
of the Arnonas; compare Zubah (Suphah), 2 Sam. viii. 3 ; 1 Sam. 
xiv., 47), as we learn from the Hebrew tradition in Numbers, xxi. 
14, and that region (the desert east of the Amorite border) is 
proximate to the Aimim, the Zuzim and the Amanites (Charn- 
manim). Apapi, the Hyksos leader, selected the Canaanite 
Set, as being his own God, to be worshipped, and ordered 
Raskenen (Ra-Sekenen the Theban sub-king) to do the same. 
The Aimim (Gen. xiv. 5) are not necessarily the same as the 
Amu (Amim.—Deut. ii. 9) which means the Arabs. But the 
remoteness of their location, in Moab, would not have pre¬ 
vented their joining the Amu (Amim) in raids into Egypt, 
since the Midianites extended from Moab to the eastern shores 
of the Red Sea, while the Amalekites rode from Egypt to the 
Persian Gulf. 

THE SHEPHERD PHILITION. 

Genesis, xxiv. 35, represents Abrahm 3 as an Arab sheik. 
In the oriental philosophy we have Isis (Ishah, Light), Nabta 
(Nephthys) Darkness. Light is represented by Sarah (Saras- 
vati); Darkness, by Kedar (Ketura). The Agarenes are rep¬ 
resented by Hagar ; the Shamah, by Ishmael. 

Abralim (Brahma) 

j^Lot (Lotan Arabs) 

Iscliaq (Isaac, Zachel, Zaliel) 

Asu-Esau----Iaqab = steals the primogeniture of 

Esau is the Elder stock; son of the I t ^ ie Arabian Esau. 

Evil Spirit. The savage man of 

Genesis, xvi. 12, 13. j | 

(Kronos) Israel Negeb 

1 ibid. 29. 

2 ibid, 9, 10. 

3 Genesis, xxvi. 34, mentions Seba/i (Seb’s town). So, Seb had been a Syrian 
Deity!! S =» Sh. See Gesenius, Lexicon S. 




THE AS API ANS IN EGYPT. 


145 


The Midianites are Ishmaelites 1 (compare Samel, Samael) 
like the Shammali tribe. Here we have a proper genealogy 
of the Arab Hyksos (Idumeans) to begin with. Their diabolic 
character seems to be connected with the words Shemal, Sa¬ 
mael, Azazel and Asu. The Haks of the Sos (Sasu Arabs) seem 
to have been the Dukes of Edom. 2 Nork represents Keturah 
as the Aphrodite Melainis, Venus skotia. 3 Iaqab steals the 
right attached to primogeniture (the blessing) away from the 
Beni Esau, and seems to have claims on the land of Kub (com¬ 
pare the Kebt). Abrahm is represented as leader of the 
Shepherds, 4 and, like the Amalekites, owning slaves. A. H. 
Sayce says : The evidence presented by the Egyptian monu¬ 
ments is confirmatory of an interesting verse (Numb. xiii. 29) 
where we are told that the Amalekites dwelt southward of 
Judah; the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites “ in the moun¬ 
tain ” ; and the Canaanites by the sea and in the valley of the 
Jordan. The statement is in complete harmony with the in¬ 
cidental notices of early Palestinian geography which meet us 
elsewhere in the Old Testament. 5 Achzib, Akko, and even 
Sidon should have belonged to the tribe Aser, but could not be 
conquered. So that “ Joshua ” proves incorrect on that point. 
—Munk, Palestine, 225. 

The Madian 6 and Amalaq and Beni Kadem 7 came up 
against the Isarelim 8 and encamped on them and carried off 
the produce of the land, as far as Gaza. They were the Shep¬ 
herds (Judges, vi. 5) and Ishmaelites (Judges, viii. 24). 9 In 

1 Gen. xxxvii. 28, 36. The Phoenicians sacrificed children to Saturn-Kronos.— 
Dunlap, ‘ Vestiges,’ p. 207. The Persians did the same. Amestris did so. The He¬ 
brews passed them through the fire to Moloch. 

2 Gen. xxxvi. Gen. xxxvi. 12, brings Amalek in among the Beni Esau. Compare 
Gen. xiv. 6, 7, which brings in the Amalekites, Chorites, Kadesh, and Aimim (Amou) ; 
not to mention the Karukamasha and Chamanites, with Chamosh the Moabite Ariel. 

8 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, Art. Ketura. 

4 Gen. xiii. 2, 5, 7,18; xxiv. 35 ; xvii. 13, 27; xx. 14. 

6 Academy, Nov. 6, 1886. Hivite is Khoite, being in Hebrew written Khoi. 

6 Midian, in the plain of Moab.—Gen. xxxvi. 35; Numbers, xxii. 4 ; xxxi. 3, 8, 
9, 10. 

7 Strange to say, the Israelites were in the city Kadesh (where the Kheta were 
when Ramses II. marched against the Khettite (Hittite) king).—Judges, xi. 16, 17. 

8 This word Isar is merely, as a proper name , the Syrian * Asar ’ pronounced Osar, 
as in the Egyptian name Asar (hieroglyphic) which is Osiris, Hesiri, Ousir, etc. Asa- 
riel is the Osiris-angel, the Asarielite Angel. Azrail the Archangel of the Iesidi. 

9 Genesis, xxxvi. 6, 16, 29. Audios.—ibid. 29; Gen. xix. 21; xxxvi. 2. Lotaun 
Arabs; Beni Adah. See Gen. x. 19, for the Kananite and Ishmaelite border. For the 
Hyksos, see Gen. xiv. 2, 3, 5, 7, 12; for the extent of the Abrahmidae, vide Gen. xv. 

10 


/ 


146 THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 

one of their raids they got as far north as the Great Plain. 
Madian seems to have carried his ark from Sinai to Moab, and 
to have crossed the Jordan to the River Kishon. If Midian- 
ites could penetrate so far in the Syrian-Amorite district, they 
must have associated themselves to the Amu in Saue, 1 and it 
would have been possible, one would imagine, for such a na¬ 
tion to have gone from the Gulf of Akabah through Sinaite 
valleys or round the Sinaite peninsula, on their camels, 2 into 
Lower Egypt east of the Nile,—certainly if joined by the Amal- 
ekites. 3 Abralim was the Father of the Arabs as well as the 
Jews. 4 

Abrahm was circumcised and Ishmael his son.—Gen. xvii. 26. 

Abrahm was rich in cattle.—Gen. xiii. 2. 

Genesis, xx. 1, mentions Abrahm (the Shemalite or Ishmaelite 
Arabs) in the South, between Kadesh and Sur (the Wilderness). 
His people were then in the Negeb. 

Thy father was an Amorite, thy mother a Katti.—Ezekiel, xvi. 3, 45. 

The “ Shepherds” adored Set 5 (Sutech), a Palestine deity 
known in the Delta of Egypt. Their kings’ names were (ac¬ 
cording to Julius Africanus) Semitic, Philistian or Phoenician 
names, such as Salatis, Saites, Sataan, Benon, Archies, Apho- 
bis, which correspond to Salad, 1 Chron. ii. 30, Set (Seth), 
Benoni, Archal (the Phoenician Herakles), Epaphus (Iobab), 

18; xx. 1. Esau is Idumea.—Gen. xxv. 30; xxxvi. 1, 31. Genesis, xxv. 2, makes 
Midian the child of Abrahm and Ketura, who resemble Adonis (Osiris, Brahma, Bro- 
mius) and Kuthereia (the Benah or Vena). So, too, Asabaq (Esbaq) has a name sug¬ 
gesting the names Asabunoi, Esebon, Seb (Sat or Set), and Dionysus, the Arab fire- 
deity.—Job i. 15, 16. 

1 Gen. xiv. 5 ; Numbers, xxi. 26, 28. Abrahm is our father.—John, viii. 39; Luke, 
i. 73. 

2 Judges, viii. 21. • 

3 See 1 Sam. xv. 3, 7 ; xxx. 11, 13. Amalek is one of the tribes of Asu (Esau) who 
is Edom (Idumea). 

4 1 Chronicles, i. 29 ff. The Genius (Angel) Bahaq called the world into existence. 
—Codex Nasar II. 233; Norberg. Bakchos (the Arabian Dionysus, Bak) was, then, 
the Arabian Light of the world; for Bak, according to Seyffarth, Th. Schr. 4, meant 
‘ light ’ in Egyptian, Bhq means splendens and f ulgens, and can be read Bak by St. 
Jerome’s rule : h = a. 

5 The Egyptians regarded Typhon as the Heliacal kosmos; and they call the 
Typhon Set.—de Iside et Osiride, 41. Hence it is clear that Set was anciently consid¬ 
ered to be the flame of the fiery sun ; while the moon was the place of Osiris and Isis. 
—de Iside, 43. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


147 


just as Khufu corresponds to Akoub, Akouph and Koupli, or 
Soupliis to Asoube and Souba among Semites. Flanking tlie 
eastern entrance into Egypt we find the Sapharitae (Mt. 
Sepher) to the north, and the Aakabara at Chebron or away 
off to the south-east (compare the Beni Kheibar east of Mid- 
ian), or possibly at the town Kliephirah a city of Beni Amin 
(Joshua, xviii. 24, 26). Speaking of the Hyksos, Josephus’s 
Manetho mentions that these did exactly what Deuteronomy, 
ii. 34, iii. 6-8, vii. 5, describes the Jews as having done down 
in the neighborhood of Gaza and Gerar. In Egyptian, Hak- 
sos or Hyksos (TJkussos) means rulers of nomads, rulers of 
Shepherds. The Shasu are the Bedouins. Josephus calls the 
Hyksos “ Our Ancestors.” The expressions Abaris (compare 
the proper name Abar, 1 Chron. viii. 17. Sept, and Aber, 1 
Chron. iv. 18, Septuagint), Typhon, Shepherds, 1 and “ the 
Shepherds at the city called Jerusalem” in the narrative 2 of 
Josephus’s Manetho show the Hyksos Shepherds to have been 
a coalition of forces Syro-Arabian, such as Mr. Birch had to 
examine in his Observations on the Statistical Table of Kar- 
nak, 14. Palmer (Egypt. Chronicles, II. p. 564) says : Manetho, 
in the passages extracted from him by Josephus, represents 
the Shepherds as not only fortifying Avaris, keeping a force 
near Pelusium 3 (which may be an anticipation), holding Mem¬ 
phis and reducing the Upper as well as Lower country, with 
the native rulers, to subjection, but also as “putting gamsons 
in such places as were most convenient for the maintenance of 
their supremacy, and for the collection of their dues.” In 
Septuagint 1 Chronicles, v. 26, vi. 1, we find the names Xa /3up 
and Xefipwv (Kliabor 4 and Khebron-Hebron); but according to 
Lepsius, who quotes Ewald, 5 the Hebrew nation originally 
comprised the most south-westerly Semitic tribes and ex¬ 
tended to the gates of Egypt, therefore to Pelusium or Abaris. 6 

1 Lepsius andMaspero regarded them as Kushites.—Wiedemann, p. 290; Maspero, 
Geschichte, p. 167 ff. Set presided over the foreign land, Phoenicia, Syria, the Desert; 
also Set possessed the red crown of Lower Egypt.—Meyer, 30, 40. The goddesses Anata 
and Astarta, which pass as bad natures, are designated ‘ creatures of Set.’—Meyer, 41. 
These goddesses are Phoenician and Syrian ; like Seth and the Sethites. 

2 Jos. c. Apion, I. p. 1053. 

3 The Karu were not very far from Pelusium. They could have done it, with aid 
from their neighbor tribes. 

4 Compare Akbar, Akbor, and Aakabara. 

3 Gesch. Isr. I. 290, 291, 328. 

6 Lepsius, Letters, p. 431. 


148 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


According to that, Josephus could easily claim Egyptian an¬ 
cestry. 

A perishing Syrian my father and lie descended into Egypt 

And he felt apprehensive there with few men.—Deuteronomy, xxvi. 5. 


The Beni Kat (Kliat, 1 Hetli) were at Chebron (Hebron) and 
at Katath. 2 Beth Kar was in Philistia 3 among the Karu. 
Compare Mt. Kliares the Mt. of the Sun, 4 Khareseth, a Sun- 
city in Moab. Manetlio’s fifteenth 5 dynasty contains the 
names Arkhles, 6 Saites, Apopliis, Staan (Sataan ?) Aseth, &c. 7 
Seth is supposed to be a God of the so-called Hyksos, and is 
associated by the Egyptians to Typlion. Aseth may therefore 
have been a Shepherd king, that is, a Seth-worshipper from 
near Kessa and Pelusium-Abaris, a Philistian. Seth was a 
Syrian deity, because he is apparently a son of Adonis-Lunus- 
Adam 8 the moon-god, being made in his image which is her- 
maphroditus. Set (Typhon) has partly the appearance (in 
hieroglyphics) of a giraffe and sometimes was represented 
with the head of an ass ; Pleyte considered the form a com¬ 
bination of ass and gazelle ; he was often represented with 
his companions as changed into goats, 9 swine and hippo¬ 
potami. 10 Set is the opponent of Osiris and Horus, 11 is also re- 


1 Ezekiel, xlvii. 19, mentions the ‘Waters of Strife at Kadesh.’ In the grand 
campaign of Ramses III. the fortress of Kadesh was defended by Kheta and Rabu 
from Arba (Chebron) united against him. In invading the Southern Syria Ramses had 
his rear open to Idumeans, Amalekites, Nabatheans, Amorites ; while the Libyans 
might attack Egypt on the west. 

2 Gen. x. 15; xxiii. 2, 7, 10, 15, 19 ; Joshua, xix. 15. 

3 1 Samuel, vii. 11. 

4 Mt. Chares.—Judges, i. 35. Chares means ‘sun’ in Hebrew. Kur is the Sun. 
Kurios is the Solar Lord. Schrader reads "13 (kr) Kur-ra, and translates it Osten 
(East).—Schrader, Keilms. u. d. Alte Test., 397, 560. Compare Samgar (Samas, Sam, 
Shems) and Garu (city of Kar the Sun). So, too, Sankara. Sanar, the Sun’s Moun¬ 
tain, Chermon. 

5 According to Mr. Savce’s Record in his Herodotus, I. p. 460. 

6 compare the Phoenician Archal, Herakles. In Cory’s Ancient Fragments, p. 11, 
Kertos (Kriprap), 29 years, is placed before Aseth, 20 years. The same name, Kertlios, 
is put immediately after Salatis in Knotel’s System, pp. 17, 19. It comes near the 
Karetim , Phoenicians, as a Hyksos name. 

7 A mixed multitude made exodus together with the Hebrews.—Exodus, xii. 38. 

8 Gen. v. 3. le disque lunaire entre les deux yeux mystiques.—Maspero. 

9 Asasel’s Goat.—Leviticus, xvi. 8, 10. 

10 Eduard Meyer, Set-Tvphon. 1, 7. 

“ ibid. 13-15. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


149 


garded as tlie Darkness, 1 all that is bad, destructive and 
hated. 2 Set is the God to whom the sea, foreign territory, and 
the desert belong: the crocodile, hippopotamus, and the ass, 
destructive and abhorred creatures, belong to him. 3 He also 
appears in the Book of the Dead as pursuer of souls. 4 Com¬ 
pare Zagreus as pursuer of souls. Here as everywhere the op¬ 
position between good and bad gradually develops out of the 
idea of Light and Darkness, friendly and hostile. 5 In lower 
Egypt the worship of Seth was only in the Eastern Delta and 
perhaps in Memphis. Tanis and Avaris (at or near Pelusium) 
were two chief seats of his worship. In Tanis he had a great 
temple. In 1862 Marietta exhumed there numerous steles 
having reference to his worship. The north-east Delta was 
from a very early period inhabited by a Canaanite population 
or one intermixed with them. With their chief god Bol 
(Apollo) Set was identified because he was God of the for¬ 
eigner. 6 Two Hyksos kings have names compounded with the 
name Set (see Wiedemann, 284, 295), and Apepi II. worships 
Sutech (Set) alone. A son of Bamses II. is called Set-em-oua, 

1 ib. 15,18-24, 28, 29. Horus and Set are mentioned as two hostile brothers. —ib. 22. 
Sebak, the crocodile-headed god, is smitten at the prow of the great bark.—Meyer, p. 
27. The hippopotamus is the old Typhon. Compare the Old Serpent Satan, the 
Devil.—Revelation, xx. 2. The Egyptians adored Typhon with the usages of the Mo¬ 
loch-worship.—Movers, 365, 367-371. 

2 Meyer, 40. 

3 ibid. 40. 

4 ib. 41, 42, compare Levit. xvi. 8, 10. 

5 Meyer, 41. He finally takes the place of the Christian Devil, Satan in Hades 
seizing the souls, devouring the entrails and living on corpses. The part was assigned 
to chiefly the bad demons of destroying the ignorant and wicked. They are often the 
servants of Osiris, Ra and Turn, like the guardians of the gates of the Elysian Field 
Aanre (or Aalu), who kill the enemies of Osiris and go about partly at night. This is 
also Hindu superstition. At the moon’s full a swine was offered up and eaten. On 
this day Set in a boar’s form attacked Horus.—Meyer, 42, 43. A type of Typhon is the 
crocodile. As beginning of all evil is Set, so in the magic papyrus Harris the inimical 
crocodile Makai is called “ Son of Set,” and the goddesses Anata and Astarta, who 
pass for evil-disposed natures, are designated “creatures of Set.”—Meyer, p. 41. The 
deceased identifies himself with Set, Osiris, Sothis, and Turn, in order thereby to scare 
away the crocodiles.—ibid. 48. This arises out of the doctrine that Apollo-Set (Baal) 
is the God of Darkness in Hades. Through Set they never expected to die again.— 
Meyer, 48, 49. 

6 Eduard Meyer, p. 47. Outside are the dogs.—Rev. xxii. 15. Like the Jews, the 
Egyptians called the foreigners scp, (that is, Goim, Gentiles) and dogs.—Eugene Rev- 
illout, Revue Egyptol. 1881. 7, 8, 60. The Egyptian prophet inveighs against Nec- 
taneb II. because his pride, boasting and self-confidence made him forget that God 
alone is the master of the supreme power.—Eugene Revillout, 1881, p. 60. The Azathi 
of Gaza worshipped Seth’s name. 


150 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


“ Set in the bark.” 1 The two sacred seas of the temple-grounds 
of Edfu bore, one, the name Sche-Hor “ Sea of Horus; ” the 
other was called Sche-Chab “ Sea of the River Horse.” At 
Edfu a festival was kept in memory of the “ fight of Horus,” 
at which the killing a hippopotamus was undertaken in the 
second sea. At another festival at Edfu an ass was killed, ac¬ 
cording to inscriptions in the temple. 2 Horus protects a piece 
of the body of Osiris from the Destroyer, Set-Typhon. Ac¬ 
cording to Nonnus (I. 155), Typhoeus stole the snowy arms of 
Zeus, the arms of fire. Set was not in the circle of Gods. His 
name was here as everywhere scraped out or changed into 
Thuti or Hor ur. 3 Seth, the Sethians say, is a certain divine 
Power.—Theodoret, Haeret. Eab., I. xiv. Cain was the Power 
of Darkness. 

There is one monument which shows Apepi or Apophis to 
have been the last of the Shepherd Kings , 4 and contemporary 
with a certain Ra Sekenen who immediately preceded Ahmes, 
the founder of the eighteenth dynasty. There is another which 
not obscurely intimates that Set or Saites was (as Manetho 
also witnesses) the first of the Shepherd kings, and also gives 
his date as 400 years before some year in the reign of Ramses 
II. Now the only dynasty of Shepherd kings whose names 
Manetho gave began with a 4 Saites ’ and ended with an 
‘Apophis,’ according to both Africanus and the Armenian 
Eusebius ; so that there are strong grounds for believing that 
the rule of the Shepherds really began and ended with this 
dynasty, to which Manetho assigned 284 years, according to 
both Africanus and the Armenian Eusebius, or, according to 
Josephus, 250 years and ten months. 5 The Hyk-Sos are partly 

1 Meyer, pp. 52, 53. Set is represented as the Golden, the double crown on his 
head, killing a serpent in whose neck a knife sticks. Also Set is xneri Ra, beloved of 
Ra.—ibid. 53. He was also conceived as brother of Osiris and Horus, that the power 
of Darkness might be conceived as the brother of Light. In this point of view his 
wife is Nepthys. Both are represented together in a group in the Louvre, of the time 
of Ramses II.—Meyer, 50, 51. Abel represents the Solar Good Principle, the Adon 
that dies. 

2 Dumichen, Allgemeine Gesch. I. 49. 

3 Meyer, 51, 52. Henoch has “ Sutel.” 

4 From Rawlinson’s Egypt. In vol. II. p. 231 he mentions Herinocol as a town of 
the Luten. It sounds like Rhinocolura on the Syrian frontier towards Egypt. 

6 Rawlinson, II. p. 16. Herodotus, II. 128, expressly mentions the pyramids of 
Khufu and Khafra in connection with “the Shepherd Philitis.” This name either 
refers to Phoenicians or Philistines, or to both ; which would include the Kef a. It is 
assumed that the Phoenician trading posts and cities were along the Philistine sea-coast 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


151 


the Amalekite Arabs, the Shasu. In his account of these 
Arabs Manetho has sketched a true likeness of those Amal- 
ekites who made the Jews so furious that they swore—the 
hand on the Throne of Iacli—perpetual war against Amalak ! 1 

And Iahoh said to M-s-e : Write this memorandum in (a) book and put it 
into Iauslia’s ears : for I with destruction am about to destroy the remembrance 
of Amalaq from underneath the heavens !—Exodus, xvii. 14. 

It is obvious that Amalak was as unpopular in Judea 2 as he 
was in Egypt. Saul smote the Amalek from Choilach south¬ 
east of the Dead Sea, nearly to the Egyptian border. 

And Iahoh did to thee as he spoke through my hand, and Iahoh severed 
the government out of thine hand gave it to thy friend, to Daud. Since you 
did not listen to the voice of Iahoh and did not execute the vehement fury of 
his anger upon Amalaq : on this account hath Iahoh done this thing to thee 
this day. And Iahoh will give also Israel with thee into the power of the 
Pelestim, and to-morrow thou and thy sons (will be) with me (in Hades) : even 
the camp of Israel Iahoh shall give into the hand of the Pelestim. And Saul 
hastened and fell at his full length to the ground, and was very much scared at 
the words of Samuel, and his strength left him.—1 Sam. xvii. ff. 

The priest-power aimed to control the kings, if these were not 
highpriests. It is to be noticed that the letters of Daud’s 
name are Dud, whence it is easy to compare Homer’s Tud 
(Tudeus), the eus being only Greek termination syllable added 
to the Semite root Adad, Dud, Tud, Taut, Tot, Thoth, such 
changes as proper names underwent under the vocal rule 
d=t=th. It seems impossible to deny that the sacred scribes 
wrote their history with a will and a political intention.— 
2 Chron. xvi. 12 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 9; 2 Cliron. xxi. 11 ; xxxi. 1 ; 
xxxv. 4; Ezra, ix. 2 ; Nehem. xiii. 1 , 23. 

“Hebron is at once a Hittite and an Amorite town; and 
Ezekiel declares (xvi. 45) that the mother of Jerusalem was a 
Hittite and the father an Amorite. I have always believed, on 
the strength of Numbers, xiii. 22 , that Manetho had traditional 
authority for his statement that Jerusalem was built by the 

and on the lower Nile,—extending as far, perhaps, as Karthage. The Philistines were 
found in battle array at Sunem in the plain of Iesreel in Saul’s time. 

1 Exodus, xvii. 8-16; Numb. xxiv. 20; 1 Sam. xv. 3, 20. The Hebrews did not 
love the Sheto (Beni Sheth.—Numbers, xxiv. 17) any more than the Egyptians did. 
The Amalekites dwelt in the land of Negeb. 

2 The burning wrath of Ia’hoh against Amalak.—1 Sam. xxviii 18; see psalm, 
lxxxiii. 7. 


152 


THE G1IEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Hyksos after their expulsion from Egypt and there is much to 
be said on behalf of the theory of Mariette and others that the 
leaders of the Hyksos were Hittites. However this may be, 
the discovery that Hittites and Amorites were associated in 
Northern Syria confirms the Biblical narrative which assigns a 
colony of Hittites to the south of Judah.” 1 

Taking into view Mr. Brugsch’s favorable opinion of the 
Hyksos, which is the exact opposite of what Josephus, in his 
controversy against Apion, claims to have been the statement 
of Manetho, considering, further, Deuteronomy, xii. 2, 3, which 
bears a striking resemblance to Manetho as quoted by Jose¬ 
phus, and that a combination or league of the powers between 
Chebron (’Hebron), the Ghor, Madian, el Paran (including 
Amalak) and Egypt would make up an allied array of peoples 
corresponding to the Josephus-Manethonian description of the 
Hyksos, it is not wholly improbable that an Amorite-Khatite- 
Amalekite invasion of Lower Egypt really occurred, of which 
this Hyksos story is the altered remnant. If the difference be¬ 
tween Hyksos and Amenemhats consists in hair arranged dif¬ 
ferently, in an unusual type of face in Egypt, in a difference of 
facial appearance on sphinxes, and the difference between the 
use of dark grey or black granite and red, 2 it must not be for¬ 
gotten that Ioudeans, Philistians (Karu), Amalekites, and 
Phoenicians were the neighbors of Egypt, that the names of 
the Hyksos kings are both Egyptian and Semite, that the 
Hyksos kings had hieroglyphic characters, and that when 
Thothmes, Seti I., and Bamses II. replied to the invasions of 
Egypt they marched into the Negeb, to the Wadi Arabah , to Biv 
Saba , and to Zahi (Azah, Gaza). We must further remember 
that the object of Josephus, in his reply to Apion, was to 
identify his ancestors and ‘Exodus’ with these very Hyk¬ 
sos who long held Lower Egypt. Then again the Phoeni¬ 
cians and Hyksos had sphinxes, 3 the Assyrians and Jews their 
sacred bulls. 

1 This passage in the ‘Academy ’ of the date Oct. 23d, 1886, has just been received 
Nov. 2d, after the completion of this chapter. Mr. A. H. Sayce is the author of the 
passage quoted above. 

2 See Petrie, Tanis, I. pp. 5, 6, 9, 11. The Amenemhats employed both red and 
black granite.—Tanis I. pp. 4, 5. The connection with Philistia, the Khatti, and 
Negeb (the South) is shown in the adoration, by the Hyksos, of Set the fire-god of the 
sea-coast from el Arish to Beirut, the Seth of the Hebronites and Jews. 

3 Georg Ebers, ‘ Academy,’ March 6, 1886, p. 173, mentions a sphinx strongly Phoe¬ 
nician in character. 


THE ASA RIANS IN EGYPT. 


153 


Now then, here, take your wife and depart! 

They sent him away and his wife and all that he had.—Gen. xii. 19, 20. 

And Abram went up out of Misraim and his wife and all (the people) that 
were his, and Lot 1 with him, to the Negeb. And Abram was very powerful in 
cattle and silver and gold. 2 And he went on his locomotions (departures) from 
Negeb to Beth El, to the place where his tent was at first, between Beth-El and 
Hai!—Gen. xiii. 1-4. 


This is a very accurate account (according to Josephus 3 ) of 
the removal of the Hyksos from Abaris to Jerusalem. Jose¬ 
phus claims them as ‘ our ancestors.’ 

And he went whence he came into the Desert.—Septuagint, Gen. xiii. 3. 


The Ishmaelites are the Children of Abraham. 4 They included 
the Amalekites, Hagarenes 5 (Agraei) and all the Edomite 
tribes. They were excellent archers, dead shots with either 
hand. 

The souvenirs of the fourth and fifth dynasties are grouped 
and concentrated, so to speak, around the ancient site of Mem¬ 
phis ; Ousirtasen I. (12th dynasty) left memorials of himself at 
Abydos, Memphis and Tanis. 6 The 12tli dynasty has left the 
traces of its power 7 from the Faium to Sinai, from Lower Egypt 
to the heart of Ethiopia. Then Apapi 8 is no barbarian but an 
enlightened prince who has a college of hierogrammatei, sacred 
scribes, learned men. He is the only Shepherd king whose en¬ 
tire cartouche has come down to us. Mariette has even found 
his legend at San. We must not forget that with this “ Shep¬ 
herd king ” we come upon the finale of the oppression of Egypt 
by a foreign race. 9 The Egyptian civilization was that of the 

1 The tribe Lotaun (as one of the Edomite tribes) very likely extended to Mesopo¬ 
tamia. See Gen. xi. 31. 

2 The plunder of Egypt. 

8 contra Apion, I. 

4 Gen. xxv. 12-14, f. 

6 The circumstance that Hagar was an Egyptian (Gen. xvi. 1) shows the intimate 
relations of the Egyptian Delta with the East. 

6 De Rouge, Recherches, pp. iv. v. vi. Oer chuu (‘great lights’) is the name of the 
prophet of Menkaura (4th dynasty).—De Rouge, 64. Chuu may perhaps have had the 
signification of ‘ lives,’ which the Hebrew chiim means. 

7 Sterile nomenclatures up to the moment when the family of Amemhat shall cast 
a new lustre upon the second part of the Ancient Empire.—De Rouge, Recherches, p. 
153. 

8 The name resembles Baba, Bebai, Papi and Pepi. Apepi subjected to his sway 
36 districts of Nubia.—Sayce, Her. I. 326. 

9 Chabas, les Pasteurs, 31, 37. 


154 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Pliilistian-Phoenicians, and a strong proof of this besides the 
Semite character of the early names, including Ramses, is that 
the Papyrus Sallier I. reveals that only the “ Shepherd t,ing ” 
has a council of learned scribes, 1 while the Theban’s council¬ 
lors are all military leaders. 2 This is in itself evidence that 
the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing began in the North, and the 
circumstance that no early and greatly inferior status of the 
said writing has been discovered seems to point to the importa¬ 
tion of letters into Egypt from abroad. The two side walls of 
the passage way and the walls of Pepi’s burial chamber were 
covered with rich inscriptions. The beauty of the green-col¬ 
ored inscriptions cut in white stone within his pyramid indi¬ 
cate the advanced stage of art in the pyramid-builders of the 
sixth dynasty and a completed state of civilization such as 
would not be looked for in the (assumed) early period from the 
commencement of regal power under a Menestothe fourth and 
fifth dynasties. Hence something, some tradition, has failed 
to be recorded in the Egyptian annals, or, if recorded, has per¬ 
ished, that would have explained this apparent perfection 
without growth which is only witnessed in the case of civiliza¬ 
tion and progress attained in one country and carried to an¬ 
other. Since there is a tradition of a Phoenician emigration 
and another of the occupation of Memphis by the Arabs or 
Syrians (called Hyksos) we have to ascribe to the Phoenicians 
or Syrians the progress in the arts and the religious organiza¬ 
tion found to have once existed near Memphis at Gizeh and on 
the border of the desert, just west of the village Saqqarah, as 
well at Abu Roash, among the pyramid builders. 3 It is, how¬ 
ever, an unsettled question what led to the destruction of the 

1 Gen. xlvi. 20, 1. 26 and Exodus, vii. 11, mention the chachams (an expression still 
in use) and the readers of hieroglyphs, the chartamim. There was nothing to prevent 
a Hebrew writer in the 2nd century B.c. using the name Ramses to indicate the locality 
where Ramses II. had left his name and image (compare Genesis, xlvii. 11). 

2 Chabas, p. 37. 

3 The diorite observed by Petrie at Gizeh and Abu Roash very likely came from 
Midian* where it was found by R. F. Burton (see his Gold Mines of Midian, 161, 353). 
King Soris (recognized as Senofru by De Rouge, Recherches, p. Ill) has the name Sor, 
a form of the name Asar or Sar (pronounced Sor), which is the name of Sour (Tyre) 
and Suria. This shows that the kings of the fourth dynasty were of Syrian Origin. 
Rawlinson, II. 46, considers that Soris corresponds with the ‘ Sar ’ of the Turin Papy¬ 
rus and the table of Saccarah, and that he is properly identified with Senefru. The 
study of the tombs of Gizeh and Saccarah allows the construction of a very extended 
tableau of the Egyptian civilization during the fourth and fifth dynasties.—De Rouge, 

p. 111. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


155 


temples of Gizeh. 1 It may have been the expulsion of the 
Syrians from Memphis, and then the ruin of Gizeh naturally 
followed. 

When we compare the two largest pyramids at Gizeh 
(Khufu’s, 450 t V<f feet high, Khafra’s 447* high; Khufu’s 746 
feet in breadth at bottom, Khafra’s 690/W broad at bottom) 
Khufu’s is the largest, indeed, but the difference in size is not 
so very important in regard to certain ulterior considerations. 
Khafra’s like Menkaura’s pyramid has no grave-chamber above 
the rock!—Petrie, 105, 117, 170. Khufu’s has. Petrie’s exhibi¬ 
tion of a cross section of each of these pyramids places the 
distinction between the two before us very clearly. The dif¬ 
ference of intention in the plan of erection is a radical one. 
If Khufu’s pyramid suggested to Khafra the idea of rivaling 
it, why did he not imitate the notion of a chamber above the 
rock ? Or if Khafra’s was first built, why should Khufu have 
deviated in regard to the location above ground of the King’s 
Chamber ? The size of the pyramid does not appear to differ 
so much as to make it a question of mere fancy. The change 
from the usual custom of burying in the rock must have had a 
more serious reason, one would be apt to think. It may have 
been caused by the need to lessen the superincumbent weight, 
as was the case in regard to the five ‘ chambers of construc¬ 
tion ’ over the ‘ King’s Chamber,’ or it may have been intended 
for concealment of the body, since in Khafra’s pyramid no 
chambers above ground existed or would be liable to be sus¬ 
pected in Khufu’s times. Sheet iron was used at Gizeh.— 
Petrie, p. 212. 

Was the Great Pyramid intended to serve as a tomb of 
Saturn or Osiris, or of a king Khufu or Suphis (Sev, Seb, 2 
Suph) ? Saturn is Eartligod, Hades, Sheol. Khufu’s emblems, 


1 The Hyksos may have been the 4th, 5th ancl 6th dynasties at Memphis, and the 
Theban kings have taken their place. Hence the bias of the Egyptians against the 4th 
dynasty is explained. This, however, would contradict Manetho, and the pyramids 
precede the 6th dynasty. Theban influences have been exerted to change the aspect of 
the history of Egypt so far as the Memphite dynasties are concerned, and to claim 
Egypt for the Egyptians except during the time of Arisu and other foreign invaders, 
disposed of as Hyksos. 

2 Seb is found in SebaA (Seb’s town), the well of Sebah.—Gen. xxvi. 83. S is Sh, 

in Hebrew.—Gesenius, Lexicon, letter S. Petrie regards the Great Pyramid as 
Khufu’s tomb. > 


156 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 

the water-jug and ram, rather point to the water of Hades. 1 
Saturn is Ancient of days. 

Thus says the High and Sublime One that inhabits eternity.—Isaiah, lvii. 

15. 

There is a certainty that the day of Saturn was kept sacred by 
the Hebrews, and in Egypt Seb must have had his day at 
some time. When it is considered that Lepsius found the re¬ 
mains of 75 pyramids, it is clear that the object of their 
erection was to serve as places of burial. That this was the 
case in regard to the Great Pyramid admits of no doubt, for 
the lower part of the passage leading to the two funeral cham¬ 
bers above was blocked up with granite plug-blocks, according 
to Petrie, 166, 167, 215. Pour kings’ mummies were found, ac¬ 
cording to Arabian authors, in the two greatest pyramids, be¬ 
sides other things of value ; 2 but the ancient authors, while 
agreed that the pyramids were graves, were not agreed as to 
their builders. 3 The Great Pyramid is an exception to the usual 
rule of burying in the rock ; for it has in addition two chambers 
for burial above ground ; one still exhibiting the sarcophagus 
that is too large to be taken up the passage way to the ‘ King’s 
Chamber.’ The references to Saturn (Adonis) as Deathgod ap¬ 
ply also to the kings. 4 Plato puts Tliamus 5 6 (probably Tamus, 

1 Deuteron. xxxiii. 13, see Hesiod, Theog. 783-786. The identification or union of 
the deceased with Osiris is already assumed as something completely settled in the old¬ 
est known copies of the Book of the Dead.—Renouf, p. 177. In the 11th dynasty the 
name Osiris is not'yet put before that of the deceased.—ib. 177. 

2 A. Wiedemann, Agypt. Gesch. p. 179. 

3 ibid. p. 180. An examination of Petrie’s plate vii. of the two large pyramids at 
Gizeh, shows that Khafra’s pyramid has no chambers above the rock, while the Great 
Pyramid has two ; the lower one of the two having been built first may have been of 
less account in the estimation of the builders, when it was decided to make the King’s 
chamber higher up. The lower chamber had to be closed up to allow the plug-blocks to 
pass it, and was therefore dependent upon such closing, which might occur at any time. 
Not reliable therefore to bury in. 

4 The 1 Hoi Adon,’ the mourning lamentation, was given for the kings.—Jeremiah, 
xxii. 18 ; xxxiv. 5. Khnum’s name, which appears in the second ‘ chamber of con¬ 
struction ’ above the ‘ King’s Chamber,’ was used in the royal names of the 13th and 
14th dynasties. A. Wiedemann, Agypt. Gesch. 268, 270. In the Museum at Naples, 
according to Massey, Natural Genesis, I. 476, there is an inscription of the time of 
Darius III., which address Khnum as Lord of lords whose right eye is the sun’s disk, 
whose left eye is the moon. Now Khnum's name is prefixed to that of Khufu. The 
water-jar and the ram appear to point to Osiris and the resurrection ; and the Asar 

(Osiris) is a very ancient name among the Kanaanites. See Movers, I. 341. 

6 Plato, Phaedrus, lviii. 274, lxi. 276. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


157 


Tammuz) back in the time of Thoth-Hermes. The date of the 
invasion of the Hyksos was in the time of King Timaeus (Turn 
or Tamuz, probably). Since in the times of the Romans the 
front door of the Great Pyramid gave ready access to the in¬ 
terior, and the Great Pyramid had two ventilation channels 
(which the other pyramids did not have) it would seem as if 
the idea that it was one of the tombs of Osiris had some foun¬ 
dation ! For if it was merely the last resting-place of a king 
why should not Khafra’s pyramid and the others have had 
the same ventilation ? But the Great Pyramid alone has it. 
Moreover the top of the sarcophagus may have been fastened 
down with only some bones of Apis left in it, as in Khafra’s 
pyramid. De Rouge, Researches, 43-50, finds Kliufu’s relatives 
in the tombs at Gizeh in number sufficient to prove him a 
king. 1 The Ram was sacred to Hermes (Tat, Thotli) Krioforos. 
The conjunction of Hermes with the Moon (Hermaphroditus) 
gives in the month of the Ram (Aries) new fruitfulness 2 to Nat¬ 
ure. Therefore the water-jug and the ram are merely the 
symbols of Khufu’s resurrection perhaps. The paschal lamb 
must have had reference to nature’s resurrection, especially as 
it was slaughtered (Rev. v. 6) on the full moon of the Ram 
month. The Adon or Lord returns in the sign Aries. At the 
same time a ram was sacrificed to Zeus Ammon, so sacred was 


1 It is not uncommon to find ancient priests named after the God that they 
served ; and Khufu must have been a high priest according to Egyptian usage.—de 
Iside, 9 ; Herodot. II. 141, 142. A temple stood before Khafra’s pyramid richly fur¬ 
nished with statues, bowls and vases engraved with his royal name and titles.—Petrie, 
133. The Pyramid of Meydoun and the Great Pyramid of Sakkarah show that the pyr¬ 
amids were used as tombs prior to the erection of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at 
Gizeh. Moreover the Kananite, Amorite and Israelite kings were habitually buried 
in the Bamoth Bal (the High Places of the Sun), which custom would of course be 
kept up by the Phoenicians and Pliilistian Kharu in Egypt. 

2 Herodotus, II. 127, says that (as the Egyptian said) Khufu reigned 50 years 
and Diodorus says that Khembes reigned 50 years. This shows that both authors 
have in mind the same party. A form of Khemmis is Khembis. Khem was there 
worshipped. Khembes was one of the names given to the Builder of the Great Pyra¬ 
mid. Khem is the creative God, and the form Amun-Khem sometimes occurs. 
Taking Khembes and Khufu (Khnum-Khufu) each as the Builder of the same struct¬ 
ure, has a tendency to show that Khufu is not more a deity than Khembes ; for Dio¬ 
dorus Siculus, I. cap. 63. p. 72, states that ‘ Khembes of Memphis built the Great¬ 
est Pyramid.’ Hecataeus gave Khembis as the name of Khem’s city, Chemmis.— 
Wheeler’s Herodotus, I. p. 385. Khembes has the appearance of being a name manu¬ 
factured out of the word Khem ; and the Pitcher and the ram might well suit as sym¬ 
bols of Khem’s creative attributes. Both names start from the name of a creative 
deity, as their root. 


158 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


formerly the ram to the Egyptians also. It was an atonement- 
festival, otherwise the Egyptians at the Theban Spring-festi¬ 
val when the ram was slain would not have beaten themselves 
on the breast as expression of the greatest grief. That this 
victim was buried explains yet more clearly its destination to 
be a symbol of the dying year. Just as in the ceremonies at 
the death of the Syrian Adonis, the beating the breasts and 
the mournful bearing of those taking part in the ceremonies 
could in like manner have reference to this dying Lamb. 
The Jews must come in white garments in Spring, a symbol of 
entering pure upon a new period of the Sun. That it was a 
ceremony of expiation is clear from Exodus, xii. 5, 13. No 
uncircumcised person could take part in the paschal offering. 1 

Pherekudes Syrius, B.c. 544, has rov act £oWa (compare 
Plato’s TO ov aet, yeVecnv Se ovk eyov. Plato, Tim. 27 d) the Ever- 
living, from whom issue Chthonos (Adam earthy) and Chthonia 
(Goddess of Matter), just as Apasson and Taautlia issue from 
the Unknown Darkness. From Chronos 2 issue Spirit, Fire, 3 
Water, which represent the triple nature of the Intelligible. 

Just as the chronological canon of the kings of Egypt com¬ 
menced with the reign of the Gods, so likewise we find on the 
monuments the cartouches of the Gods drawn in a manner 
analogous to those of the kings. This is to be noted! The 
cartouches are always simple just like those of the Pharaohs 
belonging to the first dynasties. In the exterior form, then, 
there is no difference between the cartouches of the Gods and 
those of the kings, and this conformity originated in the ha¬ 
bitual assimilation of the kings to the Gods by the Egyptians 
The kings were sons of the Sun, or claimed the distinction of 
being thus regarded, so that Khufu, so far as his cartouches 
show, might either have been either a deity-name or a royal 
name, except that his name appears in other tombs near by. 


1 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, iv. 443,448. Hebrew prophets lived on the High 
Places and Hebrew kings were buried there. So Khufu was entitled, by Semite cus¬ 
tom, to be buried in the High Place of Khnum at Gizeh, both as priest and king. They 
were usually buried in the rock below. The people still sacrificed and burned incense 
in all the High Places.—2 Kings, xii. 3 ; xv. 4. Pan, however, the Egyptians regarded 
as the Most Ancient of the Gods, irap’ Alywrioun Se ila^ nei> ap^aioTaros.— Herodotus, II. 
145. The Egyptian Pan is Khem, who is therefore as ancient a God in Egypt as 
Khnum. He was regarded as a form of the Supreme God.—Rawlinson, I. 331, 334. 

2 Oulomus (Time) issues from Aether and Air. 

3 Compare the fire-pillars of the Setiatts.— Exodus, xiii. 21, 22. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


159 


The granite blocks bear no inscription, only the limestones. 
These hieroglyphs, written not engraved, follow no consecu¬ 
tive order and do not make up veritable inscriptions. Each 
block has its own inscription which is not continued on the 
next block. One might fancy that these blocks formerly com¬ 
posed a series which had afterwards got displaced, and that 
these materials originally belonged to a monument more an¬ 
cient than the Great Pyramid. These characters, however, 
were quarry marks merely, made with the object of mentioning 
the name of the king who made use of the quarries. This is 
the opinion of Lepsius. But if so, how did they get into the 
pyramid ? They got into four of the chambers of construction 
in the attic. Col. Vyse, I: 235, 238, says that red quarry marks 
were continually found upon the stones that were removed at 
the South front of the Great Pyramid: so that these red marks 
Avere not confined to the stones Availed up in the attic cham¬ 
bers of construction ; arid Col. Vyse found another stone in a 
heap on the North side of the Great Pyramid Avith the remnant 
of a cartouche that ended like Khufu’s oval, followed by the 
Avorm which in hieroglyphs stands for f. What the worm (or 
serpent) may mean except to indicate a spiritual status 1 or 
being, is doubtful; but the jar means water of life, water (of 
Osiris), and Amun’s ram signifies Creator,—an allusion per¬ 
haps to the Arab-Dionysiac idea of creation in Hades, and the 
water in the Deep underneath. These symbols may refer to 
King Kliufu as become, or to become, a spiritual being, and 
to be revived and renewed in a resurrection of some kind. 
The Theban Kneph had the ram’s head. Lepsius felt sure 
that the red marks were completed on the inaccessible sides 
of the blocks with the red hieroglyphs on them. If these 
marks were numerous (see Vyse, I. 235), found on other stones 
of the Great Pyramid besides those in the four highest cham¬ 
bers of construction, the inference is that king Kliufu built 
the pyramid, unless we assume that it may have been com¬ 
pleted after his death or that the stones had been previously 
used in erecting another tomb for Kliufu,—a suggestion Avhich 
even the unusual formation of the so called £ King’s Chamber * 
and ‘ Queen’s Chamber ’ hardly permits to be made, although 
Khafra’s pyramid had not such chambers above the ground, 

1 The serpent indicates spirit and divinity; as in the case of the royal asps ; as a 
letter the worm means f. 


160 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and its construction is inferior to that of the Great Pyramid, 
showing- less interest in the work. The ventilating passages 
are peculiar to the Great Pyramid, as are the two chambers 
for burial above the foundations of the structure. Such an 
unusual and novel idea must have had a motive ; especially as 
clear down in the rock underneath the Great Pyramid a long 
subterranean passage was cut, as usual for a royal tomb. 1 
Manetlio would not be disposed to admit that the Great Pyra¬ 
mid was built by a Phoenician or Philistian king, by a wor¬ 
shipper of Set. Set-xenoi, Typhonian foreigners, were offered 
up as victims. 2 But Set was an older deity in Egypt than 
Asar. Khafra 3 (Kabirah, Cabar) may refer to the Sun (Khopri, 
Kheper) of the Kefa. 4 Nork says that Kepheus has solar sig¬ 
nificance, is the Sun veiled or concealed in darkness; like 
Kebo, the setting Sun in the west. Kepheus was son of Agenor 
(Bal), and King of ^Ethiopia. He appears among the stars as 
father of Andromeda and husband of Kassiepeia. A myth 
mentions Kronos as waylaying Ouranos in a place in the cen¬ 
tre of the earth. 5 Kronos has two children, imps of Darkness 
in Hades, 6 named Typhon (Tuphon) 7 and Nephthys. 8 The 
Phoenician euhemerism disposed of Ptah and Adam (the Moon- 
god Men and Osiris) by mentioning Ptah under the name 
Technites (the Architect, Khnemu) and Adam under the names 
Geinos Autochthon 9 (Earthy, Sprung from earth). The name 
of Asar (Osiris) is found at Gizeh. One would be almost dis¬ 
posed 10 to consider Khufu 11 a euhemerised Saturn, if it were 
not for the circumstance that, according to De Bouge, Bes., 
43, 44, he had quite a family. The Egyptian priests did all in 
their power to persuade the common people that the Gods 

1 Rawlinson, Egypt, I. 199, 200. 

2 Lauth, Aegypt. Chronol., 165. 

3 Cabir (?). See the town Kafira,—Nehemiah, vii. 29; Kafira, a district.—2 Es- 
dras, ii. 25. 

4 Compare the formations Ases-kaf, Shepses-kaf, etc. But Khafra, can also be 
derived from Kabar, Cabir, Kheper, the Sol-creator, and Khepra, the beetle. 

5 Philo’s Sanchoniathon, ed. Orelli, p. 34. 

6 which is just where Seb-Satum was placed as Earth-god by the Egyptians. 

7 Tuphos — smoke, hence darkness. 

8 de Iside, 12. 

9 Sanchon.; ed. Orelli, p. 20. 

10 with the author of “Mankind.” Petrie, 106, says that the pitch is still to be 
seen in the pin-holes of Khafra’s coffer. 

11 IAkub, Kub, Kuph, Khufu: Jacob was mourned 7 days; as the Adon Ra was 
mourned. 


T1IE ASARIANS IN EGYPT . 


161 


who were honored as Osiris, Isis, Horns, Harpokrates, etc., 
had really existed on earth. Their tombs were shown, 1 their 
memory was honored, the color of their hair and skin de¬ 
scribed. 2 Saturn’s tomb is pointed out in the Caucasus ; 3 Sa¬ 
turn was an ancient king. 4 Philo’s Sanchoniathon mentions the 
end of Kronos (who is Israel). 5 The Kretans showed the tomb 
of Zeus, and some one before St. Paul called them liars. The 
tombs of the Patriarchs with graves about 25 feet or more 
long to each patriarch were shown to Lepsius. That of Dio¬ 
nysus was exhibited; and Iakab’s (Saturn’s probably) is re¬ 
ferred to in Genesis,! 5. Five Egyptian Gods roamed through 
the world in human shape and in other shapes. From them 
sprung other, earthly, gods, mortal, but who on account of 
their benefits to men had acquired immortality. Some of 
them, too, have been kings over Egypt. 6 Osiris went to the 
Underworld, after his benefits to mankind, and his tomb was 
at Abudos and at Pliilae. The Oxford author of “ Mankind ” 
regarded the Great Pyramid as one of the tombs of Osiris. 7 
Euhemerism had a tendency to remove the distinction between 
a God and a king. “ Khufu and Khafra, equally with other 
kings, were honored w T ith a special worship.” 8 They were 
still worshipped at a late period. 9 Iakab dug his tomb with 
Egyptian forethought before he went West. His name re¬ 
minds us of the Semitic Kabar , which is a name (Cabir) of the 
Sun, and means “ mighty.” Herakles, too, was called the 
Mighty. 10 Iacob, like Herakles, is connected with the number 
12 . 

The Sun rejoices as a Gabor 11 to run a race.—psalm, xix. v. 

1 See de Iside, 20, 21. Equally expunging all those that are considered Gods.—de 
Iside, 23. 

2 Mankind, by a student of Baliol College, p. 703. 

3 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 400. 

4 Mover’s Phcin. I. 122. 

6 Eusebius ; in Orelli, Sanchon. p. 42. 

6 Lepsius, Gotter d. Vier Elem. p. 215. 

7 Mankind, 608. 

8 Mariette, Monuments, 67, 68. 

9 Petrie, 153. Senefru was so worshipped. 

10 Aristophanes, Frogs, 429 ed. Bothe. 

11 The g becomes k, and k = g; as in the Greek rule, “ kappa, gamma, chi.” Akbar 
= Gabar and Cabar. Hence Iakab, Iacob, Cabir, and, we shall also see, Cupido : ac- 
hab = to love ; and agap-ao, “I love.” Iachab, the future tense of Cupido. Petrie, 
84,106,107, 216, mentions no pitch in the pin-holes of Khufu’s sarcophagus, but he 
mentions the pitch in the fastenings of Khafra’s lid. Adonis-Osiris = Iachab. 

11 


162 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


UNDEE THE EAETH. 

animse quibus altera fato 
corpora debeutur.—Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 713. 

There is a subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid more 
than a hundred feet below the base. Therefore in remote 
times some tradition existed of a subterranean passage peculiar 
to this Pyramid. According to Herodotus, the tomb of Khufu 
was at so great a depth that it was surrounded by the water of 
the Nile and differed from anything to be seen in the Second 
Pyramid,—a description the more remarkable as it relates to 
the only pyramid that contains chambers in the masonry, and 
cannot apply to any apartment at present discovered in it. A 
passage like that at the Second Pyramid, inclining at an angle 
of 26 degrees, at the distance of forty feet from the base would 
arrive at the depth of 220 feet below the Pyramid.—Vyse, I. 
222. The angle of descent is, according to Rawlinson, I. 199, 
26° 41', leading to a subterranean chamber deep in the rock, 
which measures 46 feet by 27, and is eleven feet high. The 
passage continues 210 feet at this angle through the solid 
rock, when a horizontal passage 27 feet in length leads to the 
subterranean chamber. No sarcophagus was found there, but 
one, it is thought must have been there.—Rawlinson, I. 200. 
The tradition is that Khufu was not buried in the Great Pyra¬ 
mid. Khufu and Khafra had costly temples on the east side 
of their pyramids adorned with their diorite statues. Con¬ 
ceive of the absurdity of building temples to two kings who 
(on the testimony of Herodotus and Diodorus) were universally 
hated! But the later doctrine in the time of Herodotus was 
that the Gods had been men. Menes and Tat were names of 
lunar deities. And as 330 names of kings were read to Herod¬ 
otus Manetho was not thrown entirely on his own resources. 
For what purpose were the Sabian pilgrimages to these great 
pyramids for centuries after Christ ? Whose star did they 
follow ? The star of Chiun % —Amos, v. 26. Compare the 
Sabian Magi in Matthew, ii. 2, 9. The priests burned incense 
on the High Places to the planets.—2 Kings, xxiii. 5, 8, 11. 
On the High Places of Bel Saturn the Hebron Ghebers burned 
their sons as offerings to Bal.—Jeremiah, xix. 5. Kronos was 
held to be the Father of Aither and chaos ; but he is passed 
over and a Serpent substituted : 


THE ASAHIANS IN EGYPT. 


163 


Saturn is born this Serpent.—Damaskios. 1 

Zeus . . . Aitlieri vaivv (dwelling in the burning heaven).— Homer, II. ii. 

412. 

Sanefru was at his decease and even to later times divinised 
and honored with commemorative services ; but his pyramid 
has not yet been found. 2 The pyramids of Khufu and Kliafra 
are the oldest of those at Gizeh. Then those of Menkaura and 
Abu Roash are supposed to have followed, but we know not 
their date. Menkaura’s coffin lid mentions 4 Osiris born of 
Nut, substance of Seb.’ But Seb (Saturn) is the Earth-god ; 
4 of the earth, earthy,’ like the Adam (—1st Corinthians, xv. 47). 
Hosea, iv. 13, 15, ix. 10, x. 8 would seem to suggest that the 
High Places were being destroyed in about the seventh cen¬ 
tury before our era. They sacrificed to the Fire-God. The 
only evidence in the Great Pyramid (in symbols) points di¬ 
rectly to Khnum (Kneph), to Saturn, and not less plainly to 
Osiris. The water-jug and ram are Khnum’s emblems, and 
indicate that Khufu was in the bosom of Khnum, Kneph, or 
Osiris,—absorbed. Therefore, owing to these emblems and to 
the inferior location of the third pyramid at Gizeh, we are 
justified in separating the Khnum-Khufu pyramid from the 
rest and regarding it by itself 3 in its possible priority ! Petu- 
khanu built a temple at Gizeh and offers to Osiris in the 21st 
dynasty. In the 4th dynasty Menkaura likewise attorns to 
Osiris ; therefore it was built by a Syrian race (vide the Name 
Asar, Osiris), but the Great Pyramid remains dumb to all 
questioning, except its empty sarcophagus, too large for the 
ascending passage ; and the cartouches of Khufu preceded by 
the symbols of Khnum. 4 The surrounding tombs, however, 
according-to De Rouge, mention the relatives of Khufu. But 
some of the inscriptions mention As-ar and As-at (Isis). Khufu 

1 Cory, 313. 

2 De Rouge, 34, 41. 

3 Khafra’s pyramid (the Second pyramid at Gizeh) would rank next to the Great 
Pyramid by its accuracy of work both inside and outside ; and even before the Great 
Pyramid in the work of its coffer. But the lamentably bad stone of its general core 
masonry, the rounded and carelessly shaped blocks and the inferior quality of its casing 
stone prevent its taking the second place.—Petrie, p. 170. The Great Pyramid has 
upper passages and air channels ; which are not known in other pyramids.—Petrie, p. 
201 . 

4 Another name is found on the blocks in the Pyramid, side by side with those 
bearing the name of Khufu. This other name is the same as that of Khufu, with the 
prefix of two hieroglyphs, a jug and a ram.—Petrie, p. 152. 


164 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


could have built the Great Pyramid, as his name appears on 
the blocks. 1 The pitcher and ram refer to Kneph and Khnum. 
The words Khnumu-Kliufu must therefore imply the resurrec¬ 
tion of Kliufu by the water and the life of Khnum. Kliufu by 
descent was a Philistian, since his name is the Syrian Kouph, 
also found as Akouph. But Mr. Petrie, p. 152, says that there 
is no instance of a similar prefix to a king’s name, out of the 
hundreds of names and thousands of variants known. 

The forms of the word Acabar and names derived from it 
are to wit: Gabariel, Iaqab, Iakoub, Iakouf, Kouph, Khufu. 
The Mighty Iakab is Herakles, and Israel. The name Asarel 
also occurs; which is the Jewish form, while Asar is an 
ancient Egyptian form of the Greek name Osiris. Iaqab is 
Israel (—Gen. xxxii. 28) and Israel is a name both of Saturn 
and Asari-Osiris. Khufu’s name is a form of Iacoub’s name, 
and Iaqoub is Israel. The question still arises (since the 
cartouche of the god or the king is precisely the same) was 
Khufu a god or a king ? Iaqab is then the Mighty Herakles. 
Was not Khufu a deity-name ? His pyramid has its temple 
and priests, like the two other large pyramids at Gizeh. So 
they were used for other purposes than merely as tombs. 
The worm following Khufus’s cartouche would seem to point 
to a spiritual being; at least the serpent as a symbol has that 
signification. The lid of the sarcophagus of Khufu may not 
have been fastened on, for Petrie, p. 158, 217, says that in the 
period between the 7th and 10th dynasties during the civil 
wars the lid of the coffer was jjrobably broken off and the body 
of the great builder treated to the spite of his enemies. But 
Mr. Petrie does not tell us on what indications he judges that 
the lid was broken off. He found evidence that the lid of the 
sarcophagus of Khafra’s pyramid had been cemented on. We 
know not whether Khufu’s coffer held a human corpse, or the 
bones of an ox. 

We have to notice another inscription engraved on a stone 
six inches by four, found in a mound (or heap) on the north 
side of the Great Pyramid, in which there is an addition to 

1 In the second ‘ chamber of construction,’ to which there was no access except by 
breaking a passage through the stone blocks, there is a large cartouche of Khnumu- 
Khufu nearly all broken away by Vyse’s forced entrance.—Petrie, 91, 92. Of course, 
the name was not intended to be seen, being walled in. No name on the sarcophagus ! 
The destroyers of the monuments of the Old Kingdom belong to the 7th-llth dynas¬ 
ties.-Petrie, 158, 217. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


165 


a fragment of Khufu’s cartouche. 1 It is a worm (or serpent) 
following Khufu’s cartouche. The little chicken is the 
last of the four hieroglyphs in Khufu’s oval. If we translate 
the serpent-symbol by Chiun, reading Khufu-Chiun (Khufu 
the Living) we have the serpent as a symbol of eternity and of 
Saturn. At all events, the serpent indicates a spiritual being. 
Compare the Serpent as Saturn. 2 

All things are born from Kronos and Aphrodite.—De Iside, 69. 

Saturn is Set, and presides over the realm of Darkness. 
The Theban Kneph, like Ammon, had the ram’s head. 3 As 
Khufu’s name is connected with the symbol of water, we may 
mention another name of Khufu likewise connected with 
water,—Supliis or Iusuph (the bahr Iusuph). We have the 
names Asoube, 4 Asabia, 5 Iasoubos, 6 and Asoufa, 7 besides 
Ioseph. Sev (Seph) is Saturn ; so is Seb. The Nile was said 
(falsely by the priests) to spring out of the ground near Ele- 
phanta, and Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 13, points to water down in 
Hades. So, too, the water-jar and the ram are associated with 
Khufu-Suphis; while Kneph, the Agatho-daimon is repre¬ 
sented pouring water on the wheel with which he fashions the 
limbs of Osiris. As regards the red characters and cartouches 
marked on the stones in the construction-chambers above the 
King’s Chamber in the pyramid of Khufu, Col. Yyse says that 
hieroglyphs were found on the inner face of a stone in the 
ruins of a temple east of the 2nd pyramid. They have been so 
found in tombs west of the Great Pyramid. 8 Bed quarry 
marks were continually found on the stones that were removed 
at the south front of the Great Pyramid. 9 The Gods formerly 

1 Howard Vyse, I. 275. If that worm following Khufu’s cartouche were trans¬ 
lated as if it were inside said cartouche, the name would be read Khufuf; which is the 
way it stands inside the oval in the Tunra inscription at Sakkarah, as given by De 
Rouge. There is the oval at Wady Magharah. This again spells Khefu. Compare 
the Kefa. 

2 Dunlap, Vestiges, 196, 226, 227, 243. 

3 Rawlinson, Egypt, I. 327-329. Keb is a name of Saturn, Seb. Kebt = Copts.— 
Ideler, Handb. II. 504. 

4 Septuagint 1 Chron. iii. 20. 

6 Sept. 1 Chron. iv. 35. 

6 1 Esdras, ix. 30. 

7 2 Esdras, ii. 43. 

8 Vyse, I. 255. Amon-Ra of Thebes, who is Khnuphis, always appeared with the 
ram’s head and presided over the Nile inundation.—Vyse, I. 281. 

• Vyse, I. 238. 


166 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


reigned in Egypt, dwelling together with the men . 1 The 
names Menes and Tat are deity-names. So that Euhemerus 
had not far to go to obtain his theory that the Gods had once 
been men, deceased benefactors. 

Oulomus (Time) the Intelligible God I regard as the sum¬ 
mit of the intelligibles. 2 Bel (Bal) was Saturn and Sol; he 
was regarded as first king of the Assyrians (—Movers, I. 185 ; 
Servius, ad Aeneid, I. 729). 

First of the Assyrians Saturn reigned, whom Assyrians named God. 

Primus Assyriorum regnavit Saturnus, quern Assyrii Deum nominavere.— 
Servius, ad Aen., I. 642. 

One general religion (as a state religion) was carried every¬ 
where from Persia to the Mediterranean. Eire-pillars pre¬ 
ceded the Assyrian armies; and the Assyrian star-worship is 
like the Persian. About the middle of the eighth century b.c. 
the Assyrians conquered Palestine. 3 Sanchoniathon, p. 24, be¬ 
sides the Adonis at Byblus, designates him of the Lebanon 
(El Elion.—Gen. xiv. 18,19) as the Most High God (El Elioun). 
He names him Elioun KaAoi'/Aei/o 9 c 'Yi/u<rros who has dwelt in the 
district of Byblos and in hunting was torn in pieces by wild 
beasts, where the reference to the Adonis of Byblos who was 
killed by the tusk of a Boar is plain. As the Most High God, 
he stands in Sanchoniathon chief (zu oberst) in a-theogony, 
and is followed by his son Uranos, the Epigeios (Adam, 

‘ earthy ’) united with Ge (Earth 4 ) whom, as before, Saturn 
(Set) usually follows ; whence it is clear that he was regarded 
as first (primal) being, corresponding to the Ancient Bel wfith 
the Taautha, who is here Berut the Lebanon Venus. Adonis 
had also his hidden 5 name, like IAO, the mysterious desig¬ 
nation of the Sun-god Adonis in Macrobius. Especially 
weighty, in reference to this unnamable Iao- Adonis, is an 
account in Damaskius, also found in Suidas (Aia yvw/jiwv and 

1 Herodot. II. 144. The name Sahura having been found marked on blocks of 
stone belonging to the northern (the lesser) pyramid at Abusir it was hastily con¬ 
cluded that this was Sahura’s tomb. But blocks may have been taken from some 
earlier building and built into the pyramid.—Palmer, I. 360. 

2 Mochus speaks. 

3 Movers, I. 64, 66, 70, 71. 

4 Bel divides Omoroka into two halves. Of one he makes heaven, of the other, 
earth.— Dunlap, Vestiges, 152 ; Munter, Bab., 42. Compare Hathor in Mariette, 
Monuments of Upper Egypt, 141. 

5 Amun, the Hidden One. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


167 


'Hpato-Kos) and Photius (Bibl. p. 343). Damaskius mentions a 
‘ not to be named ’ statue, app-qrov aya\p,a, of Aion 1 in Alexan¬ 
dria, adored there Kara /xvo-rA^v deoKpaatav (according to mystic 
divinity) both as Osiris and Adonis; it had something divine 
and astonishing in it, both lovely and fearful to behold; but 
still the statue had something benignant in its aspect. 2 If 
one compares these accounts of the Adonis Osiris Aion with 
that of lad Adonis the identity is undeniable ; for the Adonis- 
Eljon of Sanclioniathon appears likewise as an Urwesen (a 
primal being) out of whom, one after the other, the first cos- 
mogonial beings spring, the, primarily united with Ge (Earth), 
Uranos Epigeios (Adam), then the Ancient Saturn (Seth), and 
afterwards the other Phoenician Gods. 3 If now we consider 
that Aion means Time, we cannot fail to recognize in him the 
Egyptian Nou who is God of Time, and timed the annual del¬ 
uge. Saturn may well have been regarded as Time (Ophion- 
Saturn.—Ezek. viii. 8, 10) the Destroyer 4 (Sat or Set). With 
this conception suits his name Descent (to Hades), Kebo (Keb, 
Kub, Koub, Kouph, Kuphu, or Khufu), Akabah, Iakab. 5 They 
mourned the Hebrew kings with ‘ Hoi Adon.’—Jeremiah, 
xxxiv. 5. The Assyrian Chief priest Nergal Sarezar bore the 
name of his God Nergal Sarezar, and the Assyrians had, in 
common with the Persians and Babylonians, the Great Festi¬ 
val of Anaitis, also, like the Persians, the institution of the 
Magi which had come with the Chaldaeans and Babylonians, 
and Nergal Sarezar (Jeremiah, xxxix. 3 ; Isaiah, xiv. 31; Jer. 
i. 13). The smoke-pillars went before the Assyrian armies as 

1 Time. 

2 Compare the Serapis-statue. 

3 Movers, Phonizier, 544. Typhon has the love of Destruction like Kronos, for 
Time is the destroying (principle). 

4 Herodotus, H. 124, states that (Kheopa, Khufu) the Builder of the Great Pyra¬ 
mid drove into every iniquity, closing the temples and stopping the sacrifices. In 
other words he acted like the Darkness incarnate. This is not surprising, considering 
his relations to the Adversary Set-Typhon and to Saturn, expelled from heaven, as the 
Fiend. Adonis (Rimmon) in Hades and Areimanios support the change of Set, Saturn, 
into Sathanas, Satan. 

Sent down ’neath earth and barren sea.—Homer, II. xiv. 204. 

6/C Se TOW Kpovov rbv Tvfiuva icai rrjy Ne<f>0vv.—de Iside, 12. 

And from the Saturn were generated the Devil and the Infernal Goddess, Typhon’s 
wife.—de Iside, 12. 

Ramon (2 Kings, v. 18) is Rimmon (Adonis), and Ariman, or Areimanius of the Per¬ 
sians. Isis and Osiris, having taken a fancy to each other before they were born, came 
together in utero surrounded by Darkness.—de Iside, 12. 

5 Movers, 200 ; Gen. 1. 10. Jacob was mourned 70 days : also, later, 7 days. 


/ 


168 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


they did before the Hebrew (or Hyksos) array as it marched 
from the Nile into Palestine.—Exodus, xiii. 21, 22; Movers, I. 
70. From the Assyrian and Babylonian religion we may infer 
in many particulars to Egyptian usages. Thus from the He¬ 
brew, too, we may infer resemblances. If Kliufu was the 
Deathgod; and his priest-king bore his name, then the ven¬ 
tilating passages and the two chambers above ground (found 
in no other known pyramid) would show a quasi memorial 
aboveground to Seb or Sev; while a descending xiassage goes 
down deep in the rock over which the Great Pyramid was built, 
and leads to a mortuary chamber in the rock below, such as is 
found in all the pyramids. It is 46 feet long and 27 feet 
broad. The xiassage leading to this subterranean chamber is 
347 feet from the entrance in the side of the Great Pyramid 
and 90 feet below the base of the xiyramid. Therefore as 
Kronos was a Phoenician Deity, as the 4tli Egyptian dynasty 
was Phoenician, and as the Assyrian and Kanaanite Hebrew 
priest bore the name of his God, the same custom xorobably 
obtained in Egyxet, since, too, the Egyptian Highpriest was 
also King.—De Iside, 9. Coupled with this we have the tradi¬ 
tion in Herodotos that Khufu was never buried in the Great 
Pyramid. 

You did not die as Atumnios died ; 1 not Water of Styx 

Nor flame of Tisiplione, nor Megaira’s eye did you see!—Nonnus, xii. 239, 

240. 

A “burning” for Tliee : and “Hoi Adon” their Lament for Thee ! —Jere¬ 
miah, xxxiv. 5. 

Osiris carried the souls of the dead on board the solar bark.—Massey, II. Gl. 
Ritual, xvii. 

Lift your e} r es to the North.—Ezekiel, viii. 5. 

The Bear revolves at midnight towards the setting, opposite Orion. 2 —Theo- 
kritus, xxiv. 10. 

His resurrection through which he obtained power over the Death, that is, 
annihilated the Adversary. 3 — 

1 Turn, Tamus, Tammuz, Timaeus. “Phaethon turned chariot to the sunset.”— 
Nonnus, II. 164. Atum (Adum, Turn) is the Adon descending in the west! Mundi 
opificem pollicentem suis incrementum generis propagandi usque orbis terminos, et re- 
surrectionem a mortuis una cum ipso corpore ac sanguine, prophetasque afflantem.— 
Origen contra Celsum, vi. p. 495. Nec in eum (Judaeorum Deum) sumus impii, cum 
non praedicamus mortuos resuscitaturum una cum ipsa carne et sanguine, ut iam supra 
dictum est. For we have not said that this animal body, which is sown in corruption 
and ignominy and infirmity, rises again such as it was sown.—ibid. p. 496. 

2 Orion belongs to Horns.—ibid. 21. 

3 that is, the Devil, but raised us together with himself . . . instead of Mourn- 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


169 


I am the great constellation Orion, 1 dwelling in the solar birthplace in the 
midst of the spirits.— Ritual of the Head. 

Tamas (Thamus, Adonis-Osiris) was a former king (Timaeus, 
without date) of Egypt who died! They sang the Adoni- 
maoidos (the sufferings of Osiris) and expatiated on his loveli¬ 
ness—then the lights were extinguished in personation of the 
power of Darkness until the seventh light was reached, which 
was probably not put out, seven being the sacred number of 
the God of Light. The Egyptians expected Osiris to rise from 
the dead. Osiris is risen from Hades and is present with 
Horus. 2 This Mourning for Osiris is the Abel Misraim Mourn¬ 
ing for Iakab Keb, 3 since Ken (Cain) killed Abel not exactly as 
Typhon killed Osiris. 4 So that we are now in the midst of the 
Kefa in Egypt, which is the same word as Akub (Iakab Keb) 
in Egypt. It is the death of Osiris-Eros (the Adonis-Iakab) in 
the Mysteries of Adonis Aqbal and Kubele! Achab (Achob) 
means to “love.” Compare also Plutarch, de Iside, 36, 57, 
where Osiris is exhibited as the power of Eros. So Iaqab 
loves Rachel Irach (Luna). 

The Ai in Aidoneus and AAgupios implies death. T, is a 
termination only. Guph 5 only remains, Kuph, Kupliu: for K 
is form of G. The door of the Great Pyramid may be regarded 
as ‘ death’s door.’ Through it passed Dionysus, Iachab 
(Father Life), Herakles (King of fire), Kronos, Adonis, Kad- 
mus, Osiris, Isarel, Ioseph, Seb, or Sev. Dionysus in Arabia 
was named Sabi (Sabos). The Apis-bull was the well-formed 
living image of the soul of Osiris. Apis was consecrated 
to the moon.—Ammian, xxii. 14. Osiris entered the moon 
at the beginning of Spring. Of course his bull went in 

ing he gave us the Easter hymn.—Athanasius, Festbrief: Larsow, p. 69, 66. Tvirov av- 
6po)noei8rj napan\rj<riov OaCpiAt.. —Diodorus, I. 21. In the case of both Adonis and Osiris 
the human image was exhibited to the public view.—Theokritus, xv. Arsinoe bore the 
cost, at Alexandria. 

1 The Dipper in the wave. Orion set about the time that Osiris entered his ark 
(November, 1-10).—Hesiod, Works and Days, 576, 577; de Iside, 42. 

2 de Iside, 19. Isis told the priests of each district that Osiris was buried with 
them, and gave them a donation of one third of the land in return for their ministra¬ 
tions. Therefore they all (each tribe of the priests) supposed that Osiris was buried 
among them, and on the death of the sacred animals set up to tou OcrtpiSo? nevQos “the 
Mourning for Osiris ” (the Abel Misraim) over them also.—Diodorus, I. 21. 

s Genesis, L. 11. 

4 Diodor. i. 21, p. 24. 

5 Koub, Khuph, Khufu. 


170 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


with him. Osiris is Dionysus, and the Hebrews had their 
sun-bulls. 

Kronos was mourned as Winter-Sun.—De Iside, 32. 

Night shining Dionysus, having the form of a Bull, 

With dusky feet entered the houses of Kadmus, 

Brandishing the Kronian frenzied whip of Pan.—Nonnus, xliv. 280. 

They all, Kronos, Sev, Seb, Asarel, Bel-Saturn, and Keb go 
down to Hades. The Sphinx, with his enigmatic wisdom prob¬ 
ably taught some of them, such as Herakles, El, and Alah how' 
to get out. Alah means to ascend out of Darkness in the 
morning, Serach means Sunrise. 

I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the Acheron shall rise up over the 
dust.—Job, xix. 27. 

Seb has the care of the beings of earth.—Lenormant, les Ori- 
gines, I. 452. The tomb of Bel was shown.—Movers, I. p. 256. 
When Iaqab (Israel-Saturn “ will die ”) dies, they perform over 
the defunct Saturn the Abel Misraim (the Mourning of the 
Egyptians) ; for Kab means ‘ to die,’ to become extinct. So 
instead of Hoi Adon, they cried Ai Kab ; and this expression 
seems to have suggested the word Iaqab meaning ‘he will die.’ 
Whether or not Osiris took the hint that the Great Sphinx was 
eternally giving, Osiris rose from the dead as Saviour, bring¬ 
ing souls along with him. We only know that Keb perished, 
the Mighty Iaqab too went down, Herakles-Kabar (Herakles 
the Mighty) too went down, but rose again like Osiris Sauveur, 
his associate. The wicked were tormented in a certain place 
in Hades.—Plato, Republic, II. 363 D. Kadmos, Iacclios, and 
Pan (under earth) are connected as Chthonian Deities.—Ger¬ 
hard, Griech. Myth. I. pp. 101, 120, 121, 261, 273, 470. All this 
tends to explain those two chambers (the King’s and the 
Queen’s) in the Great Pyramid; for Iaqab is the Asiatic Sun- 
god Herakles (Palaimon the Great Wrestler).—Julius Popper, 
p. 367; Genesis, xxxii. 24, 28, 30. Jacob (Iaqab) appears to be 
the Adon as Adonis the Spring Sun, the Light as opposed to 
the Darkness in which Sabi, Suphis, Seb, Iaqab, Kab, Koub and 
Kuphu (or Cheops) seem to have been plunged in the Semitic 
religions of Light and Darkness.—Ezekiel, viii. 8-14, 16. The 
passion-lied was sung at Gizeh, Alexandria, Jerusalem and 
Bethlehem. Now the ridiculous lies that the Egyptian priests 
told in order to make a secret of their Great Pyramid prove 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


171 


that they were told on purpose to make a mystery of an im¬ 
portant rite connected with the Osiris-religion, and that the 
Khufu-stories concealed an Osirian-mystery. They did just 
what Herodotus himself did,—refused to reveal the Mysteries, 
but told hieroi logoi (blessed tales) instead. Osiris is the 
substance of the world, Atmu (Adamus), the Nourisher of all 
beings among the Gods, the beneficent Spirit in the realm of 
spirits. The heavenly ocean Nu obtains from Him its water, 
the wind comes from Him, and Breath of Life is in His nostrils, 
to His content and according to His heart’s desire.—Inscript, 
on a gravestone. Benouf, Vorlesungen, pp. 203, 204. Osiris 
corresponds exactly to the Jewish Ialioli.—Gen. ii. 7. 

O King of those in night 
O Aidoneus, Aidoneus. 

The three Magian kings are in Orion.—Mankind, p. 475. Orion- 
Sahou was consecrated to Osiris and by some considered the 
abode of the souls of the blest. 1 

Preserved - is he who conies out from Orion, preserved 3 is Osiris, who comes 
fortli out of Orion, the Lord of the vintage, on the fine t/h/c-Festival (the Ouaga 
festival on the 18th of Thoth). His mother spoke, and there was an heir, his 
father spoke, and the heaven became pregnant, and the Morning-star was born ! 
Oh ! Hur-em-saf , Mer-en-ra, the heaven became pregnant with thee and with 
Orion, the Morning-star was born with the Orion. Here an ascension, there an 
ascension, according to the command of the Gods. Thou didst ascend and ap¬ 
pear on the eastern side of the heaven. Thy descent is with that of the Orion 
on the eastern side of the heaven. Ye three are there where the Sothis-Star is, 
whose places are holy, and who conducts you on a good road in heaven, upon the 
Field of Aaru. 4 —Inscription on Table III :l and IIP at Saqqara. 5 

1 Maspero, Hist. Anc. p. 79. 

2 Osiris Sauveur descends ad inferos, like Shu and Iesu. Shu, as a god, is the rep¬ 
resentative of Wind (later, Breath and Soul), and Wind in its fury is the Typhonian 
tempest.—Massey, I. 325. Compare Acts, ii. 2, 3; Matthew, iii. 11, 12. The soul is 
itself the spirit.—Tertullian de Anima, x. ; Ezekiel, xxxvii. 5; Matthew, x. 20. The 
Sh is an S. —See D. Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 413. 

3 Shu, like Turn, was a deity of the lower world, worshipped by the spirits in 
Hades, and invoked by them. Shu signifies 1 light ’ and probably signified originally 
the light of the sun. The word means also ‘ shade,’ and Shu is represented black or 
nearly so. Rawlinson, I. 351-355. If Shu and Su are but two different forms of one 
sibilant, as in Hebrew, the root would be So, in Sozo. 

4 It is difficult to reject the reading Aaru, because, like Aalu, and 4 Alusion pedon,’ 

the root AR is a name of the Sun. One letter can be read r, or 1. “ Turn ” is the 

“ Lord of Anu (On).” In the Book of the Dead the deceased says : The memory of the 
words of my father Turn is in my mouth . . . Seb preserves for me his crown, the 
inhabitants of Anu bow their heads before me.—Lauth, agypt. Vorzeit, I. 93. Todtenb. 
cap. 74, 82. 

5 Zeitschr. fiir Agyptische Sprache, 1881, heft. I. p. 10. Hur (?) in the word Iiur- 


172 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Sending np Seirios, 1 he did not ameliorate the warmth by night of the 
Blazing, burning, heat.—Nonnus, xiii. 282. 

Whom they call by the appellation Orion’s Dog ; 

This is, it is true, most brilliant, but it is also a bad sign, 

And, too, brings much burning heat to wretched mortals. — Homer, II. 
xxii. 31. 

Could they hit Helios or hurt Luna ? 2 

Who could crush Orion’s sword with a scimetar, 

Or with mortal darts shoot Bootes ?—Nonnus, 356-858. 


Tlie priests in Babylonia claimed a hallowed antiquity and 
a supernatural origin for the Oannes-writings on the Begin¬ 
ning (Urgeschichte).—Movers, 93 ; Genesis entire. That we 
are still in the reign of myth when we come to Kheops-Khu- 
fu-Supliis, appears from the ‘ story' that Kliufu after a bad 
life writes £ the Sacred Book,’ while the mythic Moses does the 
same. And Oannes comes in fish shape out of the Eruthraean 
Sea, on the Babylonian coast, and (like Osiris in Egypt) teaches 
men the arts, sciences, letters, how to build cities and temples; 
teaches them, too, laws and geometry. These mythic inventions 
are all of one family; for the purpose of all is to preoccupy 
the public mind with sacred “ fairy tales.”—See Movers, 93 ; 
Kenrick, Egypt, II. 110, 117 ; Herod. II. 124,126, 127. Where, 
as in Egypt, the government was in the hands of one class 
alone, that class invents falsehoods to keep men in ignorance, 
to keep the priests in power. The One Principle (principium) 
of the universum was Unknown Darkness, according to the 
Egyptians.—Cory, p. 321 ; Gen. i. 2. As Saturn, the Sun was 
the Anax puros, prince of fire, the Hebrew Moloch, Azarael, 
Asriel. The Sun rose (as Suliel, Saturn) out of the lower 
parts of the earth from darkness unto light.—Movers, Phoni- 
zier, I. 207 ; Macrob. Sat. I. 21. Saturn’s temple in Egypt was 
outside the city. At Memphis we find the Great Pyramid in 
the desert outside. Typhon-Saturn is the Phoenician and 
Egyptian Evil Demon.—Movers, I. 523, 526. The functions of 

em-saf Brugsch considers a very doubtful reading. In the following dynasty (vii) Mer- 
em-ra Zaf-em-saf is found in the tablet of Abydos.—Sayce, Her. p. 466. 

1 The most important of the stars was the Star of Isis, Sirius, named Sopt by the 
Egyptians and Sothis by the Greeks, the Dog-star. Its ascent was b. c. 3010-3007 on 
Epiphi 9th of the Wandering Year, and on Epiphi 9th B.c. 1322, Wandering Year. — 
Diimichen, 10-12. In the Sacra of Isis the trunk of a pine-tree is cut down, the centre 
of it is artfully removed, and an image of Osiris made from those segments is there 
buried.—Julius, Firmicus, p. 27 ; Movers, 203. 

2 Helia, or Ilia. Turn’s name is preserved in Dum-ah, and Tamuz.—Gen. xxv. 14. 


THE AS ART ANS IN EGYPT. 


173 


king, priest, and prophet were united from the earliest times ; 
Teiresias and Apollo were both called king.—Sophocles, Oe- 
dip. Tyr. 284, with Buckley’s Note to page 11. Hades and 
those below the earth are conscious.—Sophocles, Antigone, 
542. Khaba in Hebrew means to be hidden, concealed ; Kha- 
bah, to hide oneself. Amoun, Anion, means in Egyptian what 
is concealed, hidden, the Concealed One.—Plut. de Iside, 9. 
The Sun (Bel, Ammon, Keb, Seb) is both Saturn, Kronos, Ty- 
phon and Sol.—Movers, I. 317, 369, 395-6, 409, 435, 439. Am- 
mon-Kheb is consequently the Concealed Light under the 
earth. To each of the three pyramids across the Nile, at Gi- 
zeh, there was once a temple adjoining. The Israelites in 
Egypt adored El Saturn as Moloch, who, from his bad side, is 
Typhon.—Movers, I. 369 ; Amos, v. 26 ; 1 Kings, xi. 7 ; Levit. 
xviii. 21. The Great Pyramid was named Khutai ‘ Lights.’ 
The top is in light, the base is under the earth. 

Zeus sent down Kronos under earth.—Homer, Iliad, xiv. 204. 

Tartarus is as far below Hades as Heaven is from earth.— 
Homer, II. viii. 16. 

Kronos at a certain spot in the centre of the earth waylays the father.—Eu¬ 
sebius, Pr. Ev. I. x. 29. 

The only Gods are Water and Earth.—Nonnus, xxi. 261. 

And they call Osiris Water !—Hippolytus, v. 7. 

The Turkish women sprinkle the monuments of the dead with 
flowers and water. The Hindus make the usual libations of 
water to satisfy the manes of the dead. Adonis is Bel-Saturn, 
the Sun-god who descends to Hades. 1 Typhon-Saturn is the 
Wicked One.—Movers, I. 526. See, also, Ezekiel, viii. 10-12, 
14, for the rites performed in Darkness. 

THE MOURNING OF THE BETH nA SOL . 2 
“ Earth’s bosom conceals savage Kronos 

Devourer of young children, Saturn horn from heaven ”—Nonnus, xxvii. 
54, 55. 

“ Delivered unto Death, to the lowest parts of the earth ! ”—Ezekiel, xxxi. 
14. Septuag. 

1 Movers, 194, 195. 185, 283, 284. Servius, ad Aen. I. 729. Keb in Hebrew means 
extinct. 

2 Micah, i. 11. Hazal. They came to Bal pe Aur and nazarened themselves.— 
Hosea, ix. 10. 


174 


THE 01IEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Drawing savage Kronos again to Light from subterranean Abyss shall I loose 
the bonds of force ?—Nonnus, II. 337, 338. 

Kronos sitting apart from the beam of the sun, and deep Tartarus all 
around.—Homer, Iliad, viii. 479-482, xiv. 274, 279 ; Hesiod, Theog. 851. 

To Kronos (Saturn) the Phoenicians sacrificed every year the 
beloved and only-begotten children.—Movers, I. 304; Eusebius, 
in Laud. Constant, c. 13. To Saturn as Wicked Demon (Ty- 
plion) the Egyptians offered sacred animals and men in the 
Darkness.—De Iside, 73 ; Movers, 321; Hesiod, Tlieogony, 
736, 744-5 ; Macrobius, I. 7 ; Movers, I. 309. Saturn like Seb 
is an earthgod.—Gerhard, 963, § 1001 d.e. The priest bore the 
name of his God, Kneph-Khufu. 

Cut off thy Nazar. Raise a lamentation. 1 

Sit in the sepulchres and pass the night in vigils. , 

He who is not dead must to the departed give offerings, and reverence God 
under earth. —Euripides Phcenissae, 1320. 

Can these bones live ? Adonai, God of life, thou knowest! 

Orion belongs to Horus! The power of the Rain must be mentioned in the 
benediction for the revivification of the dead. 2 

The Mourning of Hadad Rimmon in the Valley Magadan. 3 

HOI ADON. 

Saturn, the God of the Egyptians and Hebrews, was supposed 
to dwell in the South. 4 The North was the Gate where they 
mourned Adon-Osiris. The Lebanon Aphrodite deplored the 
Lord of Light on the North side of the Temple. The Great 
Pyramid was entered through a ‘ hole in the wall ’ and all was 
Darkness inside. 

One hole in the wall!—Ezekiel, viii. 7. 

The angle of the entrance shaft of the Great Pyramid points 
nearly straight at the North and fronted Orion, that dips be¬ 
low the horizon, 5 the preserver of what rises up 6 from Hades 

1 Jeremiah, vii. 29. 

2 Talmud, Berachoth, 26, 33. 

3 Zachariah, xii. 11. Nazar is the consecrated hair of the Nazers. 

4 Movers, Phon. 284; Lydus, de Ostent. 22, p. 300 ; Henoch, lxxvii. 2; Habakkuk, 
iii. 3. 

5 A symbol of the “not going under,” therefore of immortality.—Lauth, Aus Ae- 
gyptens Vorzeit, p. 143. Orion is the Star of Horus.—de Iside, 21, 22. Isis gives the 
drug of immortality, raising the body of Horus, against whom the Titans plotted, to 
immortality and giving life to his corpse found in the water. The logoi (souls) and 
eidS (forms) and emanations of the God remain in heaven and stars.—Plutarch, de 
Iside, 59. 

6 Osiris is risen. The name of the Orion as the Saliu is also that of the erect 


V 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT . 175 

(Sheol) that the soul may rise to Heaven. Orion, the symbol 
of the imperishable! 1 From the West the Sphinx looked 
steadily at the rising Sun (Serach, Osiris) across the pyramidal 
emblems of death to the promise of eternal life ! The stairs up 
to the enclosure around the altar must face the east.—Ezekiel, 
xlvii. 16. The glory of the God of Israel came from the East! 
—Ezek. xliii. 2. 

Who made Kimah (Pleiades) and Kesil (Orion) and turns to morning the 
shadows of death! — Amos, v. 8. 

Let the Ursa wander dry, the pole of the Wagon having sunk.—Nonnus, II. 

289. 

And together with the Serpent of Aither, 2 an attendant of the Bear of Arkas, 3 
Beholding on high the nightly approach of Typhon, 

Old Bootes watched with sleepless eyes.—Nonnus, II. 180-182. 

The Dragon separated by the two Bears rolled the light-bringing track 
Of the burning Wain.—Nonnus, I. 252, 253. 

Osiris is called King of eternity, Master of souls, He who ap¬ 
pears as ram in Mendes, the Sovereign of Amenti.—Maspero, 
Guide, 49. Osiris, Isis, and Sib (Seb) envelope the deceased. 
—ibid. 142. Osiris-Sahou, with two little shoots on his coif¬ 
fure, on which is placed a star with five branches, was God of 
the star Orion. Osiris-Sahou was Conductor of souls in the 
other world.—ibid. p. 161. The Kam-headed sphinxes on 
either side of the avenue to Luxor must be ascribed to Khnum. 
—Loftie, p. 338. The Khnum is represented with a ram’s 
head, like Ammon. Khnum signifies the modeler, and the 
God is often seen modeling the world-egg on a potter’s wheel. 
He is one of the oldest Egyptian Gods, and worshipped as far 
south as the Cataracts.—Maspero, 167-170. Notwithstanding 
the fine style in which the walls of Pepi’s and Merenra’s pyra¬ 
mids in the interior chamber are got up, no temple is attached 
to these pyramids. If this is so, then the pyramids with tern- 

mummy, the type of the risen dead ! The body of the risen Horus is said to shine in 
the stars of the constellation Orion on the bosom of the upper heaven (—Massey, II. 
436; Records, vol. iv. p. 121), raised up to athanasia.—Diodorus, I. 25. 

1 The resurrection of the body was expected by the Egyptians, else they might not 
have embalmed the bodies. The Book of the Dead, cap. 164. 16 (Lauth, I. 56) says : 
L> Whole is his flesh and bone as if he were not dead.” In the Hebrew psalms, a saving 
of the body seems to have been hoped for. The expectation, in the flesh to see Alah 
(Elah).—Job, xix. 26. Herodotus says that the embalming was to prevent the worms. 

2 the burning fire-heaven. 

3 Near the Wain of Arkas.—Nonnus, xlii. 290. 


176 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


pies are distinguished from those without them. At Meidoom, 
“it would appear that the pyramid occupies the only rock.”— 
Loftie, p. 206. It was the usage in the Egyptian Mysteries to 
circumcise the Initiated, and the Jews in Egypt could not bear 
the reproach of being uncircumcised. 1 The Syrians of Pales¬ 
tine adopted this rite from Egypt. In the Mourning for Adon¬ 
is the word Ai means Ah! Alas ! The Greeks said Ai Adon- 
in ! 2 The Hebrews 3 and Romans 4 said Hoi. 

I did not learn to sing Ailina, 5 such as King 
Apollo among Kretans used to shrilly cry, 

Mourning “ charming Atumnios.” 6 —Nonnus, xix. 182. 

The Lover of Yenus was being mourned at Bethlehem!—St. Jerome, Ep. 
49. ad Paulinum. 

There is not thy like among Gods, Adoni.—Psalm, 86. 8. 

They worship Hermes most of Gods! And they make oath 
only by Him, and say that they are born from Hermes. 7 They 
swore by the Lifegod, the Logos, the Divine Wisdom, as the 
Jews made oath by the throne of Iahoh the God of life. Until 
recently in the Lebanon they swore “ By Seth.” 

To-day, whether sitting by the side of Minos thou too art judge, 

Or yet art in the flowering hall of Rliadamantlius, 8 

Going tender 9 in the Groves of the Elysian Field.—Nonnus, xix. 189. 

They say that Sarapis is no other than the Pluto, 

And Isis (is) the Persephone.—Plutarch, de Iside, 27. 

O Abode of Aides and Proserpina, O Hermes beneath!—Sophokles, Elektra, 

110 . 

Hermes the Conductor is leading me on, and She, the Goddess of the 
Shades !— Oedipus Kolon. 1547. 

And thee, dead, 10 She made to live, for Dionysus her brother ! 

'Jervis, Genesis, pp. 296, 297, quotes St. Ambrose; Exodus, xix. 12, 15; Joshua, 
v. 7, 9; Wilkinson, Anc. Egyptians. Among the Greeks, the circumcision made them 
absurd. A kingdom of cohenim and a holy people.—Exodus, xix. 6. 

2 aiazo, to mourn, to wail. 

3 Hoi Adon ! 

4 Heu, pronounced Hoi, as in German. 

5 death songs or dirges, songs of w T oe. 

0 Adamas, Adonis, Atamu, Atmu, Tammuz, Athamas, Tamas (Darkness), To¬ 
mas, Atman, Adamna. 

7 Herodotus, v. 7. 

8 Compare Ar Adamenthe ; Mantus (Pluto) and Amenthe ; Adamas a name of 
Pluto. “Atumnios is dead.”—Nonnus, xii. 239. Gone down to the fire of Phlege- 
thon, “the Fire (ar) of Maga Adonis,” Armagedon.—Compare Rev. xvi. 17. 

9 Young. 

111 vinw, a dead body. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


177 


Thou didst not die as Atumnios 1 died ; neither water of Styx 
Nor Tisiphone’s flame, nor Megaira’s eye didst thou see ; 

But till now thou dost live !—Nonnus, xii. 238 f. 

To thee, Mysteries, Diipolia, Adonia, O Herma !—Aristophanes, Eirene, 400. 


Hermes-Kadmilos is the Grecised form of Atys the companion 
and favorite of Kubele. 2 The beautiful Cytliereia does not put 
Adonis away from her bosom when'dead. 3 Hues Attes ! The 
Moist Adonis ! Chi Adon, O Iacche ; Adonis lives ! The 
quail (salu) that waked Herakles is the sign of His resurrec¬ 
tion and saluatio (Salvation). Therefore the Athenians offered 
quails to Herakles. 

Herakles who has gone out of the Chambers of earth 

Leaving the nether house of Aidoneus.—Euripides, Herk. Furens, 807, 808. 

Aidoneus was called Adamas in the Samothrakian Mysteries. 
Adam was called holy, heavenly, horn of Mene. When the 
Bacchi celebrated with mysteries the Dionysus Frenzied they 
were crowned with serpents,—an emblem both of the grave 
and of spirit life. Now Khufu’s cartouche is followed by a 
serpent and accompanied by the water-jar. Consequently the 
pyramid of Khufu and its temple were associated in some way 
with the Mysteries of Osiris. The Highpriest at Delphi 
brought secret offerings to the Grave of Dionysus about the 
time of the shortest day of the year.—Preller, Griech. Mythol. 
I. 427. Compare the Jewish ceremonies in the Darkness, con¬ 
nected with the mourning for the Adon-Tammuz.—Ezekiel, viii. 

On the day when He shall descend to Hades I will make a Mourning, I will 
make Lebanon mourn.—Ezekiel, xxxi. 15. 

Let the priests weep between the porch and the altar.—Joel, ii. 17. 

Give offerings, and reverence God underearth.—Euripides, Plioenissae, 1320. 

When the Vernal equinox was in the sign of Taurus the con¬ 
stellation Orion was a stellar image of Horus, who had risen 
from the underworld. Hence the body of the risen Horus is 
said to shine in the stars of the constellation Orion, on the 
bosom of the upper heaven. In the Ritual the reconstructed 

atumnios is the Setting, but always Unconquered (Adamas) Mithra, Osiris, 
Sarapis. 

2 Journal of Hellenic Stud. III. p. 45. 

3 Theokritus, Idyl. iii. 50. Akebal or Iaqabel=Adonis-Atys. 

12 


178 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and rearisen mummy says : I am the great constellation Orion 
dwelling in the solar birthplace in the midst of the spirits. 1 
That is, he rises as Orion, the Star in the East. Every time 
that Orion the conqueror of Darkness rose, the Cross of Au¬ 
tumn 2 set; and the Scorpion over it, that had given the death- 
wound to the King in the Osirian mythos, was hurled into 
Hades by Orion, the glorified body of the risen mummy, 
Osiris, the starry symbol of immortality. 3 The dead shall 
rise in Osiris ! Caught up in clouds to meet the Kurios in the 
air. 4 5 The morning Star is born. 

O Horem-paf B Ra-mer-en, the heaven was pregnant with thee and with the 
Orion. Here an ascent, there an ascension, as the Gods command. Thou didst 
ascend and appear with the Orion on the east side of the heaven. Thy descent 
is with that of Orion upon the west side of the heaven. Ye three are there 
where the Sothis-star is, whose seats are holy and who leads you upon a good 
way upon the heaven to the Field of Aaru.—Text 6 7 on Table Ilia. 

Cingula cum veheret pelagus procul Orionis 

Et cum caeruleo flagraret Sirius astro.—Avienus 1875. 

Non longa Aries statione locatus 
In convexa redit, parvo se tramite subter 
Distinet et medio caelum citus ordine currit, 

Ultima clielarum qua brachia quaque corusco 
Circulus axe means rutilum secat Oriona.—Avienus, 526. 

Abditur autem 

Orion redeunte die, turn brachia Kepheus 

Protentasque manus mediamque iminergitur alvum."—Avienus, 687. 
Signifer a borea inque australes se gerit umbras, 

Sub medii iam mole poli fera pectora tauri 
Suspicit Orion.—Avienus, 720, 721. 

et, primo cum Scorpius editur ortu 
Orion trepido terrae petit extima cursu.—Avienus, 1193. 


1 The bark of Osiris is placed among the stars not far from Orion and the Dog- 
star.—de Iside, 22. The Egyptians held Orion sacred to Horus, the Dog-star to Isis. 
—de Iside, 22. 

Orion is the star of Horus.—de Iside, 21, 22. Typhon’s star is the Bear. 

2 The Southern Cross. 

3 Massey, II. 437. As earth-born we have Typhon.—Nonnus, i. 154, 155. So were 
the Giants regarded.—Batrachomachia, 7 ; Gen. vi. 3, 4, 11,13. Set was the son of the 
Earth-god Seb (so described in papyrus Sallier iv. on Mechir 29) and Nut the Ocean of 
Heaven.—Meyer, 50. 

4 1 Thess. iv. 17. The Uak festival was celebrated about the 18th of the month. 
Thoth (August September).'—Brugsch, I. 196. 

5 This word is doubtful, according to Brugsch. 

6 Zeitschr. fiir Agypt. Sprache, 2881. Heft I. p. 9. 

7 Ai Kab, Iaqab. 


THE ASAliiANS IN EGYPT. 


179 


And together with the Aetlierial Serpent, an attendant of Arkas the Bear 1 
Beholding on high the nightly approach of Typlion, 

Old man Bootes watched with sleepless eyes : 

Lucifer, Star Hesperus, kept his eye upon an ascension in the 
West; and leaving the Southern to the Director of hows and arrows 
Kepheus ran round the rainy Gates of Boreas.—Nonnus, II. 180-185. 

When the birthplace was in the sign of the Bull, the Star in 
the East that arose to announce the birth of the babe was 
Orion, which is therefore called the star of Homs. That was 
once, says Massey, the star of the Three Kings, for this is still 
the name of the three stars in Orion’s belt; 2 and in the hiero¬ 
glyphics a tliree-looped string is a symbol of the Sahu , that is, 
the constellation Orion. 3 Orion was the star of the Three 
Kings which rose to show the time and place of birth in 
heaven some 6,000 years ago, when the vernal equinox was in 
the sign of the Bull. 4 

Coming from the land of Asia, having left the sacred Imolus, 

I dance to Bromius . . . bringing Bromius Boy, God of God, Dionysus 

from Phrygian mountains. 

And leaving the very wealthy lands of the Ludians and the Phrygians and the 
Sun-parched plains of the Persians and the Baktrian Walls and the stormy 
land of the Medes, 

Coming upon Arabia Felix and all Asia that lies along the salt sea.— 
Euripides, Bacchse. 

One can see Orion pear to Gemini 
Extending (his) arms to a great part of heaven 
And rising to the stars with not less extended stride 
Single stars mark out his shining arms 

And his sword is drawn out, pendent, with three transverse (stars). 

But Orion (as to his) head is immersed in high Olympus.—Manilius, I. 380. 

From the east, a Star with Seven others about it will be 
seen. 5 6 —The Sohar. 


1 The strength of Orion, and the Bear, which they also call the Wagon, which there 
goes round and watches Orion, but it alone is free from the baths of Ocean.—Iliad, 
xviii. 488. 

2 Lardner’s Museum of Science. 

3 Ritual, ch. xxiii. Birch. 

4 Massey, II. pp. 385, 436. The name of Orion as the Sahu is also that of the erect, 
mummy, the type of the risen dead. The word means incorporate , or incorpse ; but 
the Sahu constellation showed the mummy on the horizon of the resurrection, the erect 

body of the risen, reborn Lord; as the Egyptian mummy the Karast.—Massey, II. 
p. 436. 

6 Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 3. 


180 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


I am the great constellation Orion, dwelling in the solar birthplace in the 
midst of the spirits.— Ritual .' 

Orion rose np, no longer in the circling lake 

Did he wash the shivering 2 footsteps of Taurus who has set.—Nonnus, 
III. 3, 4. 

Osiris comes to thee as Orion.—Inscription from Pepi’s p} r ramid. 3 

Orion wades through the sea, having* his head just above the 
waters. His cosmical setting* takes place towards the end of 
autumn. 

The Pleiads and, to the observer, the late-setting Bootes, 

And Arktos (the Bear) which they also call the Wain, 

Which there is turned round and has an eye on Orion, 4 

And alone does not take part in the baths of the ocean. 5 —Homer. Odyssey, 

v. 272-275. 

Orion is the Mighty Hunter, closely connected with Her- 
akles. 6 The Lydian Herakles was, according to the Persian 
myth, the Orion transferred to heaven. 7 

I will ascend on high to the heavens, to the stars of El I will lift my 
throne and will sit on the Mount of Assembly 8 in the remotest parts of the 
North.—Isaiah, xiv. 13. 

We have here the Mount which the North side of the three 
large pyramids of Gizeli (near Memphis) directly fronts. Orion 
held on to the Ark with one hand. 9 Chares is the Phoenician- 
Hebrew sun’s name ; it is the name of Choreb and the Cliaru 
(Syrians). Charon’s boat 10 is of the Phoenician standard and 

1 G. Massey, II. 436. When the Vernal equinox was in the sign of the Bull, the 
constellation Orion was a stellar image of Horus, who had risen from the underworld 
in his glorified body.—ibid. II. 436. Tammuz (Adonis) represented Orion.—Sayce, 
Herodot. I. 403. 

2 referring to the winter season. 

3 Maspero, Recueil des Travaux, V. 172. 

4 The highest planet is El-Saturn.—Movers, 287, 310, 311, 313, 315, 316, 319; Dio¬ 
dor. Sic. II. 30. It is so slow in its movement, that the ass is his symbol. 

5 The ocean surrounding the kosmos, in which the sun’s bark moved ; according to 
Egyptian Mythology. Nu is “the liquid chaos.”—Sayce, Her. I. 341. 

0 Movers, 472. This is the Phoenician Archaleus (Har-akal, the fire that eats), the 
Lion-god Ariel. There was a city Herakleopolis in the northeastern part of Eg\ r pt 
towards Pelusium. Compare Ptah the Fire-king, the Egyptian Fire in Ezekiel, viii. 2. 

7 Movers, 472. 

8 of the Gods on Olympus (Olumpos, Oulom = time). In Eden the Garden of the 
Gods thou wast. In the Mount of the holiness of Gods.—Ezekiel, xxviii. 13, 14, 16. 

9 A Jewish myth: in Massey, II. 245. 

10 It is the bark of Osiris,—the Egyptian Sun and Saturn,—and Aristophanes lets 
Dionysus go aboard. The ‘ Herusha ’ (Cherusha ?) probably adored Dionysus-Chares. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


181 


wafts the deceased Osiris to Orion. The beautiful star Canopus 
(Kaneph, Knepli 4 ), as it sets, casts Orion below the horizon. 2 
One of the two largest pyramids has been considered the grave 
of the Agatliodemon Kneph. 8 Agatliodemon is identified with 
the Egyptian Knepli. 4 

Adon who is beloved even in Acliaron. 5 —Theokritus, Idyl. xv. 

Adon, who dost send up the shades (to heaven).—Aeschylus, Persai, G28. 

It looks as if the Great Pyramid was the tomb of Knepli, if 
we notice the water-jar and the ram as symbols of resurrec¬ 
tion in Orion. 

The Garden of Delights stood near the gate of the Lamb 
(Aries) where the sun was to restore nature at the equinox, just 
as the Serpent is at the opposite gate in Scorpio. Perseus 
(called Clielub), with wings and a sword, stands near the 
Lamb’s gate which he opens at his rising. 6 

1 According to the Wady-Magharah tablet Rawlinson gathers that Khufu made 
two expeditions into the Sinaitic peninsula, one to take possession of the mines, on 
which occasion he merely set up his cartouche and titles, calling himself { Khufu, King 
of Upper and Lower Egypt, the conquering Horus,’ and another—where he gave his 
name as Num Khufu (Rawlinson’s cartouche here would read Num Khefu) and repre¬ 
sented himself as striking down some captive in the presence of the God Tahuti, Taaut, 
or Thoth. Num Khufu (both names, Cnemu Khufu) are found in the Great Pyramid, 
and it is now most commonly held that Khufu, the successor of Seneferu, at a later 
period, assumed the prefix of Num or Khnum, intending thereby to identify himself 
with the God whom the Greeks called Kneph , one of the chief objects of worship in 
Upper Egypt.—Rawlinson, II. 55. Khem is identified with the Sun, ‘ engendered by the 
Sun,’ “beyond all doubt he was regarded as a form of the Supreme God and so as self- 
originated. Hence one of his titles was father of his own father.”—Rawl. I. 83‘1, 334. 

It was not necessary to do more than set up for effect the cartouche and the pict¬ 
ure of a warrior striking down one that he holds by his hair. 

Landseer, A. D. 1823, supposed the Osirian rites to have originated about 48 cen - 
turies ago ; for Aldebaran is 67 degrees Eastward of the present place of the Vernal 
Equinox, and 67° x 72 = 4824. It is enough that the locality of the Great Pyramid 
was probably destroyed by a Theban army about the time the Hyksos were driven 
from Memphis. 

2 Mankind, 610. 

3 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, I. 224; Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 192, 400. After the 
Christian era some of the Sabians found their Agathodaimon in Seth and their Hermes 
in Idris.—ibid. 641. The Sabians worshipped the Stars and idols.—ibid. 684. Hei'e 
comes in Mr. Petrie’s description of the destruction of the costly statues in the Great 
Pyramid and associate temples.—Petrie, 136, 137. In B.C. 671-2, the Assyrian king 
Assurbanipal is said to have taken Memphis.—Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch. VII. 348. 

4 Chwolsohn, I. 792. 

5 Danaos is mentioned by Nonnus, iv. 254, as Bringer of Water. Dan is one of 
the springs of Iardan. The Danaids, water-nymphs located iu Hades. So Adon 
(Adan), like Osiris, went down to Hades, the profundum aquarum.—Deut. xxxiii. 13. 

6 Mankind, p. 462. 


182 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


’Ey ’H Xvaiov iredloi' . . . <pepeiu /laicdpoov iir\ youav .—Quintus Smyrnaeus, iii. 
761-2. 

To the Elysian Field,—to lead to a land of the Blessed.—ibid. iii. 761-2. 

Tlie Egyptian name for paradise is Aalilu or Aalu. The 
Egyptians believed that paradise is an island surrounded by 
a holy stream. Fountains with the sweetest water pour them¬ 
selves out to all the regions of the earth. According to the 
Persian account of paradise, four great rivers come from 
Mount Alborj, Elborus in the Caucasus range ; two are in the 
north, and two flow towards the south. The river Arduisir 
nourishes the tree of immortality, the holy Horn. In the 
Chinese myth the waters of the garden of paradise issue from 
the fountain of immortality which divides itself into four rivers. 
The Persians held that those who ate the fruits of the one tree, 
Gaokerena, which grew in the sea Vouru-kasha, were rendered 
immortal. They held also that the Serpent, Angro-mainyus, 
got into paradise and created diseases. 1 Kejomaras, the first 
man, according to them, left behind him at his death a seed 
from which a bi-sexed tree grew up in which two were united 
in closest union. This, having been formed by Aura-mazda 
into a man of two sexes, bore instead of fruits ten human 
pairs. From the first pair, Mesia and Mesiane, the entire 
human race is descended. 2 If we remember that Prometheus, 
creator of men, was chained to a rock in the Caucasus, bearing 
in mind that Isaiah places the Mount of the Assembly of the 
Gods in the sides of the north 3 and then observe what has just 
been said a few lines above, it will be obvious that the Jews 
also, in their account of the river of Eden that parted into four 
streams, the Phaison, 4 the Gihon, the River of Tekrit 5 and the 
Frat 6 have followed the Persians and placed their paradise in 
the “ sides of the north.” The Jews closely followed the Per¬ 
sians in their tilery of the end of the world, 7 and claimed kin 
with them. 8 Adamas is Pluto ; and the Garden of Darkness is 

1 Spiegel, Vendidad, Farg. xxii. 24. 

2 Knobel, Genesis, p. 33. Compare the Adam and Eua from one Source. 

3 Isa. xiv. 13 : “ towards the stars of Al.” 

4 The Phasis ran by the land of Koilach (Colchis). Gold, pearls and onyxes were 
said to be found on the slopes of the Caucasus.—Jervis, Genesis, pp. 61-65. There 
was a river Phasis in Colchis and one in Phasiana of Armenia.—ibid. 63. 

5 The Tigris or Khiddekel. 

6 the Euphrat-es. 

7 Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 217. 

8 Gen. x. 22, 24. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 183 

the Garden of Adonis in Hades ; Delitzsch mentions a Garden 
of Dunias, which he locates in Babylon. 

Two numbers have hitherto formed the turning point for 
the chronolgy of the Mosaic period. These are numbers 480 
and 430. The former 1 is the number of years between the 
Exodus and the building of the Temple ; the latter is the pe¬ 
riod assigned to the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt. 2 Both 
numbers very early created difficulty, and are partly modified 
and partly refuted by other statements of the Old Testament. 3 
The long contest between the Egyptians and Hyksos men¬ 
tioned by Manetho occurred during the 17th dynasty from 
Amosis to Tuthmosis III. The former completely broke the 
foreign dominion and drove back the Hyksos to the northern 
part of the Delta ; but it was Tuthmosis who first succeeded in 
sending them out of their last stronghold of refuge, Abaris. 
From this arose the confusion that has so generally prevailed 
concerning these two kings. 4 Amosis the first king of the 
17th dynasty drove away the Hyksos, and in Josephus con¬ 
tra Apion, I. 15, the name Tethmosis is inserted in place of 
Amosis, while Syncellus 5 has the phrase “ Amosis who is also 
Tethmosis.” Amosis is placed by Manetho at the head of the 
dynasty that immediately follows the Hyksos dynasties: hence 
the inference was that he drove them out. 6 Amosis as much as 
Tuthmosis might be regarded as the conqueror of the Hyksos. 
Manetho specified the whole time of the residence of the Hyk¬ 
sos in Egypt, up to their departure from Abaris, to be 511 
years. But it must also have appeared from his narrative, and 
have been a fact specially known to the priests from their his¬ 
tory, that the real dominion of the Hyksos in Egypt was ter¬ 
minated by Amosis. If we now subtract the time from Amosis 
to Tuthmosis, which was 80 years, from 511 exactly 430 years 
remain for the dominion of the Hyksos in Egypt. 7 The Jew¬ 
ish scribe undoubtedly made the same calculation that Lepsius 
has done. Exodus, xii. 40, therefore teaches us that those 430 
years were put into its text because the writer claimed that the 

1 1 Kings, vi. 1. 

2 Exodus, xii. 40. 

3 Lepsius, Letters, p. 402. 

4 ibid. p. 486. 

5 Syncellus, p. 63 B ; 123 D. 

8 Lepsius, p. 422. 


184 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Jews were the Uyksos. And tliis very claim Josephus endeavors 
to sustain at a later period. 1 The fort of Sion was held for 
centuries after this mythical period by the Iebusites, 2 and the 
passage in Genesis, xiv. 18, 21, must be correspondingly late. 

In the entire period of the kings of Judah and Israel there 
has been an era according to which the Chronicles of Salomon, 
the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah and the Chronicles of the 
Kings of Israel have been put in order. The point of depart¬ 
ure of this era is the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. 3 Such 
a date could have been arbitrarily selected. 

Rabbinical chronology deviates in a most striking manner 
from every other, and as late as the times of the Persian kings 
it differs no less than about 160 years from the recognised 
numbers. They reckon by the years of the world. 4 The Crea¬ 
tion is placed B.c. 3761, and until the time of Joseph they agree 
perfectly with the customary mode of reckoning in the Hebrew 
text. They fix the Flood 1656 years after Adam ; the birth of 
Abrahm 1948 ; Isaac’s 2048 ; Iacob's 2108 ; Joseph’s 2199 ; 
Iacob’s march 5 to Egypt 2238 ; Ioseph’s death 2309. It is only 
when they come to Moses that they immediately deviate about 
210 years! Following the precedent of Josephus and others, 
they reckon the 400 years sojourn in Egypt not from the en¬ 
trance of Iacob 6 but from the birth of Isaac. They fix the birth 
of Moses at 2368 and his Exodus at 2448 after the Creation. 

But this year 2448 corresponds, says Lepsius, with the year 
B.c. 1314 (—1313), and therefore occurs, according to the chro¬ 
nology of Manetho, in the time of Menephthes, who reigned 


1 Dunlap, Vestiges, 265; Josephus, c. Apion, I. Amasis was the liberator of Egypt. 
—Lauth, 147 ; quotes Em. de Rouge'. In letting the Hebrews start from Babulon (Old 
Cairo) Josephus follows the Hyksos narrative rather than Exodus, xii. 37. 

2 Munk, Palestine, 79 a. 

3 Jules Oppert, Salomon et ses Successeurs, p. 10. Even if we admit that the real 
date has been incorrectly transmitted, that it has been fixed apres coup (at a later pe¬ 
riod) by the royal chronologists, it has existed in the spirit of the people, it has been 
forcibly constrained to endure.—Oppert, p. 10. 

4 gradually this reckoning was introduced by the Rabbi Hilel Hanasi and probably 

first in the year a.d. 344. 

6 Saturn marching into Egypt gave all the Southern land to Taaut, the God of the 
Sethites, or Phoenicians.—Philo’s Sanchoniathon. 

6 Josephus, Ant. II. xv. 2, calculates 430 years from Abrahm’s entrance into Canaan 
to the Exodus. Compare VIII. iii. 1. Of course, this change was not made without a 
motive! Apion (and probably others) had attacked the Jews ; and perhaps found a 
weak point in their chronological line. Or Josephus-et al. may have discovered one 
themselves. 


THE ASAIilANS IN EGYPT. 


185 


nineteen years. But tlie year 1314 is exactly the fifteenth year 
of Meneplithes, according to the Manethonic calculation. It 
must be observed here that Lepsius takes his data, at least in 
part, if not altogether, from Josephus’s quotation from Manetho , 
which is open to the usual suspicion attending parts of the 
writings of this most astute man and advocate ; consequently, 
Lepsius stands on no better footing than does Josephus, and 
was bound to come to the same conclusion with him. It is, 
practically, a petitio principii, since Josephus has not yet es¬ 
tablished his own credit. 

The same Rabbinical chronology 1 places the building of 
Salomon’s temple, according to 1 Kings vi. 1, about 480 years 
after the Exodus, therefore 2928 or B.c. 834, the march of 
Sliishak against Rehoboam 2969, or b.c. 793, etc. These are 
all of them about 165 years too late. The construction of 
Salomon’s temple was begun in May B.c. 1014. 2 The Rab¬ 
binical chronology puts the building of the Second temple b.c. 
354. But from here the correct dates 3 are suddenly restored (?). 
Alexander the Great is set down at B.c. 320, only sixteen years 
too late ; and his death at 308. 

The Syrian Era of the Seleucidae began b.c 312, and is 
adopted in the Book of the Makkabees, besides being correctly 
mentioned in the rabbinical chronology. The Seleucidic Era 
retained its correct place, in spite of the universal displace¬ 
ment in the chain of events. According to that displacement , 
Alexander first began to reign b.c. 320 and died B.c. 308. The 
beginning of the new era, therefore, according to this, happened 
in the reign of Alexander himself, who in reality had been 
dead twenty-one years at the time of the battle of Gaza, which 
occasioned the new era. In consequence of these contradic¬ 
tions the number was retained, but the event was changed to 
agree with it; for the introduction of the era of Seleucus was 
transferred to Alexander, and connected with an account 4 of his 
presence in Jerusalem, which is otherwise only mentioned by 
Josephus 5 and the so-called Barbaras of Scaliger. 6 

How is the remarkable displacement of events to be rec- 

1 weakened by the remark above of Lepsius, Letters, p. 451. See note 4, p. 184. 

2 according to Oppert, Salomon, p. 96. 

3 So Lepsius calls them. 

4 false, of course. 

5 Ant. XI. viii. 5. 

6 Thesaurus tempp. Euseb. 1658, II. p. 72. 


186 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


onciled with the true numbers ? Lepsius thinks that in the 
time of Eusebius and Theon of Alexandria people could not 
possibly be so completely ignorant of the history of the last 
centuries before Christ as the rabbinical chronology supposed. 
Lepsius seems to have considered that he could get the true 
chronological thread in some way; but this expectation could 
not conscientiously be based upon anything else than an entire 
confidence in the Jewish priesthood, and their strict adherence 
to historical facts, without self-seeking or any personal, clerical 
or national ambition. Lepsius then has recourse to the Genealo¬ 
gies. The first column contains, after the Patriarchs from 
Abrahm to Amram, the twelve heads of the people from Moses 
to David, who appear to have been regarded as the represen¬ 
tations 1 of 12 generations of 40 years each, and thence to have 
occasioned the calculation of 480 years. 2 To show that the 
priesthood was not always respected by the Jews, the Phari¬ 
sees, 3 in B.c. 94, pelted the Highpriest at the altar and declared 
him unworthy of the priesthood. Herodotus, II. 104, gives a 
flat contradiction to Genesis, xvii. 10; which contradiction 4 
shows positively that, according to Herodotos, our Pentateuch 
is later than B.c. 450. 

The statement that the Phoenicians said that they anciently 
lived on the Eruthra Thalassa (the Sea that surrounds Arabia) 
and crossing Syria came to the parts bordering on the Medi¬ 
terranean 5 may have been current in B.c. 450, but traditions of 
ancient peoples are not always literally true. The movements, 
in very early times, of the Philistians and Amalekites into 
Egypt, and certain emigrations out of Egypt into the strip of 
Syria that runs from Gaza to Tyre would seem to have been as 


1 We trust that they were not misrepresentations. But the unanimity with which 
each generation persisted in living precisely one third of an Egyptian hanti is strikingly 
suggestive of a preconceived plan somewhere. Another instance of persistence men¬ 
tioned in scripture is that the Kanaanites persisted in staying: which slightly inter¬ 
fered with the “ totus, teres, et rotundus ” of the Scribal intellectual outline of Iakab’s 
dominion. 

2 Lepsius, Letters, 464. 

3 The Pharisees, who had unbounded influence over the common people, afterwards 
manifested great hostility and caused many embarrassments to the family of Hurkanus. 
—Jahn, Hist. Heb. Com. p. 263. 

4 The “ Kolchians and Egyptians and Aithiops alone of all men are circumcised, 
originally, as to ra euSoIa.”—Herod., II. 104. an apxv s is the Greek for “originally.” 

5 Compare the Phoenician territory, running from the Mediterranean south-easterly 
to Lasa, and their settlements in Egypt. 


THE AS ASIANS IN EGYPT. 


187 


reliable as any other account derived from Phoenician tradi¬ 
tion, more especially as they would appear to have carried 
civilisation along the north shores of Africa, and to Memphis. 
Nonnus evidently thought that Lower Egypt was earlier civ¬ 
ilised than Upper Egypt, while Lepsius and later authorities 
have ascertained that the civilisation of Meroe came up the 
Nile. Of course the Sabseans may have come from the Persian 
Gulf, but it was easier for the Philistians to enter the Delta 
and cultivate the Berbers, creating Keft or Kopt settlements 
while teaching the Semite worship of Chamali (Cham, Sun) and 
Asar (Aser, Osiris, Oseir, Seir), and Kepheus, and founding 
temples. 

Petrie found at Gizeh a piece of diorite bowl inscribed 
‘ . . . nofru ’; perhaps Senofru : and another piece with the 
standard of Khufu. It is merely a false door, the inscription 
being the king’s name on the panel over the door,—like the 
false doors of the early tombs. 1 Josephus, from Manetho, 
gives us a king Timaeus whose name cannot be found, unless 
in the name Tamo, or Atima (the first a deity-name, the second 
meaning Edom), or Tamphthis a king’s name in Manetho’s 
fourth dynasty. After long centuries of Theban sway the 
Egyptians still hated the foreigner. The four dynasties with 
which Manetho 2 filled the interval between the 12th and 17tli 
are regarded by most Egyptologists as ruling contempora¬ 
neously in either three or four places. Manetho’s numbers for 
this period are untrustworthy, and where not false are mis¬ 
leading. 3 De Bouge says : c It would seem, that the great 
division ’ (into dynasties) ‘ had not commenced until after the 
sixth dynasty.’ The table of Saqqarah indicates this; and 

1 Petrie, Pyramids, 153 ; ibid. Tanis, L p. 5. 

2 From an Egyptian list, compiled by Eratosthenes but copied by Syncellus out of 
Apollodorus, and from a notice, doubtless taken by Syncellus from the same source, 
that “ the chronographer had collected from Manetho ” a certain sum of the years of the 
kings to Nectanebo or Alexander, we see that the genuine work of Manetho was still 
extant and no other mentioned, as late as the year B.c. 141 when Apollodorus ended 
his chronography. But Diodorus who was in Egypt B.C. 60 makes no mention of Ma¬ 
netho; and Josephus, writing against Apian at Rome (a.d. 81-94) quotes with empha¬ 
sis “ Manetho himself; ” which seems to imply that the Manetho which has come down 
to modern times is a work of Ptolemy of Mendes who borrowed and altered from Ma¬ 
netho. It seems certain that Manetho by his myriads of years divided among Gods, 
Demigods, Heroes and Kings before and after Menes had obtained more ridicule than 
admiration from Greek readers. Hence the original work of Manetho was superseded 
by the abridgment and re-edition of Ptolemy of Mendes.—Palmer, 87-89, et passim. 

3 Rawlinson, II., 175. 


188 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


probably in the time of the 19th dynasty it was considered at 
Thebes to be all one family, from Mena to Neb-ka. 

Neither Herodotus, Diodorus, nor any other ancient writer 
except Manetho mentions the ITyksos. 1 Manetho alone knows 
them. And while it is possible that the scribe or scribes that 
wrote Genesis and Exodus may have read Manetho’s genuine 
work in the third century B.C., there seems to be no reason for 
assuming that Manetho had ever seen the account of the Exo¬ 
dus written at Jerusalem. 

“ This Manetho, therefore, the one who promised to inter¬ 
pret the Egyptian history from the ‘ sacred characters,’ com¬ 
mencing by saying that our ancestors coming in many thou¬ 
sands into Egypt overpowered the inhabitants, afterwards him¬ 
self confessing that in a little time later, having lost it, they 
took Ioudaia (Judea) and, having built Hierosoluma, con¬ 
structed the Temple ! ” 2 Thus Manetho gives an account so 
different from the Jewish as to raise the point whether some 
oriental has not falsified and mystified. He says that “ Jo¬ 
sephus’s ancestors ” (?) came into the Delta by thousands ; not 
in the patriarch’s little band numbering less than a hundred 
persons who came to visit Ioseph the Jew in his high estate 
among the c miserables ’ of Misraim. The Phoenicians after 
sacrificing to Bol’s fire went in, when they came by land, by 
the way of Accaron (Ekron), and Mr. Brugsch’s “ Khar ” or 
“ Chari ” are as likely to mean the Achari-Phoenicians as any 
body, 3 because Baal-Zebub was Seth (Sada, flaming fire) and was 
the Seth that the Egyptians hated in Akaron, 4 as they did the 
Typhon ! Compare such Egyptian names as Mena, Atot, Tot, 
Teta, Khufu, Ata, Khaphra, Aten, Aseth, Seti, Setes, Soris, 
Suphis, Chebron, Asaneth (Asaneta) with the Syrian names 
Manes, Atad, Ateta, 5 Taut, Tat, Akub, Iakoub, Iakoubos, 
Akbos, Akouph, 6 Attai, Autaias, Atten, Kebrene (see Cheph- 
ren), Set, Seth, Asara, Sur, Asebia, Asaph, Asipha, Iosipli (see 


1 Akasah (Joshua, xv. 16, 17), Akaseph (Joshua, xi. 1), Akasib (Josh. xix. 29), 
Khasor (Josh. xi. 1), Khosah (Josh. xix. 20), have a resemblance to “Hukousos,” the 
Hyksos. These are Philistian names ; and from Philistia Egypt was most likely to be 
invaded in the earliest times. 

2 Josephus contra Apion, I. 

3 Brugsch, Egypt, I. 223. 

4 2 Kings, i. 2. 

8 1 Esdras, v. 28. 

«ibid. v. 30, 31, 48. 


THE ASAEIAN8 IN EGYPT. 


189 


Osar-siph), Hebron, Asana, Hassan : they are all Phoenician or 
Syrian names. 

Tyre was destroyed 1 B.c. 332 by Alexander the Great, but it 
was flourishing again in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes and 
his Greek predecessors, b.c. 221-175. Now take Isaiah, xxiii. 
11, 12, 15, 17, and Zachariah, ix. 3, 4, 13 (who mentions the 
rousing of the Sons of Zion against the Sons of Ion, that is, 
Greece) and we will see that the seventy years during which 
Tyre lay deserted 2 subtracted from 332 will give b.c. 262 as 
about the time when Tyre began to be known again as a great 
commercial mart, that is (41 years before the 2nd year of the 
reign of Antiochus the Great) in the first part of the reign of 
Antiochus II., the third successor to Alexander in Syria. In 
Daniel, viii. 21, 22, the rough goat is the Greek king (Alexander 
the Great) and Seleucus Nicator king of Syria is one of the 
four among whom Alexander’s provinces were subsequently 
divided. 3 From all this it follows that the Jewish historian 
(the prophet Isaiah) whose 23d chapter mentions the resurrec¬ 
tion of Tyre must have lived later than B.c. 262; and probably 
later than the time of Antiochus Epiphanes; 4 since Jewish 
dominion over Tyre (Isa. xxiii. 18) could not have been hoped 
for before Jewish independence, B.c. 143. 

We may assume that the success of the Makkabees in the 
second century before Christ entirely changed the prospects of 
the Jews and made it a political necessity for their priests to 
put forward greater claims than before, claims more in accord 
with the new monarchy and better hopes. The policy of the 
state would be aided by a historical statement of the exploits 

1 Jahn, Hebr. Commonwealth, p. 160. In the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, 175- 
171 B.C. the Jews, having been so long under the dominion of Grecian monarchs, had 
now become familiar with the customs, the literature and the sciences of Greece. They 
had acquired a taste for them; many preferred the Greek manners to their own, and 
even the idolatrous Greek religion to the rational worship of one true God. Of this 
class was Iesous, a brother of the high priest Onias the third. He assumed the Greek 
name Iason, and had solicited the high priesthood of Antiochus Epiphanes at the com¬ 
mencement of his reign. The real design of Iason’s gymnasium at Jerusalem went to 
the gradual changing of Judaism for heathenism. In 174 at Tyre games were cele¬ 
brated in the presence of Antiochus Epiphanes in honor of Herakles. See Jahn, pp. 
•214, 215. Hence the hostility of the native party at Jerusalem under Mattathias and 
the chasidim in B. C. 166. 

2 Isa. xxiii. 15, 17. 

3 Jahn, p. 182. The great horn between the eyes of the rough goat is, apparently, 
Antigonus. See Jahn, 178 ff. 

4 See Daniel, xi. 36, 37, 42, 43, 45; xii. 11. 


190 


THE GJIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of tlie nation at former periods, showing* that the new claims 
now made were not out of proportion to the former position of 
the Jewish people inter nationes. If a g*ood deal is set down on 
paper it is easier to admit it than to controvert it, and while 
encouraging* to their own people it stood a small chance of be¬ 
ing believed by others. To an ardent people thirsting for an 
empire extending up to ’Hamath 1 with an impregnable fortress 
for its capital, a temple replete with the riches of Western 
Asia, and the sacred city* of Palestine theirs, it may have 
seemed worth the writing a very large book to aid the accom¬ 
plishment of their patriotic purpose in the magnifying of the 
kingdom of Daud. And under the circumstances in which he 
was placed, the acute Josephus undoubtedly felt himself ob¬ 
liged to sustain the hope and faith of his countrymen in Rome. 
Themosis, son of Misphragmutliosis, whom Josephus or Mane- 
tho , 2 contrives to confound with Ramses 3 is Thotlimes III., son 
of Queen Hatasu . 4 Josephus states (contrary to the monu¬ 
ments) that Abaris was not taken, but evacuated in pursuance 
of an agreement with Thothmes, who had driven the Shepherds 
into the north-east corner of the Delta near Pelusium . 5 

Osiri Sar aaut era Anu (Osiris the Old Prince in Anu).—Book of the Dead, 
Cap. 142 7d. 6 7 

Turn the Lord of Anu. 1 —Todtenbuch, 74, 3. 

Suppose, for instance, that M. Naville has found Heroopo- 
lis (in Tuket or Taku , 8 Thukot) and inscriptions to the Sungod 
of the South and West, Turn. It does not absolutely follow 
that the place was called pi-tum in the time of the “ Seventy.” 


1 Joshua, xiii. 5. Chamah is the Sun. Khamath the city of the sun. 

2 Manetho, says Josephus, p. 1052, professed to write merely sayings and popular 
talk about the Jews. 

3 Jos. c. Apion, I. 1053. 

4 See Sayce, Herodot. I. p. 469. 

0 Jos. c. Apion, I. p. 1040. Manetho states that Amenophis and his son, with a 
great force from Aethiopia and the troops of Rampses, or Sethon (as he calls him), 
routed the Shepherds and Lepers, pursuing them to the borders of Syria. Contra 
Apion, I. 1053, 1054. This may hardly be considered an “unvarnished tale,” even if 
a popular one. The impression it leaves on the mind is that the varnish of Josephus 
was at least as good as the rest. 

6 Lauth, Agypt-Vorzeit, p. 88. 

7 ibid. p. 93. The deceased assimilates himself to Turn, the Setting Sun of Anu. 
The superscription of Cap. 75 lets him “ wander towards Anu and stop there.” 

8 There is a capital of anome, called Takh-n-amun.—Sayce, Her. 314. It is men¬ 
tioned just before Bubastis and Busiris. 


THE AS ART ANS IN EGYPT . 


191 


The Coptic translation can claim no antiquity of itself, but it 
may affect the date of the Hebrew Ms. of Exodus by showing 
an agreement between so late a reading, as 'its own and that of 
the Hebrew Ms. Lepsius, Letters, p. 448, says that “ the situa¬ 
tion of this town (Pithom) cannot easily be mistaken. It has 
long been recognised in the town of Patoumos, of which He¬ 
rodotus speaks when he says that the eastern Nile canal, which 
was conducted a little above Bubastis, flowed past it, the Ara¬ 
bian town. It was probably situated opposite Bubastis (Tell 
Basta), on the border of the desert, and at the entrance of the 
Wadi through which the canal is led. The ancient ruins of a 
town are found there under the name of Tell el Kebir , and the 
Itinerarium Antonini places the town of Thoum , which has 
certainly been properly recognised as the ancient town of 
Turn Pa-toumos, exactly in that place, namely, upon the road 
from Heliopolis to Pelusium, on the edge of the desert be¬ 
tween Yicus Judaeorum (Tell Jehudeh) and Tacasartha (Sal- 
liieh ?). Now if the Coptic translation in the passage which is 
cited from Gen. xlvi. 28, writes Pithom in place of Heroonpo- 
lis, as is translated by the Seventy, it does not mean that 
Pithom was believed to be discovered in Heroonpolis, but 
that it was thought better to fix the place at which Joseph 
went to meet Jacob at Pithom rather than at Heroonpolis.” 
The late Dr. Edward Eobinson, as his map furnished to Yol. 
II. of Horne’s Introduction shows, thought that Patoum was 
at the Western end of the Yalley Tumeilat! How then does 
M. Naville contrive to bring Herodotus on his side. Simply 
thus, by a singular translation ! He renders the Greek prep¬ 
osition “para” (whose first meaning is “ alongside of”) near, 
thus altering Herodotus completely. Then he renders “ ese- 
chei ” (which means “ it extends ”) as if it were estrechtei (it 
runs). No wonder that he considers “esechei ” a quite unnec¬ 
essary repetition, and says that the text is cori'upt; and then 
he corrects the Greek text to suit himself! If he had rendered 
Herodotus as he should have been translated, the text was 
good enough! The passage in Herodotus, before it was thus 
metamorphosed, read as follows : And Nekos was son of 
Psammiticlius and was king of Egypt; who first put his hand 
to the canal which stretches into the Red Sea, which Dareios 
the Persian afterwards dug through: its length is indeed a four 
days voyage, but in width it was dug so that two triremes 


192 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


could sail rowed together. And the water was led into it from 
the Nile, and it was conveyed down, from a little above Bou- 
bastis city, beyond Patoum the Arabian city ; and it extends 
into the Bed Sea. And first indeed the parts of the Egyptian 
plain that are towards Arabia were dug through: and above 
the plain is the mountain stretching to Memphis, in which are 
the stone quarries. Actually, then, the canal was carried along 
the foot of the mountain from west a great (canal) to the east, 
and then stretches into the clefts (passes), inclining from the 
mountain towards the south and the south wind into the Ara¬ 
bian bay.—Herodotus, II. 158. Herodotus is therefore very 
far from saying (with M. Naville) “ The water is derived from 
the Nile, a little above Bubastis, and it runs into the Bed Sea 
near Patumos , the Arabian city.” Para , with verbs of motion, 
means to go beyond, to pass beyond; so that Herodotus in¬ 
tended to say that the canal left Patoum on one side. The 
fourth meaning of para is “ beyond.” 1 —Liddell and Scott, 
Sixth edition, p. 1175. Consequently, as regards the location 
of Pa-toum, Lepsius and Herodotus are both opposed to M. 
Naville. 

Herodotus, I. 193, has just such another use of {rj 

Sic opv£), he says, tcre^ei Se cs aXXov irorapiov ck tov Et^/o^rca), where 
eae^ci means “ it opens into.” The preposition para in Greek, 
when used with the accusative case, means “ motion along¬ 
side; ” with the accusative there is always a notion of exten¬ 
sion. — Liddell & Scott, 6th ed. Bevised. napa Siva (Iliad, i. 34) 
means “ along the bank.” 

Turn was adored everywhere in North-eastern Egypt as the 
Sun in the West. Turn was not the Lord of Heroopolis alone, 
but also of Heliopolis. “ One now of the chief Gods found in 
Mascliutah must yet have given the name to the city to which 
they belonged. That this was not Turn follows from this that 

1 A single hour’s free life is better 

Beyond forty years’ slavery and captivity : 

irapa aapavTa. xpovmv cncAa/3id *ai $uAa*e r/. —Rega Thourios. 

Here we find it preserved in the Modern Greek of Rega. M. Naville’s mistake began by 
translating napa “ near,” when it should have been translated “past,” “beyond.” 
Herodotus says that “ the water was carried past Patumos,” not that Patumos is above 
Bubastis, as Naville makes him say. The Hebrew account was written at Jerusalem ; 
consequently Succoth is Hebrew, and not Thuku : the scribe used it to indicate an 
Arabian location, like Atam, Atima, Edom. Diospolis would be Turn's city.—See 
Naville, Pithom, 17. There could be a Sucoth in Midian or Atam (Etham) as well as 
beyond Jordan. 


THE ASAR1ANS IN EGYPT. 


193 


there was already in close proximity another Pa-Tum, which, 
as we unmistakably know, lay at the entrance of the Yalley 
TumeiMt. Just so there was already a Pa-Ra that was the 
known Heliopolis. Two cities in Lower Egypt in such imme¬ 
diate neighborhood could not have the same name. It must 
have been the third God of the temple, Ramses, who has 
given to the city its name Pa-Ramses.” 1 Ramses is Heroon- 
polis. 2 Atam was on the margin on the Desert. 3 Herodotus 
says that the water was carried from the Nile into the canal, 
and it was led 4 down from a little above Bubastis City by 
(past) Patoum the Arabian city. Which gives us to under¬ 
stand that the canal ran at the base of the hills to the east of 
the Nile and turned off, by Patoum, into the Tumilat valley, 
stretching into the Red Sea. 

M. Naville reads the hieroglyphs tkou (with the sign of a 
city added) as meaning “ Succoth ” in Exodus, xii. 37. What 
is the reason, in this particular instance, for assuming that t 
represents s ? Sk (sak) in Hebrew means “ covered.” What 
resemblance is there between Sakoth (tents 5 ) and Naville’s tku 
(Tliuku) ? In Exodus, i. 11; xii. 37, Pithom is distinguished 
from Sakoth (Succoth). But Naville makes them pretty much 
one place, Succoth (Thuku ? or Thuket ?) being regarded by 
Naville as a district, not a town. 6 But what does the Bible 
say ? They departed out of Ramesses to Sakoth; they de¬ 
parted from Sakoth and encamped at Atam on the border of 
the Medbar. 7 If Ramesses and Atam (Etham) are names of 
towns, why not Succoth, like the other two ? 

Brugsch, however, besides admitting that Ramses II. built 
the city “ Ramses,” stated that Ramessu is the father of the 
unnamed princess who found Moses and is the pharaoh of the 
oppression of the Israelites. 8 He claimed that this city is the 
residence of Ramses II., the S&n-Tanis, or New-Tanis ; but, re¬ 
cently, prefers the situation of Zaru (Tzaru ?) not far from Pe- 
lusium on the right bank of the Eastern arm of the Nile. The 


1 Lepsius, Zeitschr. fur Aegypt. Sprache und Alt. 1883, p. 47. 

2 Lepsius, ibid. 48, 51. 

8 Exodus, xiii. 20. 

* rjicTai. 

6 Greek SkSne. 

8 Naville’s Store-city Pithom, 5, 23, 32. 

7 Exodus, xii. 37; xiii. 20 ; Numb, xxxiii. 5, 6, 7. 

8 Brugsch, II. p. 99, 353. 

13 


194 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


discovery of inscriptions with the names Thuku, Pi-Tum, and 
Ero in no way establishes the truth of the Exodus account. 
It is the story told about these places that needs verification. 
The Scribe would have been a fool if he had not used the local 
names of the land of Bamses to circumstantiate his narrative 
and give it an aspect of probability. Without this, the com¬ 
pilation would have failed of its object. 

Josephus maintains the Jewish statement which amalga¬ 
mated the Exodus of the Beni Israel 1 with the expulsion of 
the Shepherds. The Jews did not like the description given 
of them by Manetho ; and, according to Prof. Lauth, they did 
not gain much by the exchange, “ for the Hyksos were to the 
Egyptians the pestilence.” The Book of the Exodus contains 
a complete refutation of Manetho’s rumors ; it could not have 
been more complete if viritten from a controversial standpoint, 
and in reply to such charges ! When, however, Josephus de¬ 
clares that Manetho’s story is an Egyptian story (falsehood) 
about the Jews, there is considerable reason for thinking that 
Josephus is correct enough in this; for neither the Hyksos- 
story nor the invasion of Egypt in Menephtha’s reign have any 
appearance of a resemblance to an egress of a Jewish army of 
Mountaineers from Hebron or an Exodus of Jews in a large 
body. Manetho seems (if we trust Josephus) to have used 
popular fables and to let the Jews have the benefit of some of 
the Hyksos traditions in a popular and abusive shape, and per¬ 
haps unjustly. The Egyptians were undoubtedly attacked by 
the Hyksos ; the fourth dynasty must be of foreign extraction. 
The testimony of Herodotus and Diodorus points in this di¬ 
rection, and that of Artapanus supplements the others. Com¬ 
pare Khafra with the Jewish cities Kafira. 

Josephus, p. 1041, tells another large story about the Shep¬ 
herds his ancestors having left Egypt 393 years before 
Danaus.—contra Apion, I. The locating Pitliom (or Bamses) 
and Sukkoth does not touch a reported departure of the Isra¬ 
elites from Bamses to Sukkoth and Atam, as the story could 
have been made up after the time of Herodotus. The point is, 
is that report true —not where is Pithom, where Ramses and 

1 “which took place 348 years later.”—Lauth, 147. Manetho has certainly not 
mentioned the confounding of the Exodus with the Expulsion of the Hyksos.—ibid. 
148. The Hyqsos kings reigned (in round numbers) 260 years, and there was no second 
Hyqsos-dynasty.—ibid. 150. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


195 


where Sukkoth ! Considering that the author of Exodus men¬ 
tions Pithom in the very first chapter, it is not reasonable to 
suppose that he would replace this name by a different one, 
if he wished to be understood. Josephus starts the Hebrew 
Exodus at Babulon, instead of at Ramses. But Josephus fol¬ 
lowed the tradition that made the builders of the pyramids to 
be Syrians, for Old Cairo is the Babulon that Cambyses built 
B.c. 525.—Am. Oriental Soc. Journal, vol. xiii. p. xv. Proceed¬ 
ings at Boston, May, 1885. 

According to Wiedemann Set was adored in Egypt. 1 The 
word Setim (Sheto) is the same as Sethim; 2 and the Jews 
are Sethites. The Sabians derived their religion from Seth. 
Set (Seth) was worshipped in the land of the Sethim and all 
the way from the Nile to the Lebanon, by Hyksos, Jews, 
Philistans, and transjordans. The effect of the doctrines of 
Euliemerus 3 is seen in the human form of Seth in the Jewish 
account; for the doctrine of Euliemerus 4 circumscribes that 
of any book in which his doctrine is manifest, particularly 
where Seth is thus euhemerised and declassified. 5 Euliemerus 
had predecessors in Phoenicia: and what is the beginning 
every list of the Egyptian kings with Mina-Menes, followed 
by Athotliis-Teta, but the same kind of Euhemerism as the 
making Adam the Syrian Adonis, the Moon-god followed by 
the Kananite Taut or Thoth (the Syrian Setli-Hermes) his 
immediate successor ? 6 Josephus speaks of the Sethites as 

1 Wiedemann, I. 444, 479, 501. 

2 compare Sadem and Sadim.—Gen. xiv. 2, 3, Hebrew copy. Asatah or Satah.— 
Judges, vii. 22. Sutel.—Henoch, xxxii. 2. The Gods of the Osiris-circle are the old¬ 
est and only genuine Egyptian: Seb, Nutpe, Osiris, Isis, Set (later identified with 
Moloch), Ptah, Tot, Hapi (Nile-god).—Knotel, Syst. d. iigypt. chronol. p. 87. Ptah, 
Helios, Hapi-Nil (Agathodaimon), Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Thoudis (Hermes), Typhon, 
Horus-Ares.—Lauth, agyptens Vorzeit, 49. 

3 Brave, famous or powerful men after death came to be Gods, and they are the 
very ones that we are accustomed to worship, pray to, and venerate.—Cicero, N. D. I. 
42. Have you not lifted up from the number of mortals all whom you now have in 
your temples, and endowed them with heaven and stars ?—Arnobius, I. xxxvi. The 
citizens of Alabanda worship Alabandus, by whom that city was built, more solemnly 
than any one of the Noble Gods.—Cicero, N. D. III. 19. Masen (the city Zaru) may 
too have had its mythic founder (Mase, Masses, Moses) ; since it was near Abaris and 
Pelusium, the supposed line of some Exodus out of Egypt. 

4 B.C. 320. The Moon was the Mother of the Kosmos.—de Iside, 43. 

5 Dunlap, Vestiges, 270, 271 ff. Ennius translated the Hiera Anagraphs of Euhe- 
merus ; Eusebius, pr. ev., II. 2, refers to it. Compare the tombs of the Patriarchs in 
the Orient. 

6 So Athothis, in Manetho’s list, follows Menes. “ Those who are held to be Gods 




196 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


one would speak of the descendants of Hermes-Taut. Thotli 
was Governor of "earth, moon and Hades (or hell), and Seth 
ruled in Hades as well as on earth. Chabas (Pasteurs, 32) 
mentions Hor-nub and Set-nub, the Golden Horus and the 
Golden Set. Philo Judaeus (de Ebrietate, 24) mentions that 
the Egyptian emblem of Typhos w r as a Golden Bull; which 
shows that Semites and Setim (Sethites) had entered Egypt to 
stay. Eor Set is the Egyptian Set-Typhon. Set is evident¬ 
ly the Sungod (Meyer, Setli-Typhon, 53), even if connected 
with destructive heat. He was also regarded as flame (fire).— 
Meyer, 53. 

The Sheto mentioned as adversaries of the Egyptians were 
the worshippers of Set; Set is the burning, destructive, Solar 
force, the red Typhon : 1 for Asad is Hermes, Sada is a flame of 
fire, 2 and Hermes has the very centre of the Seven Circles of 
the Planets, the position of the Logos. 3 The flaming fire roll¬ 
ing in upon itself to keep the way to the Tree of Life ! Seth 
arranged the year, 4 and means pillar. The Children of Seth 
set up two steles 5 on which the science of astronomy was in¬ 
scribed. The name is allied to Sada “ fire ” and Zadus a name 
of Hermes. Shetha means “year,” and the Arabs swear 4 by 
Sheyth/ because of the old worship of Hermes as chief God. 
Hermes, playing pettia with Isis, wins five more days for the 
year. Thoth (Hermes) was the name given to the first month 
of the Egyptian year. Lactantius, a father of the Church, 
living under Constantine, considered the Hermetic Books an 

majorum gentium will be found to have gone hence from us to heaven. Inquire whose 
sepulchres are shown in Greece : remember since thou art initiated what things are 
taught in the Mysteries.”—Cicero, Tusc., I. 13. Those who from men have become 
Gods.—Arnobius, III. xxxix. Bacchus, Herakles, Kadmus, Linus, Zeus, their sepul¬ 
chres were shown. Herakles, Romulus, iEsculapius, Liber, Aeneas from men became 
Gods. All whom you call Gods were men.—Arnobius, liber iv. Consider the very 
Sacra and Mysteria: you will find the sad ends, fates, funerals of the wretched gods.— 
Min. Felix, c. 21. 195. War burton, Divine Legation, I. 152, supposed that Euhemer- 
ism was taught in the Mysteries. The Phoenicians proclaimed as gods Melcantharos 
and Ousoros, and certain other less honored mortal men.—Movers, 120, 133, 396 ; 
Euseb. de laud, const. 13. 

1 de Iside, 41. 

2 Johnson, Persian Diet., p. 690. 

3 Philo, Quis Heres, 44, 45. 

4 Nork, Real-Worterb. IV. 277, 278; Jos. Ant. I. 3. Nork, Rabbin. Wortenbuch, 
565. Gen. i. 

5 From inaccessible sacred books and hidden tablets (steles) which all-wise Hermes 
raised.—Manethon, v. 1, 2. 


THE AS AM ANS IN EGYPT. 


197 


ancient and very venerable authority, 1 2 while in the treatise on 
Isis and Osiris “ the Hermaeus ” is treated as unquestioned 
authority. Plato tells us that all the wise agree that the King 
of heaven and earth is mind} Plato here uses the very word 
which Hermes employs for the Father-mind. 3 The priests 
relate the legend that Hermes has been the Inventor of learn¬ 
ing and the arts. He first articulately divided this common 
speech, 4 called by a name things that had none, 5 invented the 
writings, and arranged what concerns the honors and sacrifices 
of the Gods. 6 Thus the legend was already quite ancient in 
the time of Diodorus, fifty years before the Christian era. The 
Egyptian Theuth (Hermes) is mentioned in Plato. 7 Seth was 
a resident of Palestine, for his worshippers are described on 
Egyptian monuments with shorn heads according to the Pal¬ 
estine usage, 8 and with the Arab tuft of hair that Herodotus 
refers to as a characteristic of the Arabian Dionysus-wor- 
sliippers. The followers of Seth set up pillars in the Sirian 
land (Siriadis) and were called in Egypt Shetha or Sheto. 
The custom of setting up such pillars existed in Syria.—2 
Chron. iv. 12. Lucian mentions it in Bublos (Byblus). It was 
also an Egyptian usage in the lands of Iebus, Seir and Osiris. 
Set conquered Osiris. 9 According to the ancient theology, 
Abaris was a city of Typhon, 10 that is, of Set: The ark of Osiris 


1 Menard, Hermes, p. ci. Eremias or Eremiah (Jeremiah) has the name of Her¬ 
mes, Aram, the Supreme. Compare the name of the city Arumah.—Judges, ix. 41. 

2 Plato, Philebus, 28 C. 

3 Hermes, Poimander, 6. 

4 Hermes-Kadmus. 

5 Adam does this in Genesis, ii. 19, 20 ; Brahma, in India. 

6 Diodorus Siculus, I. pp. 19, 53; de Iside, 3 ; Orelli, Sanchoniathon, p. 22. Sirius, 
the star of Isis, the sidus Osiridis, was also by Vettius Valens (Salm. Ann. Clim. p. 
113) called Seth.—Mankind, 698. 

7 As evil demon, Set appears mostly as flame, and in the Ritual as pursuer of souls. 
The deceased must have knowledge, must know the magic sentences, and perceive that 
he is identical with the Deity. Otherwise he falls under the power of the evil spirits 
and is subject to the new death.—Meyer, 41. Set was, prior to the King Apepi, the 
God of the north-eastern Delta and Syria.—Meyer, 55-58. He was God of the so- 
called Hyksos. 

8 Jeremiah, xli. 5; Ezekiel, xliv. 20; Levit. xxi. 5; Acts, xxi. 24; Job, i. 20. 
The Egyptians shaved the head, and some wore wigs.—Dunlap, Sod, I. 76. Radi 
Capita ob luctum : “their heads are shaven for mourning.”—de Iside, 4. Aset pet 
Chaman (Aset-ef-ha-Amen) is Seti I, father of Ramses-Mer-Amen. 

9 Brugsch, I. 225, 226. Set is Shemael, Samael; good or bad, according to race, 
prejudice. 

10 Jos. contra Apion, I. p. 1052. With the Abaris (as a name of the Sun) compare 


198 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


was sent through the Tanaitic mouth of the Nile into the sea, 
which (mouth) even yet (a.d. 50) the Egyptians, for this reason, 
name hated and abominable. The idol of a dead man was 
shown, carried around in an ark, to the Egyptians. 1 Josephus 
mentions the shadow of a Man disposed upon the (boat or) ark 
to intimate that (Osiris) attends the sun on this his everlast¬ 
ing course. 2 The Arabs connect the arrival of Noah’s ark in 
September in the mountain cloud with the Festival Ashurah 
which was celebrated to the Sun. A ship ascended with the 
Virgin 3 (Luna, Mene, or the sign Virgo). Osiris therefore 
enters the Moon’s ark at the conjunction of sun and moon, and 
Apis, “ the well-formed image of the life of Osiris,” 4 is the 
Dionysus with horns; as Pluto and the Devil are similarly 
represented, with the cloven foot. The hippopotamus signifies 
the west, like Oreb and Orphe, Darkness. 

The Kushite race on the Red Sea, in the North-eastern 
Delta of Egypt, with its swelled faces, its high cheek bones, 
thick lips, Berber countenance, and peculiar sphinxes at Tanis 
and Zagazig are unnoticed by Manetho’s successors in chro¬ 
nology and by himself. 5 The whole theory of the Egyptian 
religion was, like its progress in civilisation and the arts, its 
conquests in the peninsula of Sinai and Upper Egypt, its doc¬ 
trine of Light and Darkness in the Osiris religion, its use of 
iron, its jewelled saws and its wonderful creations at Gizeh, 
complete in the 4th dynasty, and nearly all of it in the time of 
Kliufu. It must have required a vast series of years, a great 
number of reigns, during a period of which history has little to 


Beth Abara (beth meaning temple), Beth Barah (Judg. vii. 24), Berog, 1 Esdras, v. 19, 
BSroth, 2 Esdr. ii. 25, BaracZ (Gen. xvi. 14), Bara (Gen. xiv. 2) and the “luminous 
Bar,” an Assyrian deity, inbar “sunbeam,” Beroe a city of the Sun, Berouth, Baroth 
(Josh. ix. 17) and Baratu or Bratu a mountain in Phoenicia, and Kadesh Barana 
(Varna). Set, being Baal, is the Fire-god Moloch Herakles, Asad or Sada, the Kebir. 
Bar, Baru, is Set.—Meyer, 47. Hence Abar, Abaris. 

1 de Iside, 13, 17. 

2 Jos. c. Apion, II. 1; Dunlap, Sod, I. 84. 

3 Firmicus, 7. The moon contains the body of Osiris which the Devil tore into four¬ 
teen parts.—de Iside, 8, 18. The tebs is therefore the urn or coffin (tafe) of Osiris. 

4 de Iside, 29. On Dec. 17th they take out the relic which has the form of one 
dead, and is adorned with the white crown. On the 18th, at the 8th hour there is a 
celebration on board ship, with lamps lighted in 34 vessels carrying Horus, Thot, 
Anubis, Isis, Nephthys, etc. 

5 For all we know, Manetho never once mentioned them. The pastors (in African 
aga’zuan) in Josephus contra Apion, I. are Semites , not African Kushites, Kopts, or 
Berbers. 


THE ASAUIANS IN EGYPT. 


199 


say, to have brought primal conceptions to perfection, even 
under an aboriginal papacy, to have brought the civilisation of 
the priest caste to such a great result in the times between 
Senofru and the reigns of the sixth dynasty. The Nile was the 
great cause of all. The Nile supplied the capital, and the 
priests were the administrators of it; the people had the faith, 
and the priests directed and instructed it, until Osiris is named 
by Menkaura in the third pyramid. Time was required to 
learn the use of the metals in Phoenicia, to make chariots of 
iron for war, and it required time to invade the Delta and locate 
there the old Kanaanites. But the question is how near to the 
12tli dynasty was the Sixth! Who has given assurance that 
Manetho is to be followed ? He begins with the results of 
ages! Wiedemann 1 holds Manetho responsible for the in¬ 
credible things that Josephus claims to quote from him. 
When an oriental lied before our era, it was lying of a superior 
sort, it went ahead in the ratio of geometrical progression. 
He talked of cycles extending to 36,525 years. 2 Manetho’s 
general scheme, being so differently reported, is in reality un¬ 
known to us; its details, being frequently contradicted by the 
monuments, are untrustworthy ; and the method of the scheme, 
the general principle on which it was constructed, was so 
faulty, that, even if we had it before us in its entirety, we could 
derive from it no exact or satisfactory chronology. 3 Diodorus, 
I. 50, says: “ The Thebans say that they are the oldest of all 
men ; and that philosophy and astrology were invented among 
themselves first.” Their geometry and arithmetic came prob¬ 
ably from Syria and the Delta. The Phoenicians, and Philis- 
tians (or Arabs) must have early entered the Delta. The Pliil- 
istians or Kara must have entered first because of proximity. 
The Phoenicians and Philistians occupied the entire sea-coast 
of Palestine down to near or about Pelusium. The Hebrew 
language was Phoenician ; and the Phoenician vessels bore the 
Phoenician religion through the Aegaean Sea to Greece and 
the islands. This explains the identity of religion and the 
similarity of the Mysteries from Athens to Egypt. For, in 

1 Wiedemann, Eg. I. 298. The great year-numbers (Jahrzahlen) in Manetho lead to 
the inference that they were designed after Cycles ; what Cycle suited but the Dog- 
star Cycle ?—Boeckh, 90, 91. 

2 See Apokatastasis (the final restoration of the heavenly bodies to the point from 
which they started).—Palmer, Egypt. Chron II. 427. 

3 Rawlinson, II. p. 9. 


200 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


spite of apparent differences in details, they are fundamentally 
the same, 1 as far as Karthage. 2 

Sirius rose in the evening in the south of Egypt, described 
a diurnal arc of about an hour and a half and, after appearing 
for a short period, sunk below the horizon.—Mankind, 697. 
In the low latitude of Egypt and ^Ethiopia the star Sirius 
never became invisible in a solar eclipse ; but the stars of Ursa 
Major, otherwise termed the Ark of Osiris, 3 set; and the last 
of its stars, Benetnasch, returned at the period under discus¬ 
sion to the Eastern horizon with those in the head of Leo a 
little before the season of the summer solstice. The stars of 
the Husbandman followed at the same hour of sunrise in 
about a month,—the chief of them, Has, Mirach , and Arcturus , 
being very nearly simultaneous in their heliacal rising. The 
stars of Ara (the Altar) 4 too, which have been supposed to be 
connected with those which record the leading circumstances 
of the Deluge, rise in these ^Ethiopian latitudes, while those 
of the Husbandman 5 embellish the Oriental quarter of the 
heavens. 6 The latter stars of the “ Dove ” (of the more ancient 
Chaldean planispheres) rise simultaneously with the hand of 
the Husbandman. 7 

Noch put forth his hand and took her.—Gen. viii. 9. 

1 de Iside, 25. 

2 A passage in Macrobius, I. vii. 14, says that in the worship of Saturn the Roman 
rites (forms and ceremonies) vary from the very religious nation of the Egyptians. For 
these had not admitted Saturn nor even Scerapis into the arcana of the temples down to 
the death of Alexander of Macedon. Bub this passage has reference to the slaying of 
the victims and the blood-offerings in the case of the Roman Saturn, it being claimed 
that the Egyptian offerings were bloodless, only prayers and incense. But the Egyp¬ 
tians did offer blood offerings.—Rawlinson, Anc. Egypt, I. 408, 409-411. Macrobius 
lived in the first part of the fifth century of our era. The Saturnalia were more ancient 
than the city Rome and were celebrated in Greece under the name Kronia.—Macrobius, 
I. vii. 36, 37. 

3 Osiris Sahou, our Sirius, consecrated to Osiris and considered by some to be the 
abode of happy souls.—Maspero, Hist. Anc. 3d ed. p. 79. The Serpent of the Pole, 
the Serpent of Winter, Ahriman, puts Osiris in the gleaming sarcophagus, the seven 
stars of the Great Bear, and keeps watch over him. This is an approximation to what 
the earlier legend of Light and Darkness must have been. 

4 Genesis, viii. 20; Uoch (Descent) built an altar to the Raingod. 

6 Bootes. 

6 The annual progress of the stars and succession of the seasons may have origi¬ 
nated the legend of the Deluge. 

7 Landseer, Sabaean Res. 185-187. Aurion, the Shining. He hunts the She-bear 
(die Barin), and then is Arkas. Then first, when astronomy had acquired greater com¬ 
pleteness among the Greeks, they separated Orion into the Deus Solaris and into his 
own constellation.—Nork, III. 347. This shows Greek indebtedness to the Semites. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


201 

Mann, Men, Menes and Meneuis seem to have been connected 
with the flood. The Vetus Chronicon placed Menes in the first 
year of the canicular period. 1 Many will admit what can indeed 
hardly be denied that Manetho made use of a cycle for the 
mythical period, and that cycle the dogstar cycle. But if it is 
granted that the prehistoric time has been regarded or ar¬ 
ranged according to dogstar periods then it must have so 
closed with one; where now the prehistoric time ceases just 
there the historical begins, and consequently the accord with 
dogstar periods propagated itself in so far as the beginning of 
the last, or the beginning of Menes, was made with the com¬ 
mencement of a dogstar period. And this explains the first 
15 dynasties of the Kunic Cycle in the Old Chronicle (the 16th 
commencing with the Tanis or Menes dynasty) as also the fact 
that Manetho, after his dynasties of supernaturals, begins the 
dynasties of kings with Menes. 2 

All things were born from Kronos and the Assyrian Aph¬ 
rodite. 3 Kronos is Seb (Saturn). When the ark of Aloliim 
got to Aqaron it may have stood in the temple of Kronos at 
Akaron.—See 1 Samuel, v. 10. Ouranos 4 is the fire-heaven. 
The ancient Kanaanites and Egyptians noticed the stellar fires 
as they shone in a Southern firmament, they beheld the zodi¬ 
acal light and the comets, incident to the panorama of night, 
as they drew their trains of fire across heaven. They observed 
in this the potency of fire! Somewhere near four thousand 
years ago, or earlier, in a period of considerable civilisation, 

1 Seyffarth, Chronol., 108, 109. 

2 Both statements have only then a reasonable meaning when it is assumed that a 
dogstar period began with Menes.—Boeckh, 41, 91. The Egyptian priests dated the 
Beginning of the world and of time July 20-22, at the commencement of the dogstar 
period, and it was natural that priest Manetho should do the same, in accordance with 
the notions prevailing in the order in regard to dogstar cycles, the last one of which 
was certainly within calculation. Boeckh says the commencement of the dogstar 
period does not depend upon a knowledge of a renewal of the period in a.d. 139, but 
could be reckoned any time before from the current movable years. It is of no conse¬ 
quence whether the dogstar period was openly introduced into Egypt or already in¬ 
vented at the time of the Pharaohs, ‘ but we presuppose in Manetho only the theoret¬ 
ical knowledge of the period.’ It is of no consequence to the argument whether 
Manetho knew the great circle of 25 dogstar periods or not, for Boeckh does not rest 
his proof on this circle.—Boeckh, 91, 92. As to the connection of the Menes-era with 
MSna, Menados, Men, Menos, etc., see Boeckh, 96, 97. 

3 de Iside, 69. Saturn was with Venus Architis first worshipped in Assyria.—Ser- 
vius ad Aeneid. i. 642 ; Macrob, Sat. i. 21. Saturn is the Serpent God (Cory, p. 313); 
and therefore an Earth-god.—Nonnus, vi. 155-166. 

4 Our Anou. Uro = toburn. Oer means “ great.” 


202 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


when the fire-worship existed everywhere and superstition 
guided by priests was in full sway, the worship of Dionysus- 
Moloch or Saturn, the devourer of children, prevailed in S}^ria, 
possibly in Lower Egypt. A Phoenician or Pliilistian people, 
the Kefa , 1 bore its flaming altars from Akaron along the east¬ 
ern shore of the Mediterranean, and following the sun to the 
west, moved into the northern coast of Africa. The land they 
left behind was devoted to the worship of the Sun and Fire, 
and was split into small localities controlled by petty rulers 
and priests. The settlements in the Nile Delta resulted in the 
establishment of a state. Kaplitor or Keft Oer was the child 
of Egypt . 2 The Kefa extended themselves as far as what ulti¬ 
mately became Memphis, and they , 3 Phoenician, Philistine 
and Amalekite Shepherds, fed their flocks in the region where 
the Great Pyramid now stands, bearing upon its blocks the 
name Kliufu. Akab, Keb 4 or Kub (Kouph), died in Decem- 

1 Phoenicia, called Keft by the Phoenicians, sent Semite colonists to the Delta, the 
Isle of Kaphtor.—Prof. A. H. Sayce, Academy, 1884, p. 351 ; Prof. Jebb, in Encyclo¬ 
paedia Britannica, vol. xi. p. 90 ; Brugsch, Egypt, I. 222. 

The day that is coming for the spoliation of all the Phelesti, for cutting off from 
Tyre and Sidon every remaining auxiliary ; for Ia’hoh will waste the Phelesti, the re¬ 
siduum of the Isle of Kaftor.—Jeremiah, xlvii. 4. 

Phelestii from Kaftor.—Amos, ix. 7. 

Brugsch, I. 336, reads Keftu (Phoenicians). Keb stands for Seb.—Lepsius, Trans. 
Berlin Akad. 1851, p. 163 ff. 

2 Genesis, x. 14. 

3 The submission of Upper Egypt to the masters of Memphis was of no recent 
date, but prior to the pyramids.—Chabas, les Pasteurs en Egypte, p. 6. Chabas, 
Pasteurs, 10, 11, quotes Eusebius, Africanus, and Manetho. Judges, vi. 33, mentions 
a league of the Midianites, Amalekites, and all the Beni Kadm against Israel. 

4 Keb, Kepheus, Akbar, Kabir, Koub (comp. Kub in Ezekiel, xxx. 5), Kouph, Khufu. 
The Great Pyramid, according to Manetho, was built by foreigners of the fourth 
dynasty.—Heeren. Res. Africa, II. 197, 411. Compare the names Akoub (2 Esdras, 
ii. 45), Iakab, Keb, and Kebo, the descending Sun, or Saturn. Kebtu is Coptos.— 
Rawlinson, II., 129. Kib, a land mentioned in an Assyrian inscription. Asat-em-Kheb 
is a queen’s name. 

Herodotus, II. 127, has almost the tradition in Diodorus, I. 64, that Khufu never 
was buried in the Great Pyramid, and says that the pyramids of Gizeh had attached to 
them in the minds of the people the name of the Shepherd Philition, which points to 
Philistian Kefa. Nothing more mythic can be found than the stories in Herodotus, II. 
121-126, that introduce and accompany his account of the pyramids. Compare Diod¬ 
orus, I. 63. Herodotus does not hesitate to let Rhampsinitus (Ramses III.) precede 
Khufu-Cheopa. 

Petrie, p. 216, says that the coffer (sarcophagus) cannot have been put into the 
Great Pyramid after the “ King’s Chamber” was finished, as it is nearly an inch wider 
than the beginning of the ‘ ascending passage.’ It was put in before the roof of the 
pyramid was put on. The kings were usually buried in the rock under the pyramid. 
And under the Great Pyramid there is a gallery in the rock. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


203 


her} Kronos is father of Typhon and Nephthys. 1 2 Consequent¬ 
ly, he went to Hades ! 3 Kronos is a name of Keb ! Movers, 
547, mentions Sabos as one of the names of Dionysus (who is 
the Dionysus Saturn in Hades). 

To explain the name Israel, take the name of Eleasar of 
Masada, the Jewish patriot, and it has been translated the 
Warrior God, from Asar, or Azar, Mars. Movers, Phonizier, p. 
341, mentions the Phoenician Asar. Mars-Herakles was saluted 
in the rising sun by the Syrians, the Salii, and even by a 
Roman legion, in the month of March. He was called Adar, 
Azar, and Asar. Movers gives the Hebrew letters of Asar; 
De Rouge, the hieroglyphs. De Rouge, Recherches, p. 46, 
reads the hieroglyphs of Osiris “ Asiri.” The names Asar 
(Beni Asr.—Joshua, xix. 24, 28) and Sara (Tyre) show Osiris 
to be a Syrian name. The Bible (1 Sam xiii. 5 ; xxix. 2) says 
that the Philistians had a great army. Phoenician Shepherds 
entered Egypt. 4 * Josephus quotes Manetho as saying that sos 
meant shepherd and shepherds in the common dialect & of 
Egypt. The Sasu (Shasu) carried bows, and the Shemalites or 
Ishmaelites were capital archers.—Genesis, xxi. 20. When the 
Syrians, 6 Kharu, 7 or Peleti (Philistians) first emigrated into 
Egypt from the River Soreq or the five cities of the Saranim 
(their governors) they carried with them Phoenician and Kan- 
anite usages; the Asari dwelt in the midst of the Kanani 
(Judges, i. 31, 32) for Asar (Osiris) was already in Phoenicia 


1 de Iside, 82, 69. 

2 de Iside, 12 ; and Rev. xx. 1-3. 

3 de Iside, 17. 32, 44, 57. Kronos (Saturn Keb) coming into the country of the 
South gave all Egypt to the Phoenician God Taaut.—Philo’s Sanchoniathon ed. Orelli, 
pp. 38, 39. Israel is a Phoenician name of Kronos.—ibid. p. 42. Israel is also Gabor, 
Akab, Iakab, as God of Time. 

4 Manetho, according to Julius Africanus. 

s Jos. contra Apion, I. p. 1040. Abbaros (ibid. I. 1046) was the name of a High- 
priest, consequently, Abar, Bar, the shining, and Abaris (the city) are names of Bel. 

6 The tribe of Aser bordered on Sarra (the city Tyre). The Assyrian Assur was a 
Great King above all Gods.—Sayce, Hib. Lect. 122. Hence Aser, Ousir, Asar, Isiris, 
Asariel and Israel (Sarah included) are all forms (like Esmun-Azar) of one name Asar 
(Azar, Mars) and Serach. The well of Asara.—2 Sam. iii. 26. Asur, Gen. x. 11. 
Joshua, xvii. 2, has the Beni Asriel, and Judges, i. 32, the Asarites. Saria.—2 Sam. 
viii. 17. Compare Zaroh (i.e. Saroh).—Judges, xiii. 2; like Sarra and Zur, names of 
Tyre. 

7 Kharu (Akharu), from Alcaron (Ekron) in Philistia on the R. Sorek. Ioab’s 
troops were Kharu and Philistian Peleti.—2 Sam. xx. 7. It is to be remarked here that 
the name Seba or Seva (xx. 6) suggests the Egyptian theological name Seb, or Sev ; and 
that Bikheri is identical with the Egyptian name Bikheres. 


204 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and Israel, and the name Isarel is evidently one with Azara, 
Sar-Azar, Asar (Asor.—Josephus, Ant. xiii. 57), Asariel, Isiris, 
Isiri, Asar (1 Chron. vi. 62, Asir (1 Chron. vi. 37), Asiri (a 
name of Osiris),—De Rouge, Recherches, p. 49. Baethgen 
(Beitrage zur Semit. Rel. p. 39; Corpus Inscrip. Semit. I.) 
has the words Mlkasr (Melk-Asar) and Mlkastrt (Melkastarta) 
compounds of Asar (Osiris) and Astarte with Moloch (Saturn, 
Set), Milichus. Compare Melkitan and Melkatan (—Baethgen, 
39) and Tonach (Taanach in Israel): 

The Meleki fought in Kanan, in Tanak.—Judges, v. 19. 

The Phoenician Shepherds were originally the same sort of 
people perhaps as the Osirians of the Delta, unless where 
the Shasu (the Shepherd Sos) may have imported a different 
element into the Delta or the primitive Berber stock have 
altered the Semite blood of the invaders. In Amathus and in 
Byblos Adonis-Osiris was worshipped.—Baethgen, 43 ; Movers, 
235. Azara is the name of the Persian sanctuary of Artemis.— 
Movers, 341. 

The name Siwa is found applied to the Oasis of Ammon. 
Compare Zio, meaning fulgor (light) in the Codex Nasaraeus, 
Abel Ziua 1 (the Great Messenger of Light in the same work), 
and the Greek Zeus, the Spartan Sios (Ziua), or Jupiter Ammon, 
whose temple was in the Oasis aforesaid. The tradition says 
that the Phoenicians came from the Red Sea. Keb is Saturn. 
Kepheus is Son of Agenor, who is the Phoenician Supreme 
Baal. 2 Agenor, father of Phoenix was called Khna, who changed 
his name to Phoinix, according to Philo of Byblos. 3 

INSCRIPTION IN PEPl’S PYRAMID. 

This Pepi comes upon the seat of Osiris. . . . O Pepi, he, who has given 
thee all life, all force and the eternity, is Ra, as well as thy speech and thy 
body, and thou hast taken the forms of God and dost become ‘ grand grace ’ 
in the presence of the Gods that reside in the Lake. O Pepi, since thy soul is 

1 Abel, the name of a place.—2 Sam. xx. 14, 15. At Abel the Great, they seem to 
have inquired of an oracle.—2 Sam. xx. 18. 

2 Sayce, Herod. I. 415; Movers, II. 129-139, 212. 

3 Sayce, Herod. 2; Eusebius, praep. ev. i. 10. Kings reigned in Idumea (Aduma) 
before there were any kings over the Beni Isarel (Israel). One was called Aloa, an¬ 
other, Ala.—Gen. xxxvi. 31, 40, 41. King Alah.—2 Kings, xviii. 9. Now, the God El 
of these early religionists must have been the sun (Eli, Elios). We find the Beni Adan 
(Adonis-worshippers) in 2 Kings, xix. 12. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


205 


among the Gods, among the Luminous, thy fear acts upon their hearts. . . . 
it is the magic power of thy hook which acts on their hearts, thy name lives on 
earth, thy name endures old upon earth, thou art not destroyed, thou art not 
annihilated forever.—Maspero, Recueil, 160, 161. 

Thou whom Ra has received by the hand and whose head the double ‘ Nine 
Days’ of the Gods has lifted, behold he comes to thee as Orion, lo Osiris comes to 
thee as Orion, master of wine at the time of the good festival Ouaga, him of 
whom his mother has said ‘ be flesh,’ him of whom his father has said ‘ be con¬ 
ceived in heaven, be delivered in the abyss ! ’ and who has been conceived 
in heaven with Orion, born in the abyss with Orion. Who lives lives by 
the order of the Gods, thou 1 then dost live and thou goest out with Orion 2 
from the eastern heaven, thou goest down with Orion from the western heaven 
and Sotliis is the third with ye, She of whom the abodes are pure, and She it is 
who conducts you to the excellent ways of heaven in the Fields of Ailou.—Mas¬ 
pero, Recueil de Travaux, 172, 173. 

THE PYRAMID POINTS FROM HADES TO HEAVEN 

Rejuvenate all his members that he may reach the horizon with his father the 
sun, that his soul may rise to heaven in the disk of the moon ; that his 
body may shine in the stars of Orion, on the bosom of Nut.—Book of Respira¬ 
tions. 3 

When this Pepi has sailed towards (the horizon) he keeps himself in the 
eastern part of the heaven, 4 in his northern part, . . .—Pyramid of Pepi I. 

Sin the Moon-god, father of Istar, navigating in the bark.—Lenormant, les 
origines, I. 120. Istar, daughter of the Moon-god Sin (—Trans. Soc. Biblical 
Archaeol. II. 180). 

For this god Lunus 5 is the brother of this Pepi. 

The birth of this Pepi 6 7 is the Morning Star.—Pyramid Pepi I. 

I will give to him the Morning Star. 1 —Apokalypse, ii. 28. 

1 Pepi of the 6th dynasty. 

2 Orion is the coffin of Osiris,—the coffin of Mithra born Dec. 25th. Orion is Du- 
mouzi, Adonis.—Lenormant, Origines de l’histoire, I. 247, 2nd ed. Orion is the star of 
Horns.—de Iside, 21. The hunter Orion is Nimrod.—Nork, Real-Worterb. III. 278; 
Odyssey, xi. 572; see Job, i. 2; ix. 9. Sabians joined the worship of the 7 planets to 
the adoration of the 7 stars of the Great Bear. —Lenormant, II. 123. 

3 Rawlinson, Eg. I. 367. 

4 He rose from darkness into light among the stars. Compare 2 Kings, xxi. 5; 
xxiii. 5; G. Maspero, Recueil de Travaux, V. p. 26. The three Magian kings are in 
Orion.—Mankind, p. 475. 

5 le Dieu Lune. Maspero, V. 172. 

6 The name Babai occurs 2 Esdras, ii. 11 ; and Babi, 2 Esdras, viii. 11. Comp. 
Bibi of the 3d Egyptian dynasty and Apepi of the 15th. The serpent Apap personifies 
Darkness.—Lenormant, I. 104. According to Brugsch, I. 115, Hor was honored as l the 
holy morning star that rose to the west of the land of Punt ’ in Africa. 

7 According to Massey, II. 58, Seb acquired his starry soul as Jupiter, God of the 
mid-region, a morning and evening star. The Egyptian Seb is a god of earth and the 
heaven of day, who declines when Shu uplifts the heaven of night.—Massey, I. 522 ; 
quotes Pierret, Pantheon Egyptien, p. 22, plate. 


206 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Phoenician religion was typically Semitic, says Mr. A. H. 
Sayce. It centred in the worship of the Sun-god, adored now 
as the beneficent giver of light and life, now as the stern god of 
fire and summer heat, who must be appeased by human sacri¬ 
fice. 1 Each aspect of the Sun-god had its own name and be¬ 
came a separate divinity. The baneful and beneficent aspects 
of the Sun-god were united in Baal-Melkarth, the God and 
King of Tyre. 2 3 The various transformations of the Divinity 
and His incomprehensibleness, unity, infinity were as well 
known to the Egyptians as to the Jews. 8 


For the Maker is in all things.—Hermes Trismegistus, XI. 6. 

Baal-Agenor, the supreme Baal of Phoenicia, 4 is one of the 
Bels ; and, consequently, one of the divine transformations of 
Ra and Set. As Set (Seth) is only one of the transformations 
of Thoth or Tet the Moon-god, and is God of heaven and hell 
he seems to correspond to these three roles of the Egyptian 
Tet, the Phoenician Tat, Taaut. Seth is Bel, and apparently 
had as much title to the crescent and disk as Thoth who 
never leaves Osiris not even in Hades, and is the associate of 
Isis. The emperor Julian secretly supplicated Hermes, who 
was the swifter Intelligence of the world, exciting the move¬ 
ment of minds. 5 6 * Bel philosophos is God of letters, as Seth is 
God of astronomy. The entire orient appears to have wor¬ 
shipped the Saviour Hermes G before our era, under the differ¬ 
ent names Sadi, Set, Adad, Tat, Thoth, etc., and as Mana 
Shemir the divine Wisdom in the sun and moon. Julian of¬ 
fered sacrifices to the Moon, who was religiously worshipped 


1 Compare the Egyptian Set as Evil Principle, God of darkness, and Death-god. 

2 Sayce, Herod. I. 414-416. 

3 See Chabas, papyr. mag. 62, 70 f. 

4 Sayce, I. 415. Saturn is the Phoenician El.—Movers, Phonizier, 186. Saturn 
was regarded as an Old King.—Movers, 130, 152; Orelli, Sanclion, 42. So was the 
Phrygian Masses. 

5 Ammian, b. xvi. ch. v. For Sol is the Mind of the world, pouring forth our 
minds out of himself like sparks.—Ammian, xxi. 1. Hermes is Sol, according to Ma- 
crobius, and Zadus. Hermes was worshipped by the Arab tribe Asad. 

6 Sada, and Sadi. The word Ramestes on Hermapion’s obelisk at Rome would 

seem to have contained in itself the words Ramas (Hermes) and Set. Stnah, Gen. 
xxvi. 21, certainly resembles the name of a Shepherd king Staan. Putting in the 
vowel e, or a, which was not usually written, we have the word Satanah, as Set’s well 

was named. Set is written Sit, in Egyptian occasionally. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


207 


at Carrhae, 1 the Biblical Charan 2 (Haran). Swine were offered 
at one festival to Osiris and the full moon. 3 Osiris was the 
God of Oh in Egypt. 4 Bacchus 5 was the Son of Luna. 6 Osiris 
is the lunar world, the order of nature in the moon. 7 Hermes 
was the Lunar Angel; the name Asad means “ lion,” and the 
Arab tribe Asad worshipped Mercury. 8 The power of Osiris 
was in the moon. 9 The same is the case with the Adonis, who 
was the moon’s horn and had his Adonis-gardens where they 
ate pork. 10 The Phoenician Onka was Moongoddess in so far 
as she was regarded as the Sunlight proceeding from the Sun- 
god and given over to the Moon, who pours it out upon the 
sublunar world. 11 The Egyptian religion knows this view. 
The Moon sucks up the light and the powers of the sun, 12 im¬ 
parts them to the world beneath Her, and therefore passed for 
male-female, since She receives and brings forth. 13 Therefore 
Adonis was Lunus, when, like Osiris, he was conjoined with 
luna. Hence the Orphic Athena was Hermes-Athena, and her 
priestess wore a beard. The Asiatic author of the Iliad fully 
understood Her masculine character. 

When God created the primal Adam, he created him of two genders.— 
Beresith Rah. c. 8. 

When God created the primal Adam he created him with two faces.—Bere¬ 
sith Rabba. c. 8. 

avdpoyvvov yhp %v r6re fikv ^v .—Plato, Symposium, 189 E. 

For the unit (or unity) indeed was androgyne then. 

In a notice of the Egyptian Book of the Dead 14 it is stated 
that a majority of the chapters are of Heliopolitan 15 origin, the 

1 Ammian, xxiii. chap, iii. 1, 2. 

2 Gen. xi. 32; xii. 4. 

3 Herodotus, II. 47, 48. 

4 Jos. contra Apion, I. p. 1054. 

5 Osiris. 

6 Cicero, K D. iii. 23. 

7 de Iside, 41, 43. 

8 Richardson’s Persian Arabic Diet. p. 492. Zadus is Sadus. Hence Sadi, or Seth- 
Hermes. 

9 de Iside, 43. Osiris represents the Moon.—Lauth, I. 45, 48. Iacab comes to 
Laban (Deus Lunus).—Gen. xxviii. 5. 

10 Isaiah, lxvi. 17. 

11 Deuteron. xxxiii. 14. 

12 proceeding from the sun. Deut. xxxiii. 14. The English version is wrong here. 

13 Movers, Phonizer, 648. 

14 Das Aegyptische Todtenbuch der xviii. bis xx. Dynastie von Edouard Naville. 
The “Academy,” Sept. 10, 1887, p. 172. 

15 at On (Anu) in the eastern Delta. 


208 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


next largest number being due to Hermopolis. One chapter 
only—the 171st—can with certainty be attributed to Thebes ; 
and this chapter is found but in two documents, namely, the 
Brocklehurst papyrus No. 2, and the twenty-first Boulak 
papyrus. This is the only chapter in the whole Book of the 
Dead which mentions the name of either Thebes or Amen, 
whence M. Naville concludes that it is a Theban interpolation 
and consequently of more recent date than the rest. If the 
God of Thebes and his temples are passed over in silence it is, 
therefore, undoubtedly because the composition of the book 
dated back to an epoch anterior to the worship of Amen. 

Osiris is described as descended, like Heraldes and Horus, 
to the place of the departed and his mummy exhibited there. 
But, like the Adon, Darkness could not control the Lord of 
Light, and he rises from the dead. The Hebrew scribe, that 
wrote Moses, comes as near this as he well could in Gen. xxxii. 
28 ; for he parodies the word Asarel (Herakles the Mighty) by 
two Hebrew words, sara El = Israel (God = El; isara = will 
prevail). Now as the Temple of the Great Pyramid was in the 
cemetery why may not both that and the King’s Chamber in the 
pyramid have been useful in the annual ceremony of the death 
of Osiris! Something of the kind went on to the Tamuz in 
the crypts of the Jerusalem Temple.—Ezechiel, viii. 

The Egyptian religion, said Emmanuel de Bouge, compre¬ 
hends a quantity of local cults. One idea prevails in it, that 
of a God One and primordial. 1 There is always and every¬ 
where one substance that exists by itself and an inaccessible 
God. Chabas considers that he was regarded as the only God 
existing before all things, representing the pure and abstract 
idea of the Divinity, of whom the innumerable Gods of Egypt 
were the attributes or aspects of this “ type unique.” For the 
enlightened adorer, ‘but the names and forms of one same 
Being,’ says Maspero. Polytheist in appearance it was essen¬ 
tially monotheist, says Pierret. 2 El, Bel, more complete, Beli- 
tan, the Old Bel, whom the Greeks name Kronos, the Eomans 
Saturn (and indeed the planet of this name) claims in Semit- 

1 The sacred pond recalls the dogma of the humid principle of the origin of the 
world.—P. Gener, La Mort et le Diable, p. 61; Lenormant, Essai de commentaire des 
fragments cosmog, de Berose, p. 222. The circle of waters shut in by the horizon seems 
to have suggested the image of a circular pond. 

2 Revue Egyptologique, II. 46. Iahoh’s symbol is devouring fire.—Movers, 319 
Deut. iv. 24. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


209 


ism before all Gods the first rank. 1 The Hebrew God is the 
same as the Highest God of all Semites for all branches of 
one great family of peoples worship originally, according to 
all historical analogy, one and the same Deity as Highest 
Being. In the oldest historical book of the Hebrews, how¬ 
ever, he is, as El, 2 but one Only God and El has this same 
meaning among all the other Semites. The Babylonian and 
Phoenician El is exactly like the Patriarchal El; and the El 
that has become the Planet Saturn necessarily belongs to a later 
period. In this second period the idea of the Most High Being 
is joined to the Highest Star which circles round 3 all the 
Star-courses and in his sphere is enthroned as the Highest 
Being of Light, 4 according to a probably older view. 5 It seems 
rather that the Old Bel, Belitan, must have originally been 
the Sun-god of the Semites, for, in the priestly doctrine, 
he was held to be Sol and Saturn also. 6 Iahoh and Saturn 
change places in the Flood story. Iahoh was held to be 
Saturn. 7 His day is Saturn-day, Saturday. The Arabian 
Dionysus-Iao is Iahoh. The Arabs adored Dionysus-Moloch- 
Iahoh, who is Abel, Bal, Bel. Bel is both Saturn and Sun 
(Movers, I. 185). Hence the prophets of Bal contended with 
those of Iahoh.—(1 Kings, xviii. 24; Movers, 319.) Merely a 
difference of party and name. Movers, I. 259, gives us Baal- 
Herakles as Son of Saturn. Baal-Saturn was the highest deity. 
—Movers, 319. Herakles is Bel Saturn.—Movers, 415 ff. 

Menephthah attacked the same nations over whom the 
Thothmes and Amenophis had established (!) their dominion. 
One of the sculptures at Karnak represents Horus engaged in 
warfare with the Shasu of Kanana. He pursues them towards 
a “ fortress of the land of Kanana,” as the inscription on the 
fortress-front states. Again he attacks the Bemanen or Ba- 

1 Movers, I. 254, 316. The idol of Saturn is mentioned in Movers, I. 290, 296. Sat¬ 
urn is El = Iahoh.—See Movers, 254, 299. 

2 Compare Gen. xiv. 20, 22; xvii. 1; xxxv. 11; xlviii. 3; Exodus, vi. 3. 

3 Umkreiset. 

4 Lichtwesen ; Orb of Light. 

5 Movers, 316. The way El came to be regarded as the Planet Saturn Movers at¬ 
tributes to the Chaldean astrologers at a later period ; he holds that this was not a view 
of great importance generally held in antiquity, and that the Planetary El was not at 
home in Syria and Phoenicia; stating that the Phoenician Religion had no astrological 
basis. But 2 Kings, xxiii. 5, 12, shows the worship of the planets in Jerusalem. 

6 Compare Movers, I. 185,186. 

» ibid. 293, 294, 297, 299. 

14 


210 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


moth, Butenu 1 or Lotanu. Their physiognomy, dress and 
armor are very different from those of the Shos; they have 
less pointed features, their heads covered with a cap which de¬ 
scends to protect the back of the neck and is fastened by a 
band, while they wear long garments, 2 with a girdle at the 
waist and a deep cape over the shoulders. The conqueror leads 
his prisoners in triumph. 3 The whole scene is bordered by 
the Nile, marked by the crocodiles with which it is filled. The 
date of the first year of Menephthah is repeated in the hiero¬ 
glyphics at this place ; a presumption that the scene of the 
events could not be very remote from the Egyptian frontiers. 
The whole finishes with the presentation of the prisoners 
(Lutennu) of the land of Luden (Ludia, Lud, in Arabian.—Eze¬ 
kiel, xxx. 5) to the Theban triad of Gods, Amen Ka, Maut and 
Chons. In the next scene the king attacks a fortress* which 
has been read Otsch or Atet (Kadesh), 4 situated in the land of 
Amar or Omar (the Amorite). The people who have been de¬ 
fending it resemble in features the Shos, 5 in costume the Be- 
manen. Taken or Token is their name, the Tahai mentioned 
in the Statistical Tablet at Karnak, and who are declared to 
belong to the Botenu or Ludenu. 6 The Tahai of Tahath are 
mentioned in Numbers, xxxiii. 26, 27. 

The Sketo or Sketin are the subject of another of the great 
historical pictures of the wars of Menephthah 7 with the Sjnians 
and Arabs. The land of Saua 8 is Asau (Esau) in Mt. Seir, and 
Cherubu is Mt. Choreb; Bamses II. was advancing on Satuma 

1 Aradenu. R and L are the same letters in Egyptian. T represents d. Although 
Maspero, 356, reads the ‘ hand ’ D. 

2 Like the Syrians, Jews, and Peleti or Philistians. 

3 In a similar way the captive Shos are led in triumph and three of their heads are 
fixed on the back of the royal chariot. 

4 Birch in Roy. Soc. Lit. 2nd Series, vol. 2, p. 335. Chabas reads the 1st hieroglyph 
Kt.—Chabas, papyrus magique, p. 8, Tableau phonetique I. The words Ati and 
Atesh must therefore be read Katti and Kadesh. They are names belonging from Che- 
bron to Arad and Kadesh in Negeb (the South). Ramses here met the Sosim and 
Amou and the Chorim in their Mt. Seir as far as the plain of Pharan by the desert.— 
Gen, xiv. 5, 6. 

5 Sosim. Sosu, Zoozim (?), Shasu. 

6 Kenrick, vol. 2, p. 219. 

7 ibid. 219. 

8 Birch, Statist. Tablet, p. 21. Sauah and Saue.—Gen. xiv. 5, 17. Mr. Birch has 
read Ato, Atet, and Atesh, where, according to Chabas, Khati, Khatet, and Khadesli 
should have been written. Kt = kat.—Chabas, Pap. mag. 8; = k.—Lauth, Aegypt. 
Chronology, p. 68. 


THE AS ARIA NS IN EGYPT. 


211 


(Sodom) in the land Atuma or Edom. It is not likely that a 
powerful warrior, at the head of, say, a few thousand men or 
so, should get beyond the fenced cities of Palestine. He would 
have left all Arabia in his rear, to ruin him. 

Then went Amalak and fought with Isarel 1 in Raphidim.—Exodus, xvii. 8. 

And Tliaiman brought forth Amalek.—Genesis, xxxvi. 12. 

The great necessity for an army moving from the Nile to Pal¬ 
estine has always been a supply of water, for marching in a 
hot 2 country without water is an impossibility. Ramses II., 
so far as is known, never took Khebron nor Iebus, but was 
felt at Makkeda, Libnah, Lachish, in the river district, and 
along the sea shore ; and his shields were inscribed on the 
rocks just above Akka. There were some strong cities to be 
captured by the seaside ; but, if he could dispose of these, 
the shore route would seem to have been the most likely one 
by all odds for him to have taken. In the first place he would 
be relieved of the harassing attacks of the Bedouins, he would 
avoid the woods of the Remanen, the Kheta king , although 
sometimes beaten, was never entirely subdued , the Besor and 
Sorek (the Nahrena, the river country) would have supplied 
his troops with water, the cultivated farms of the Kananites 
could have provided them with food ; and, above all, his car- 
touches (in spite of modern misconceptions in taking Hittite 
(Chatti) columns for those of Ramses II.) have never been 
found north of the Nahr el Kelb. Consequently all that has 
been said about his exploits along the Orontes, at Aradus out 
at sea, at Hamath, in Asia Minor, Armenia, or on the Eu¬ 
phrates at Karchemish has the aspect of modern mistake or 
oriental exaggeration. If it was possible for Ramses II..to 
mark his conquests by columns and inscriptions we should 
have found some of his cartouches far north of Acre. It is a 
question if the successes of Seti I. on the coast would have 
encouraged an Egyptian army to force the threatening defiles 
of the snow white Lebanon. As long as the army followed 
the sea-coast it was supported by a fleet. In Zedekiah’s time, 
too, Apries took Gaza and Sidon, following the sea-coast. 

The Karukamasa were in thelshmaelite country near enough 

1 Compare Seir and Oseiris with Isarel, Israel, Asara. 

2 iqadatha — burning. Nura iqadatha = fire burning.—Daniel, iii. 20. Akhad 
means one, and the sun. qd, to burn. Kades, qades.—Numb. xiii. 26. 


212 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


to attack Kadesh. There is a Kadesh to the south of Judea (in 
the Negeb) within the reach of an Egyptian army. Ezekiel 
xlviii. 28, speaks of ‘ the waters 1 of strife at Kadesh.’ There is 
an Arad near to it, there was a Khaleb (Caleb’s land) lying 
south and southwest of Hebron (Khebron). Now these are, 
with the exception of a word read by the younger De Rouge 
as Anrata and Aranta (and an unlucky phrase pi-ta-Sa = the 
land of Sa or Esau) about all with which to settle the line of 
march of Ramses II.; for, as he did not cut his cartouche at all 
on the Nahr el Kelb but on a rock projecting into the sea it is 
not necessary to prove an alibi for Ramses II. His fleet may 
have reached the spot, or the cartouche may have been cut in 
some other way. The line of march of an Egyptian army not 
closely following the sea-shore would have carried it to Beer 
Saba or Sabatun, next after that to Kadesh, next to Arad, then 
north to Caleb’s land in front of Hebron. Sankara can perhaps 
be identified with Asan or Kar. Kerek and the Massa seem 
to be all that is left of Karukamasha, Nahren means the river 
region from the vale of Gerar across the Besor and Sorek, fol¬ 
lowing the latter to its head waters, to Libnah and Lachish. 
The probability is that, when Ramses II. reached the two last 
named cities, he began to think of the Ishmaelite archers in his 
rear and the mountains covered with snow in plain sight, and 
the Kheta king’s army behind him, or on his flank. The Ara¬ 
bian tribes could have reached him on camels and their Arab 
steeds, and their archers were to be dreaded. For these reasons, 
the Southern Kadesh would seem to have been the scene of 
strife between the Kheta king of Khebron (Hebron), the Arad 
mentioned to have not been the island of the Mediterranean 
far to the north, the Khalibu not to have been Aleppo but 
Caleb’s land, the Aranta not the Orontes but some Aranen near 
the Arnon, or further south, which cannot now be placed, Sab¬ 
atun to have been one of the two places of similar name not 
far from the Kadesh in the South, and Nahren not to be the 
Nahraina of Mesopotamia, but the less noted “ river land ” in 
the rear of the Gerar district, whose ports were Gaza and Asca- 
lon. When in the face of oriental exaggeration we have to 
choose between two positions, one in which an army is essenti- 

1 The mountains of Edom, in the time of Ramses II., may have afforded a supply 
of water for the protection of Kadesh in the Negeb. Four feet of snow at Jerusalem 
fell within a few years. 


THE AS ART ANS IN EGYPT. 


213 


ally cut off from its base, and another which leaves the same 
army with its communications practically preserved or suffi¬ 
ciently near home to get back somehow, it is safer to decide for 
the latter. It is not to be supposed that Ramses II. would 
march northwards 1 leaving in his rear the Arkite (Reka), the 
Khatti (Heth, Hittites), Amorites, Kadesh, the Asenite, Arad, 
the Arouka, Caleb, Hebron, Iebus (former Jerusalem), Philistia, 
Israel, Galilee, the forts near Lake Genesareth, besides Beirut, 
Tyre and Sidon ; the Aranta or Narata, which the Egyptian 
letters seem to read, may be perhaps explained by Arinatli, 
Arinata, Rhinocolura, which Ramses II. left far in his rear be¬ 
fore he approached Sabatun (Sebat) and the Southern Kadesh , 
or by the river Aran (the Arnon) in Moab east of the middle of 
the Dead Sea. This could be reached from the Sinaite Penin¬ 
sula, where Phoenicians, at all events Egyptians, are said to 
have worked copper mines. 

Mr. Birch and other distinguished Egyptologists have for 
many years maintained in print that Thothmes III., Seti I., 
and Ramses II. marched to the Euphrates. They took ‘ Rema- 
nen * to mean Armenia, whereas Ram means ‘ high,’ and Rama- 
nen “ Highlanders,” or people living around the Highplaces. 
The Ruten or Rotennu (Lotan or Aradenu) they never dreamed 
of deriving from Arad in the extreme south of the tribe of Ju¬ 
dah or from Lotan. The name of Caleb, when it was chiselled 
into the stones of Karnak they read Aleppo, and the Taliai 
(or Tachai) down in the Desert they mistook for the Dahae 
‘ in the sides of the North ’ in defiance of the Book of Num¬ 
bers, xxxiii. 27. Karukamasha (Karekamasha), notwithstand¬ 
ing that the names Karek, Massah, Kharu and Khoreb might 
have given them a hint, they persisted in reading Karchemish, 
Senker (Saengara, Sankara) they fancied to be Shinar (Senar), 
and the word Nahren which means the ‘ river district ’ of the 
streams Besor and Sorek, a little east of Askalon, they decided 
to be the Mesopotamian Nahraina. The Egyptologists still 
up to a recent period held these opinions. In the following 
table we will set forth some of the coincidences of names, in 


1 Egypt attacked Kharkamus (Carchemish) on the Euphrates in the seventh century 
B.C. —Esdras, A.i. 23-25. But that was over 4 or 6 centuries later. As to Sankara, 
we have the towns Asan and Kar ; and Asan was probably in the land of the Philistian 
Karu, a people frequently named by the Egyptians. Akaron (Accaron, Ekron) may 
have supplied the Egyptians with the name Karu. 


214 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


this regard, which we have arrived at, and will suggest some¬ 
times different localities for the reader to select from. 


Egyptian. Hebrew. 


Ruten (Luten, Lutennu), Rotennu 

(Palmer, I. 225). 

Chalibu. 

Aachabaara ) 

Kheburu ) 

Upper Ruten. 

Tunep . 

Kharu. 

Kheta, Kbita. 

Zalii. 

Askaluna. 

Wawa. 

Sabatun. 

Tar, or Tara. 

Narata(See tbe city Aruana.—Records 
of tbe past, II. p. 27, line 37) . . 

Kesli Kesli (See 1 Samuel, xxvii. 8 ; 

1 Kings, ix. 16). 

Kates (Kades). 

Karkisa. 

Sankara 2 . 


Arad 1 or Lud in Arabia. Lot, Lotan. 
Tbe Caleb district. 

Gliebers of Kliebron, Hebron. 

) Lotan. Mountaineers of tbe Dead Sea, 
1 tbe Balir Lut. 

Adana, Danali, or Idna. 

AkarGn, Ekron, to Mt. Klioreb. 
Hebronite Kliatti, Katti. 

Azali.—Jer. xxv. 20. Gaza. 

Askalon. 

Oa di Gaza. Auim. 

Seba, Sebat; or Beer-Sbeba. 
j'Adar (Josli. xv. 21). Eter, Etber. 

| Atarotli.—Numb, xxxii. 34. 

I Atarim.—Numb. xxi. 1-3. 

Anar, Aner; Narata. 

\ Gesliur.—Josliua, xiii. 2. Gezr. Gez- 
( rites. Mt. Kasius ? 

Kadesb. 

Kirberez . . vel Cliarakmoba. 

Kiriatli Sanab (Debir). Betli Kar. 
See Asan in tbe land of tbe Karu. 
—Josliua, xix. 7. 


1 Joshua, xii. 14. Arad 20 miles from Khebron (Hebron, the Kheburu) in the 
vicinity of the desert of Kades.—See Numbers, xxi. 1-3. Edward Hull, Mt. Seir, p. 
60, 206, finds Jebel Aradeh in southeastern Sinai near the northwestern part of the 
Gulf of Akaba, and southwest from Azin Gabar (Ezion Geber). The name Arad is in 
1 Chronicles, viii. 15. 

Lud ; Ludia was a town of Arabia Petrae.—Ezekiel, xxx. 5 ; Jervis, Genesis, 366. 
Lod, a city, and its villages are mentioned. 1 Chron. viii. 12. Septuagint. Awrar. 
—ibid. i. 38. t 

2 We find Asan.—1 Chronicles, iv. 32 ; vi. 59. Asan and Beth Kar in Joshua, xv. 
43, 43; 1 Sam., vii. 11. San. —1 Sam., vii. 12. 

In the ‘Nahrena’ of the rivers Besor and Sorek Joshua, xv. has Asanah, Sansanah ; 
and a little further to the east Kiriath-Sanah (otherwise called Debir not remote 

from the district of Hebron, on the way to it, for an Egyptian force. Joshua, xv. S3, 
43, 43, mentions three cities named Asan (Ashan) while Jenks’s Maps, iv. vi. pp. 33, 
43, mention an Ashan (Asan or Ashanah) and Beth Kar in the same Nahren district 
near the River Besor, and a Kerioth (Joshua, xv. 25) near the Desert of San (or Sin) a 
little west of it, between Beer Saba and Karkaa. Just west of Jerusalem is San, or 


















THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


215 


Egyptian. 


Hebrew. 


Akarith 
Aupa 
Har incola 

Masah . 


Kerioth, in the Negeb. 

Iopa, Joppa. 

Rhinocolura. 

Massah 1 (1 Chron. 1. 30 and 1 Chron. 
ix. 42, Septuagint). Wetzstein, p. 
88 . 


{ The people near the River Keraki.— 

Karukamasha. \ Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 8 ; Ezekiel, 

| xlvii. 19. We find Kerekha in 
(_ Cham.—Gen. xiv. 5. 

Pelasta, Pulista.Peleti, Philitis, Philistians. 

Arhena.Arcliites. 

Katuata.Kattatli.—Joshua, xix. 15. 

Charebu.Khareb, Choreb 2 Horeb. 

Aranata, Anrata.5 Ar;naUl in PMlistia : or Auran 

( Jordan. Or see Ranath ? 

Aruana (Araana.—Records of the Past, f Rana, in lat. 31° 40'. 

II. p. 27, line 37).( Ranath. 

Tarteni.Ataratli; Atarateni ? 


Hasan (1 Sam. vii. 12), not far south of Misphah. 1 Chronicles, iv. 40-43, states that 
in the Old Time people from Kham formerly lived there ! So Joshua, xv. 47 ; Gen. x. 
14, 20. Now the Egyptologists report this inscription : 

Then His Majesty came to the city (?) of Ninu (Khanani) on his return. The H. 
M. set up his tablet in Nahrena to enlarge the frontiers of Kami (Egypt). 

Of course the Egyptians lived at Asan Beth Ivar as early as Ramses II., and again 
in the time of the earliest Ptolemys. 1 Chronicles, iv. 40 agrees with the erection 
in Canaan of his Egyptian Majesty’s tablet. 

1 Deuteron. ix. 22; see Golenischeff in Zeitschr. fur Agypt. Sprache, 1882, p. 116. 
Tafel VI. No. 270 ; Dunlap, Sod, I. 202,294; Wetzstein, p. 88. The Massam.—1 Chron. 
i. 25. Sept. 

2 Justin Martyr, pp. 38, 70. Exodus, xvii. 7, locates Masah towards Choreb (Ho¬ 
reb). Gen. xxxvii. 25, 28, 36, identifies the Midianites with the Ishmaelites; and thus 
we have Masah, Midian, the River Kerahy (Kerach) all near the Ghor. The Wady 
Kerahy runs from the Ghor eastward. The names Kerahy or Karak and Masa (joined 
together) would form the name Karukamasha, as applied to the Massah who lived on the 
R. Kerahy. Genesis, xxxvi. 16, puts Duke Qarech among the Beni Esau in the land of 
the Amu (the mixed peoples of Arabia). Soar/t is mentioned with Midian in Arabia. 
—Gen. xxv. 2. Saue was by the Dead Sea. Soa.—Gen. xiv. 17. Asah is the Isis or 
Uesta of Sa. An inscription of Ramses III. says : ‘ I made destruction of the Sa’ar 
of the tribes of the Shasu ; ’ where Sa’ar would correspond with the Hebrew Seir and 
the Shasu with the Bedawin of Aduma.—R. F. Burton, Gold Mines of Midian, p. 178. 
Exodus, xv. 15, mentions the Dukes of Edom (Esaou), the mighty of Moab and the 
Kanani (Phoenicians) together. 

The position of Kerak was towards the Dead Sea, east of it.—Hull, Mt. Seir, 111, 
116, 126. Wetzstein puts Massah to the east of it.—Wetzstein, 88. Dr. Robinson 
places Kerak east of the Dead Sea. The Keraku were then alongside the Zuzim in 
Chaman (the Zuz and Sos), the Aimirn, and Esau (Sa, Saue). Here is no question of 
Gargamis (Carchemish). Pharaoh Naku did not reach the Euphrates until B.C. 608, 
nearly eight centuries after the time of Ramses the Great.—2 Chron. xxxv. 20. 














216 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Egyptian. Hebrew. 

Pidasa (pi-ta Sa).Sa, So, Saue, Soach.—Genesis, xxv. 2. 

Tacliennu.Taclien.—1 Chronicles, iv. 32. 

Sharhana.Sliaruchen. 

^perhaps el Kara ? East of Askalon ? 

Sankara.^ in the watered district of the 

l Nahrena. BethKar! 

f Parasim.—Gen: xv. 20. The Peri- 

Purnsata.^ zites ? “ How hast thou broken 

^ forth ” in war. 

Kadi, Katti.Kheta, Khatti, ’Hetli. 

f San.—1 Sam. vii. 12-14. This was a 
Saukara (This name seems to corre- | town of the Karu in Philistia . 

spond to the two names San and-j and wa3 „ ot in Bab ,.i onia , as 

^ aru ^.i some have supposed. 


One day that Ramses II. had advanced a little to the south 
of Sabatun, 1 two Shasu 2 3 came to tell him “ Our brethren who 
are the chiefs of the tribes joined together with the poor 
chief of Klieta sent us to tell his Majesty: We wish to serve 
the Pharaoh, etc. We quit the poor chief of Klieta; he is in 
the country of Khalep, to the north of the city of Tounep.”— 
Maspero, Hist. Anc. 3d ed. p. 220. Observe the words Caleb 
(Khalep), Tounep (Donep, or Dunep, Danali), then the three 
ominous names to the south of Caleb's land? Saba (Sabat, Sa¬ 
batun, Bar Seba), Kadesh, and Arad, towns right in the Pha¬ 
raoh’s path if he marched from Sinai or from Sharulien. If to 
this the reply should be made * we have so read in the hiero¬ 
glyphs,’ the words of A. Erman (in his Commentary on the In- 


1 Mentioned in the texts of the Vicomte J. de Rouge, Revue egyptologique, Troi- 
si>me Annee, p. 158. The Egyptian inscriptions mention Auba (Ioppa), Satuma 
(Sadem, Sodom), the fortress of the Khiru[bu] (Caleb; or Khoreb), Tubachi (Tap- 
puah, or the land of Tob, east of the Jordan), the bow-bearing Shasu (the Amalekites 
and the other Arabs), and the land Saua (Asau, Esau), Tamneh (Timnath) ; Chana- 
ruta (Chinneroth) and Baita Sha [?*.] are merely mentioned as ‘ fortresses which are 
above them as you go to the land Tachisa.’ The Gods of the Khita are Sout or Sutech 
(Set), Baal and Astarta. At last we come to the . . . neniu, which looks a good 
deal like the ending of the word Kananiou (people of Canaan). When, however, ‘ the 
great chief of the Khita sends to the king of Khatesh (Kadesh) saying : Let us com¬ 
bine against Kam,’ it becomes plain that the locality is south in Esau or Edom.—See 
Birch, Observations on Statist. Table of Karnak, 21, 22, 29. Mr. Birch read the sign 
for 1 kat’ an A, consequently he got Atet instead of Katesh. When Thothmes occu¬ 
pied Tounep, Khalep and Arad, and besieged Kadesh (Maspero, 204) it is reasonable to 
infer that we have the seat of war among the Beni Heth, the Khati. 

2 Bedouins. Shepherds. 

3 Caleb’s land.—Joshua, xv. 13-15. 









THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


217 


scription of Una,—Lepsius’s Zeitschrift, 1882, p. 1), ‘ Gewiss 
sind wir dnrch die langjahrige Arbeit der Agyptologen, vor 
Allem durch Brugsch’s unermudliches Wirken lieute im 
Stande, den Sinn eines leichten Textes mit annahernder 
Siclierheit anzugeben, nnd im Grossen und Ganzen werden 
unsere Ubersetzungen meist das Richtige treffen. Aber das 
heisst niclit einen Text verstehen, wenigstens in der Wissen- 
scliaft niclit. Was wiirde man von einem klassisclien Pliilo- 
logen denken, der den Cicero ilbersetzte und doch keine Ah- 
nung davon hatte, warum bald Conjunctiv bald Indicativ, bald 
Perfectum bald Imperfectum stelit, ja der sich dieser Unkenn- 
tniss kaum bewusst ware ? Und wer vermag zu leugnen, 
dass wir fur die Sprache des alten und des mittleren Reiches 
noch auf diesem naiven Standpunkt stehen ? ” may perhaps 
apply; or these : “ mein Text, der freilich noch an manclien 
Stellen zweifelhaft bleibt.”—A. Erman, p. 2. At all events, 
oriental priests have often lied, and may have told a few 
stretchers in this case. 

When Joshua is said to have found so many kings in the 
Mountains of Judah, it is a fair question to what nations they 
belonged. They were, first, Kananiia (Cananites) ; next they 
were people of Tunep, or Danah ; third, they were Amorites 
and the Beni Kheth (Heth ! ) or Khatti; for 2 Kings, vii. 6, 
says: 

The Melek of Isarel has hired against us the meleks of the Khatti and the 
kings of Misraim to come upon us.— 2 Kings, vii. 6. 

Thy father Amorite, thy mother a Khatti (Hethite of Hebron).—Ezekiel, 
xvi. 3. 

For the King of Khita had come with all the kings of the other peoples, 
with horses and riders which he brought with him in great numbers, and stood 
there ready in an ambush behind the town of Kadesh. 1 2 —Egyptian Inscription. 3 

Ezekiel, xvi. 3, locating Jerusalem in Canaan, with the Amor¬ 
ites and Kheth (Hebron), entirely excludes Carchemis from 
being the Katti here meant. From Kadesh onwards the land 
of the Kheta lay before the Egyptians— 4 the land of Kadesh 
in the country of the Amorites.” 4 What we call Dannah or 

1 Genesis, xxiii. 2, 3, 10. 

2 This Kadesh was in the Negeb (in the South), not on the Orontes.—Gen. xiv. 7; 
xx. 1. 

3 Brugsch, ii. 50. 

4 ibid., ii. 15. 


218 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Adana, 1 to tlie north of Kadesh, seems to have been the Tunep 
of the Egyptian inscription. Comparing the march of Seti I. 
from a fort in the land Zalu in the Tanaitic nome to Kanana 
(Canaan), we find him on the c road of the Philistines,’ going 
past Mt. Kasius to the land Zahi (Azahi, Gaza), then to Ri- 
batha (Rechoboth 2 ) and Bar Seba, 3 which brings him to that 
point (Sabatun) which his son, Ramses II., afterward reached 
in the campaign, whose topography we are now trying to as¬ 
certain. The story of the Shasu spies that the Khetlia King 
was camped in Caleb (Khalebu), to the north of Adana (or 
Idna), that is, “ to the north of Tunep,” may, topographically 
regarded, have had no intrinsic improbability in it. It is 
worthy of mention, as a remarkable coincidence, that both 
Ramses II., when he gets to Sabatun, and Rebecca Iscliak, 
when she reaches Bar Sabat, were adverse to the Khetlia. 4 
Old Ischak sets down the Kheta as Kananites (Lowlanders), 
and packs off the tricky Iauqab at once to the great plain of 
Nahraina in Mesopotamia (padan aram), the very district 
where Birch, Hincks, Brugsch, and Rawlinson long ago de¬ 
cided to send Ramses II. Whether the Scribes of Israel took 
a leaf out of the Egyptian Book of Kings or not need not be 
said, since we have already found, in western Judea, a veritable 
Nahraina (Nahren). But it is remarkable that Ischak should 
have preferred one of the daughters of the Moon-god Laban 
for his son’s bride, unless some recollection of the Moon-god 
worship in Charran and Aur of the Cliasdim was still cher¬ 
ished in a family whose progenitor presumably knew some¬ 
thing concerning the Mysteries of Iaukabel and Kubele, of 
Adonis and Asarah. There is no doubt that the priests took. 


1 Tanep, Tunep, would seem to have been the transfiguration of the name Danah 
in Egypt. 

2 Southwest of Beersheba.—Brugsch, ii. 12, 14. 

3 Gen. xxvi. 22, 23. In the first year of King Seti the report came that the sheiks 
of the Shasu had assembled and made a stand in the land of Khal (Caleb). Brugsch 
speaks of “the eastern boundary of the land of the Shasu, marked by the hill-fortress 
of Canaan, near which a stream seems to have fallen into a lake,” and says that in the 
great Harris papyrus in the time of Ramessu III., Kanaan is called a fortress of the 
land of Zahi. Did this land then extend as far as the shores of the Dead Sea ?— 
Brugsch, ii. 13. It probably did, for one finds the town Adana upon a modern map, 
with the ancient name probably still adhering to the spot. 

4 Gen. xxvi. 22, 23 ; xxvii. 46. Chat, Heth, Khita, Kheth. Mareb, in Arabia, Kha- 
leb, Khoreb (Horeb), Tacheba and Tunep illustrate the ending eb. So do Achsaph, 
Achzib, Mispah. 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


219 


part in these Mysteries. The abel misraim (Mourning of 
Egypt) was for Osiris; but Genesis, 1. 3, 11, states that the 
Egyptians mourned Iaukab (Kab, Turn, Osiris) with an abel 
misraim. What makes this seem rather strange is that, ac¬ 
cording to Josephus, the Hebrews are the Hyksos, whom the 
Egyptians mortally hated and drove out of Egypt, following 
them 1 to the territory of the Beni Kheth (Heth), at a later pe¬ 
riod, under Bhamses II. The name of the Kheta has been 
preserved in the names Gath, Kheth (Heth) Katti and Gad 
(Achad, 2 —so that these Shepherds 3 formed a line from Gath 
to Libnah, Makedah, Hebron (Kheth) and down to Arad and 
Kadesh; there was another lower line across the country from 
Azahi (Gaza) to Kadesh and to Moab, although the frontier of 
Goshen 4 was a line running from the bottom of the Dead Sea^ 
at Zoar west to about Gaza. The Shasu and Amu were around 
Kadesh and Sabat, and the Aimin were in Saua (So), and the 
Sosim (Zouzim) in Cham 5 or Chaman (Haman, in Gad). So 
that the Campaign of Kamses II. was, in part, fought among the 
Meleks of the Shasu (Sos), in fact, t among the Amalekites 
around Arad and Kadesh in Negeb. Amalak abode in Negeb, 
the Khatti and the Ebusi 6 and the Amari 7 dwelling in the 
highlands; and the Kanani, settled on the Sea and by the 
shore of the Iardan. 8 

From the Euphrates to the land Chatti (the West-land).—Rammanirar. 

“ The Kanani persisted in living in this land ” 10 of Kanaan. 
So did the Amorites. It needed explanation, why there were 

1 The Shasu or Sos. 

2 One, the Sun kadem : compare the name Iachado (Ichdo).—1 Chronicles, v. 14. 

3 1 Sam. xvii. 15, 28. 

4 See Jenks, Bible Atlas, Map no. iii. Just south of that line it locates Goshen. 
The Jews, later, claimed their line to be from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Palastao 
(Philistians).—Exodus, xxiii. 31. Joshua, i. 4, calls the country the land of the Kha- 
tim. See 1 Kings, x. 29; 2 Kings, vii. 0 ; 2 Chron. i. 17. Compare the name Achates. 

6 We have seen, in another place, that the Egyptians at some time held a part of 
Kanaan. See, also, Gen. x. 6; 1 Chron. iv. 40, 41. 

6 Iebusites. 

7 Amorites.—Ezekiel, xvi. 3. 

8 Numbers, xiii. 29. If Caleb (Khilibu, Chirubu or Khalebu) was given Hebron 
(Chebron) by Joshua (xiv. 13-15), we have the three names in succession, Kiriath 
Arba, Chebron, Cherubu or Calubu; but Hebron survived. 

9 b.c. 812-783. — E. Schrader, Keilins. u. d. A. T. 213,215; see 1 Moses, x. 6. 
The sign which Mr. Birch read A, was read by Chabas Kt, and by Lauth K. The 
word which Birch read Ati is Kat, or Katti, Khet, Kheth, ’Heth. 

10 Joshua, xvii. 12 ; Judges, i. 29. 


220 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Canaanites in the land, in spite of the Jews. The scribe saw 
the contradiction between claims and facts. 


Then goes up Haram, rex of Gazer, to the aid of Lachish.—Joshua, x. 33. 
Thence the border descends to the sea to the boundary of the Iaphaleti, 1 to the 
border of Beth Kliaron 2 inferior, and to Gazer.—Joshua, xvi. 3. Iausha struck 
them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and all the land Gesen up to Gabaon.— 
Joshua, x. 41. 

The whole desert region between Palestine and Egypt was 
once far more productive than now and could support a con¬ 
siderable population. Khafu was represented as a warrior in 
Wady Magharah, Sahura (Sephres) fought theMentu (Hyksos) 
in the Sinaitic peninsula, as did Ea-n-user, and now we find 
Thothmes III. up at Gaza, Beer Sheba, Kadesh, and fighting 
the Khati, the friends of Abrahm, at Khebron (Hebron). As 
long as they had something to boast of, the Egyptians may 
not have been particular to get the exact names of their foes 
put down in hieroglyphs. 

As in the case of the hostility of Good and Evil, or the 
Great Archangel Israel 3 versus Satan, so we have strained re¬ 
lations between the Ishmaelites (as Children of Typhon, 
Samael) and the settled population of Israel. So with Iaqab 
and Asau (the Ismaelites of Saue.—Gen. xiv. 5, 7, 17). The 
scribe assumes that Saue, down in the Arab country to the 
South, had an Ancestor, a Founder of the place or tribe, and 
names him Asau Btfy, Mars-Typhon.—Exodus, xvii. 8,16; Gen. 
xxv. 2„ 23. Here are “two peoples struggling” like the “ So- 
sim in Kerne ” against the Egyptians.—Gen. xiv. 5. Genesis, 
xxv. 2, mentions a people Su cich, or Sua, with the Midianites, 
Teman, and other Arabs. As tribes sometimes had the same 


1 Compare the * Shepherd Philitios ’ in Herodotus. Iaphaleti contains Phaleti, 
Philiti. So that Philitian (Philistian) Shepherd kings built Gizeh ! 

2 Is Beth-Horon the Garu, whence Thothmes proceeded in his first expedition into 
Syria ? Ramses II. is in Zahi (Azah, Gaza, Philistia) on his second, Syrian, campaign. 
The attack on Aruth (Arad) was followed by the march of Thothmes III. through all 
the land Zahi. The tribute of the Ruten contained among other things silver vases 
with Baal’s head on them. They sent also a Syrian bear. With Ruten, compare 
Ruda, the Arab name of a deity. 

3 The Achbar-Angel (Efcodus, vi. 3; Judges, xiii. 20, 22) is the Angel-Lord, the 
Archangel Israel (who sees El).—Isaiah, lxiii. 9 ; Gen. xxii. 11, 12 ; xlviii. 16 ; Exodus, 
iii. 2, 4, 14. This Acbar-Angel is the patriarch Iaqab (—Gen. xxxii. 28) the Arch¬ 
angel Cabir, the Good Principle (Asari) opposed to Samael-Asau. The change was 
from A1 Sadi to A1 Alahi Israel.—Exodus, vi. 3 ; Gen. xxxiii. 20 


THE ASARIANS IN EGYPT. 


221 


name as their Sun (Saturn-Kronos), are we to assume that the 
Egyptian deity Shu was the god of the Shuah ? We only 
know that the Shua are mentioned in the same chapter with 
the Ishmaelites (Amalekites).—Gen. xxv. 13, 16, 18, 22, 23, 25; 
xxxvi. 11, 12. These were names of the Beni Asau.—Gen. xxxvi. 
11, 15. See Movers, I. 344, 396 ff., 433 f. Uso (or Esau) was 
the Fire-God.—Movers, I. 344, 345. The scribe interweaves 
the myth with the story of Esau (i.e. Saue). Compare As= 
Fire in Hebrew. Nork connects Asu with the Chaldean Zoui 
(Saui), arrow. When Typhon was represented in Egypt as the 
Devilish-Adversary of Asari (Osiris) and Usous in Phoenicia 
as the pillar of Evil, what was to hinder the Hebrew scribe 
from likening the Amalekite (Esau) to the Bed Demon (Mars) 
that was (assumed to be) the founder of Saue ? Saturn was 
also considered, like Typhon, the Adversary.—Dunlap, Sod, I. 
161, 199 ; Hesiod, Theog. 138. The Egyptian Aso (Queen Aso) 
was one of Typhon’s aids in his attack upon Osiris. Soir-Esau 
is alternately Mars and Saturn, Esau being the God of Dark¬ 
ness and Destruction, like Typhon.—Nork, Hebr.-Chald.-Bab- 
bin.-Worterbuch, p. 472 ; Genesis, xxxii. 26, 28. As Hupsou- 
ranios (Saturn), Israel contends with the God of Darkness, and 
conquers! As Light shines in Darkness.—John, i. 5. Saturn 
is the Phoenician mythic Herakles who wrestled with Typhon- 
Antaeus,—and under Esau Samael (the Devil) is understood. 1 
—Movers, I. 396, 397, 433. Since the Ebionites (like Job, ii. 1) 
held that from one source (from a corporeal mixture, outside) 
not from the best change (rponr]) of the God the Adversary was 
come into existence, the Devil comes from the worst side (or 
phase) of the God.-—Gerhard Uhlhorn, Horn, und Kecogn. p. 185; 
Clem. Horn. xx. 8. Qinah in Edom (Josh. xv. 22). Qin, Cain. 2 

Jacob is connected with irach (Bachel) the moon, just as 
Archal (Herakles in Phoenicia) is with Osiris. Osiris was 
represented in human form (—De Iside, 51); so was the Life- 

1 Auch sonst wird Esau haufig fur Samael erklart: Megilla Amykla fol. 165 ; Ial- 
kut Rubeni fol. 33, 62; Eisenmenger Entdektes Judenthum, I. 624 f., 647 ff. 825 ff.— 
Movers, I. 397. The Devil is connected with Matter (mixture), consequently with Eua 
the Mother and Matter of Life.—G. Uhlhorn, Horn, und Rec., 185; Horn. xx. 8; 
Genesis, iii. Hence Asu might be connected with ‘ As ’ (fire, life) as a spiritual being, 
which Eua (Eve) was in Jordan, Transjordan, Egyptian and Sabian mythology. Eua 
was named Issa, Aisah ; and Isis came out from Phoenicia. The Ebionites considered 
that the Devil sprung from a source external to the God. So the Persians and Hebrews 
may not have thought.—See Gen. xxxii. 24,26, 28. 

2 Qain, from Qinah, a town. 


222 


THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Father, Dionysus Iach-Ab, Father Iacchos. In Hebrew, kab 
means to die, to perish, to become extinct. Kebo means to de¬ 
scend to Hades. Israel (a name of Saturn “ goes down ” in that 
direction.—Gen. 1. 2, 6, 7, 11. Keb is Saturn. Kronos was 
mourned as the Winter Sun.—De Iside, 32. Keb is Saturn- 
Moloch-Kronos.—Compare Brugsch, Zeitschr. f. Agyptische 
Sprache, 1881, p. 5; Sarcophagus of Merenra, Inscription. 
What was easier than to change Ai Kab into Iacob ? The tomb 
of Bel (Saturn) was shown. Night-shining Dionysus (in bull’s 
form) entered with dusky feet the Houses of Kadmus, bran¬ 
dishing the Kronian Whip of Pan.—Nonnus, xlv. 280. “ The 

Apis bull was the well-formed living image of the soul of 
Osiris.” Apis was consecrated to the moon.—Ammian, xxii. 
14. Osiris entered the moon at the beginning of Spring. The 
lunar year was naturally extremely sacred for religious rea¬ 
sons, since it must have been entirely interwoven with the rites 
of Osiris.—Knotel, System, p. 64. Kadmus, Iacchos, and Pan 
(under earth) are connected as Chthonian deities.—See Ger¬ 
hard, Greek Mythol. I. pp. 101, 120, 121, 261, 273, 470. Ai Keb, 
Alas Saturn. Ai Kupt would be read Egypt. Why not Ai 
Kuphu, 1 the mourning for Kub. 

The Phoenicians and Hebrews euhemerised their Gods into 
patriarchs. Kronos offers up his Onlybegotten Son to Father 
Ouranos, on the occasion of a pestilence and destruction (of 
life) just as Abrahm prepared to deal with fkchaq, or as the 
king of Moab did actually. Another son, Muth, dying, Saturn 
deifies ; but Phoenicians call him Thanatos and Plouton. When 
then, Job, xix. 27, knows that his Bedeemer lives 2 and at the 
£ Acheron ’ shall rise over the dust, he meant that Hermes who 
was in Hades, and appeared in human shape.—See the Hebrew 
Text of Job for the Hebrew word ■ Acheron.’ 

The Jewish Sacred Book$ had been destroyed by Antiochus 
Epiphanes, according to Josephus, Ant. xii. 5, 4. When the 
priests in Egypt were in doubt as to who built Thebes, how 
should they know Menes (Men = Lunus) as the Maker of the 
dyke and creator of the space on which Herodotos states that 
Memphis (the Older city) was erected ?—Herod. II. 99. 

1 Aeguptos, Aegyptus, Son of Bel and Adon of Arabia. The Monrning for the 
Adon, Keb, Kub, Kuphu of the Kefa. 

2 And centuries prior to Job, the Sphinx, in the graveyard of Memphis, pointed to 
the resurrection of the Sun. It still points to the Unknown, and faces the sunrise 
forever. 


THE AS ART ANS IN EGYPT. 


223 


Plutarch de Iside, 21, 22, intimates that the theory of Eu- 
hemerus had been applied to Osiris and Isis. The theory 
that the Gods had been men must have been at least as old 
as the times when Herodotos lived, for some of it was put off 
on him. To show that Khufu had been a man, the priests con¬ 
cocted the stuff 1 which Herodotos tells about his daughter and 
his getting short of money, his unpopularity on account of his 
general wickedness in closing the temples which were a source 
of profit to the priests. If Khufu had been a real person, 2 
they would have had something more sensible to tell, if any¬ 
thing at all was known about him. Then the confusion be¬ 
tween the two names Khufu and Supliu (Suphis) is just what 
happens between the two names of Saturn (Keb and Seb), for 
the priests strictly kept the consonants K and S showing that 
they knew the difference between the names, although they 
applied them indifferently to one mythic person. But the 
unusual prefix of the water-jar and ram to Khufu’s cartouche 
seems to settle the question; for as Petrie says, there is no 
other instance known of any prefix to a king’s cartouche. It 
was the distinctive character of the doctrine called Euhemerism 
to describe mythically the life of the Gods when they lived as 
men on earth, and Lepsius was shown in Syria the graves of 
the patriarchs, one, at least, being twenty-five feet or more 
long. Bead the absurd tales put off upon Herodotus about 
Khufu and Khafra, and call to mind the ox-bones found inside 
Khafra’s coffin, not outside on the floor, as elsewhere. Manetlio 
makes the Gods up into dynasties, but in the two lists of kings, 
one in the tomb of Tunra at Sakkarah, the other at Abydos, no 
division at all appears, but the ovals follow one another in 
Indian file. At Sakkarah, Oval no. 17 reads Khafuf (the hie¬ 
roglyphs being kh, f, u, f, inside the cartouche), as De Bouge’s 
facsimile shows. Another peculiarity of the Great Pyramid is 
that besides the mortuary chamber underground it has what 


1 How could people in B.C. 450 remember what happened in the 4th dynasty of the 
Gods ? It is not improbable that the priest Manetho should have put the early Karu, 
Philitian, Peletian, or Philistian kings among the Gods, from some theory or other 
prejudice. Herodotos has the tradition that the Philitian Shepherd pastured his 
flocks near the Great Pyramid. 

2 Who descends beneath the hollow earth 

Knows the God-given beginnings of life.—Pindar, ThrSnoi, 8. 

My bone was not hid from Thee when I was made in secret, 

Curiously wrought in the lowest chambers of the earth.—Psalm, cxxxix. 15. 


224 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


no other pyramid has, the two chambers upstairs aboveground 
and the two to four ventilating channels. Taking the permu¬ 
tations of the letters k and b, for example (as signs of primi¬ 
tive vocal sounds): we have for k, kh ; for b, p, ph, f. Apply¬ 
ing this rule to the (Saturn) names Keb and Seb, it is clear 
that the narrators, in B.c. 450, adhered with the greatest tenac¬ 
ity to some form of the consonants of these two deity-names, 
showing that they were conscious of Keb and Seb, when they 
spoke or wrote Khufu or Kheopis and Shufu or Suphis. While 
Seb (Sabe, Sabos, Soba) and Keb are Saturn’s names, and are 
the roots of all the variants from them, you never find the in¬ 
structors of Herodotos and Manetho departing from these two 
primordial names when speaking of Khufu’s or Khafra’s pyr¬ 
amid. It is remarkable that no other name is used, but always 
some variant of these two names of the Egyptian Saturn ; for 
Kliembes, whether regarded as a form of Klieb or Khem, is 
another name of Saturn. Therefore the sources of Herodotos 
and Manetho interchange Klieb with Seb, in mentioning the 
master of the Great Pyramid, just as the Hebrew scribe might 
have interchanged Akhabar (Kabar) with Asaph (Soupliis, 
Iosaph, or Ioseph). It is not meant to deny that the Phoenician, 
Hebrew and Babylonian scribes had the same mythic names, 
more or less, and in this respect were on a par. De Wette 
said that Moses offers us “ eine untergangene Gotter-Mythol- 
ogie,” a submerged mythology.—De Wette, Bibl. Dogmatik, 
§ 63, p. 44. At all events, the Hebrew Biblion has enough to 
say about the great Highplaces of Bal, Bel, or Baal to gratify 
the most ardent Kanaanite priest; and if Baal the Sungod is 
not taken up among the chosen in Genesis, v., it is an evidence 
that it was written after the Greek Habol (Apollo), owing to 
the actions of Antiochus Epiphanes, had become a nuisance in 
Israel. 

How indeed my soul, originally from Apollo, flying down 
to earth entered into a man’s body.—Lucian, Gallus, 16. A 
particle (portion) of God is lodged in the bodies.—Jos. Wars, 
III. 8, 5 (III. 13. Kepli. *e. Coloniae, 1691). 


CHAPTER FIVE. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 

. “ Celebrate the Name of the Great King of light, and go to Iardana to be 
baptized.” 

“ air b rov fiwfJLOv tov 'HAtou SaSas a\pdfj.evoL. ’’ 

Asar, Asariel, Asriel, Izreel, and Israel were nearly the same 
name. The land of Asariel was the land of the Spirit, that bap¬ 
tizes with fire; and “ the souls of the Nazoria who have eaten the 
food of the sons of the world, and have become contaminated, 
shall depart into burning fire with the spirit, the Messiah, and 
twelve (Zodiacal) stellar constellations.”—Codex Nazoria, II. 
252, III. 154. See Matthew, iii. 11, 12. The Codex Nazorians 
were once Jordan Nazorenes.—Codex Nazar, I. 34, III. 190. 


Fires of Iahoh Alahi Isaral.—Joshua, xiii. 14. 

‘ Light, Fire, Flame.’—Seal of Iar with the Lion’s head. 

‘ The Angel of Life appeared to him in a flame of fire.’—Exodus, iii. 2. 

‘ The life is through fire and spirit.’—Plato, Tim. 77. 

‘Oh Ariel, Ariel, the city where Daoud 1 dwelt.—Isaiah, xxix. 1. 

‘The fire of Ia’hoh fell.’— 1 Kings, xviii. 38. Messiah shall appear in fire. 
—Cod. Nazar. I. 98, 99. 

‘ His ministers, fire flaming.’—Psalm, civ. 4. 

‘Fire shall perpetually burn on the altar, it shall not be put out.’—Levit. 
vi. 6. 

‘ Fire was in the night on the tabernacle in the eyes of all the house of Isa- 
rel.’—Exodus, xl. 38. 

Sadef, in Hebrew, meant to burn, and Sada meant (in Persian) 
a flaming fire. This chapter deals with Gheber and Khebaru 
(Kheberou-Hebrew) altars and traditions. Under the name 
’Hebronim (Khebronites) and Kliebarou 2 (Gheber Abraha- 

1 The Arabic Daoud, English David, Gheber Dod, Egyptian Tot; compare Adodos, 
the king of the Gods and HaRa the Egyptian Predecessor of their kings. 

a compare Kebir = fire. Bonaparte was called ‘ Sultan kebir ’ by the Egyptians. 

15 


226 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


micles) the description of the Exodus is now continued into 
Idumea. 1 Chebron was an Egyptian king. 2 


I have made you go up out of the land of Mizarim 3 and have led you in the 
desert forty years, to possess the land of the Amori.—Amos, ii. 10. 

Thy father an Amorite, thy mother a Kheti.—Ezekiel, xvi. 8. 

The Amorites were white-skinned, blue eyed, fair haired.—A. H. Sayce, in 
‘Academy,’ 1888, p. 55. 


In his first expedition into Syria, Thothmes proceeded from 
G^ru, 4 and went to Gazah, and got to Iaham (Iamnia). Beth 
Khoron may be Garu, judging by the location and the sound 
of Khar, pronounced Khor. Kamses II. is in Zalii (Azah, 
Gaza in Philistia) in his second campaign. He advances on 
Kadesli (Kadytis ? also called Ain mi Saphat) keeping a 
good look-out to the south of the town, as the Shasu Arabs 
might be expected on the Pharah’s flank to turn him and cut 
him off from his base. He comes to the south of the town 
Sabatun where he is met by two Shasu (Arab spies) from Ka- 
desh to say that the Khethite king is posted to the north of 
Tunep (Iedna, Adana, Idna). The Pharah is deceived, and 
suddenly the army of the Khethians debouches from Kadesh 
by the southern gate to attack Burnses. Sabatun is probably 
Beer Sabat, 20 miles south of Hebron (of the Khatti) where the 
Kheta were settled, 5 among the Amorites. When the Hebrews 
went to war they shaved the head. 6 The Sheto (Sethians) wore 
long-sleeved tunics and usually had their heads shorn, except 
a lock which falls over the back of the neck; and they wore 
mustachios. 7 The Khethite was posted with his rear at Iedna, 
expecting the advance of Bamses by the river Sorek or per¬ 
haps by the Besor in the Nahrena. Bamses II. followed the 
Besor, for water. The Kanani persisted in living in this land. 8 


1 Adum (Edom) shall be a desolate wilderness.—Ioel, iii. 19. The desert was bet¬ 
ter populated at a very early period. Set was the God of the Kheta. Set means “ fire.” 

2 Josephus, contra Apion, p. 1041. Mat Surru is the Syrian land, mat Kib is the 
land of Kib.—See Schrader, Keil, u. d. A. T. 213. 

3 compare the name Mt. Mizar.—Psalm xlii. 6 (7). 

4 We find the Kharetim (Kharu) and Igur (Egur).—Joshua, xv. 21. A brook Kharit, 
near Jerusalem. 

5 Genesis, xxiii. 2, 10. 

6 Ezekiel, xxix. 18. 

7 Kenrick, II. 234. 

8 Joshua, xvii. 12; Judges, i. 29. Genesis, xiv. 5, mentions Cham (in Moab), and 
Saua (Asu, Esau) who are Kharu of Mt. Khareb (Choreb) in Idumea (Edom). 


ISIS IJY PHCENICIA. 


227 


The border descends to the sea to the boundary of the Iaphaleti 1 to the 
border of Beth Kharan 2 inferior, and to Gazer.—Joshua, xvi. 3. 

Then goes up Haram, rex Gazer, to the aid of Lachish.—Joshua, x. 33. 

Iausha struck them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and all the land Gesen up 
to Gabaon.—Joshua, x. 41. 

The tribute of the Ruten (the Arutu of Arad, Arot in Egyptian) 
is horses, chariots (Kananites had iron chariots), rare woods, 
ivory (from Kartliage, or the Indus via Arabia), gloves, a Syrian 
bear, porcelain jars, pitch, woods, frankincense, wine, honey, gold 
and silver vases with Bal’s head on them. Their tight dresses 
open with a buckle, in the mode of Astarta, and they carry long 
gloves. Baal and Astarta bring us at once to the Phoenician 
Setliian or Kharu. 3 The tribute of wine, honey and incense 
points to the Hebronites, Kharu, Lower Khatti and Ruten 
(Araden). Kadesh is mentioned in connection with waters and 
sieges.—Ezekiel, xlviii. 19. The attack on Aruth (Arad) was 
followed by the march of Thothmes III. through all the land 
of Zahi (the back country of Azah). The Egyptians, under 
Ramses III., are represented attacking a strong city sur¬ 
rounded by water. This is probably Kadesh, a city of Negeb, 
among the lower Ruthen. Pharah goes down, and comes to 
the region to the northwest of Kadesh. 4 The waters of strife 
at Kades.—Ezekiel, xlvii. 19. Arad was in Negeb. 5 

The sons of Cham possessed the land from Syria and the 
Mountains Amanus and Libanus ; and they turned and seized 
the parts near the sea, appropriating the parts as far as the 
ocean.—Jos. I. vi. 2. It is clear then that by Cham we must 
understand the Negeb (the south) as well as Arabia and 
Egypt; and the statement can be explained in Gen. x. 6 that 
the Canaanites could be the Beni Cham (for thus Philistia, 
Garar, the Karu, and Phoenicia would be considered Beni 
Cham). The fire-worship reached from High Asia to Egypt. 

1 Philitians.—Herodotus, II. 128. 

2 Beth-Horon: Garu ? 

3 1 Kings, xviii. 25. No camels, but horses and Seth-Baal. From the Euphrates to 
the land Chatti.—Rammanirar. Chatti = the West Land. 

4 Brugsch, Egypt, 1st ed. II. 50. In Dan there was a gilded image of Apis or 
Mneuis.—1 Kings, xii. 29; 2 Kings, x. 29 ; 2 Chron. xi. 15. The Great Plain of Iezreel, 
Magadon, TonacA, Nazar-eta were given to the Adonis-worship. Josephus, Wars, iv. 1, 
locates the temple of the Golden Heifer (Neith, Anata, Anaitis) in Galilee ; along with 
Dan’s sun-bulls. Chi Alohik, Don !—Amos, viii. 14, writes Dan, pronounced Don. 
The melechi fought in Ton ach by the waters of Magado.—Judges, v. 19. 

5 Numbers, xxxiii. 40. Ruda an Arab idol. 


228 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Kadesli is in the Negeb near the Desert of Sin (Numbers, 
xxxiii. 16, 36, 37). Kadesh was in Idumea (—Numbers, xx. 14, 
22). The Pliilistian-Kananite border ran from Gaza to Sodom 
on the Dead Sea (—Gen. x. 19). After burning Arad and Khor- 
mali (—Numbers, xxi. 3) just as in a raid of the Egyptians, the 
Isarelim (Israeli) retreated from Mt. Khor (Hor) in order 
to go around the land of Edom (Aduma.—Numb. xxi. 4). 
We learn from 1 Samuel, xxx. 13, 14, that the Amalekites 
raided over Idumea taking Egyptians prisoners. Hence 
the Hyksos in retreating from Egypt into the land of 
Kanan would be likely to have made a detour in order to 
avoid meeting desert riders and raiders. But Deuteronomy, 
ii. 23, mentions that the Phoenicians (the Keft oer, or Kaphto- 
rim) issued from Kaphtor (in Egypt, according to A. H. Sayce) 
and destroyed the Chazorim (the Auim living in Khazorim). 
Going from Hebron 1 or Gaza towards the Egyptian Delta the 
Jewish writers would notice the strongholds Abaris, Magdolon, 
Rameses 2 and Patum : towards the Egyptian sea-coast is San. 
It is not essential that any one of the states 3 in the Delta 
should have all these cities within its ancient limits. It is 
enough to satisfy the requirements of the psalm lxxviii. 12, 43, 
that between San (Zoan, Zan) and Rameses we have the terri¬ 
tory most exposed to Syrian and Idumean invasions, and forti- 

1 The word Cabar, Cabir, Chebar, Kabar (Ezekiel, i. 1); * Kabeiroi and Ptah.’— 
Herodotus, III. 37. It is here assumed that Exodus was written by Jerusalem scribes 
at a very late period, posterior to Antiochus Epiphanes; after the chartams and the 
chachams. Chart (like XapTa), the writing material. 

2 The city Rameses must have been in the land of Rameses ; and what place was 
more likely to receive his name than the land just redeemed by the canal which he 
built ? Set is the Sun and Fire.—Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, III. 145 ; Ed. Meyer, 
Seth-Tvphon, 41, 52. Shid (Sid) is the Sun.—Richardson, I. 583. Sid means Lord.— 
ibid. I. 510. Sheta is Chaldee for ‘ year.’—Nork, Heb-Chald-Rabbin. Worterbuch, p. 
565. Korshid (Kur and Shid) is a solar name in Persia. Shed means Lord, Sol, Light. 
—Vuiler, II. 491. Shed, in Hebrew, means demon, andSada “demon” in Syriac. So 
that Sad means the Sun’s fire that feeds all things ; at the same time, Sad means Mer- 
kury ; Set meaning the Sun-god and also the Demon. Set was God of the Khita, of 
Memphis and Lower Egypt under the Hyksos. The Asrielites left Ramses, under the 
protection of the Fire-god Set, their Setel (Set = El). Sada means a flaming fire.—John¬ 
son, Persian Diet. p. 690. The Hebrew God bore the name (El Sadi) Sadi (Set, Seth); 
and in the Lebanon the oath or affirmation ‘wa Sheyth’ was quite recently heard. 
Persian dualism is distinctly traced in the case of Set, whose name was used for good 
and for bad. Sitar means a spark of fire.—Richardson, Persian-Arabic Diet. I. 517. 
The bull is the emblem of Typhon, with the cloven foot and horns,—the Seth-Typhon. 
Osiris becomes Asrael the Death-angel. Philo, de Ebrietate, 24, mentions the Golden 
Bull as Typhon’s emblem. 

3 Isaiah, xix. 2, 11. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


229 


fied in some places on the eastern border. Raineses and Patum 
form the bulwarks towards Ismailia; Abaris (Pelusium), and 
Magdolon 1 (Migdol), supported in the rear by San, are in face 
of the route between Lake Serbonis and the Sea. Patum was 
a city of Goshen, 2 hence called in Herodotus II. 158, an Ara¬ 
bian city. Patum (Pithom) was at the entrance of the valley 
Tumilat, where the route from Pelusium to Heliopolis struck 
the road from Heliopolis to Hero and Serapiu. 3 In going east, 
the name Ramses (Tell el Maschuta) is met on the route to Is- 
malia from Tell el Kebir. In withdrawing an army of Syrians 4 
from Memphis to Gaza or Hebron the retreat would be by 
Heliopolis to Pelusium, picking up detachments and reserves 5 
as they fell back to the north and east. 6 

When Israel was a child, then I loved him and called my son 7 out of 
Egypt.—Hose a, xi. 1. 

With a strong hand Ia’hoh made you go out from Misraim.—Exodus, xiii. 9. 

In the land of Misraim, field of San.—psalm, lxxviii. 12. 

Wonderful deeds in the land of Cham (Egypt, Africa). 

Horrors at the Sea of Reeds.—psalm, cvi. 22. 


Who does not think of the ship of the Argonauts which they 
bore on their shoulders, and of the Mosaic Ark of the covenant 8 

1 Herodotus, II. 159. The city Kadesh would be the nearest “Kadutis” that an 
Egyptian general would reach from the Bitter Lakes and Migdol. 

2 Cush, Cushan, Goshen. Sate and Satis are Goddess of light, and Juno (Ino). 
The Arab tribe Asad adored Hermes ; Hermes is the Hermeneutic Logos.—Justin Apol. 
I. xxix. Hermes was represented at Cyllene in Elis by a phallus.—Chassang’s Apol¬ 
lonius, 265. 

3 Lepsius, Zeitschrift, 1883, p. 45. 

4 Phoenicians, Syrians, Idumeans, etc. Amenemheb’s stele mentions the high 
plains of Oo’an west of Khaleboo (Caleb).—Brugsch, 1st ed. I. 354. 

5 How otherwise could they have amounted to 600,000 men ? Exodus, xii. 37. 
Set is the Sun and Fire.—Wilkinson, Anc. Egyptians, III. 145 ; Ed. Meyer, Seth- 
Typhon, 41, 52. Set is God of the Khita and Lower Egypt under the Hyksos, and at 
Memphis. 

6 with a strong hand (a powerful band),—Exodus, iii. 19,—passing between fort 
Magdol and the Mediterranean.—Exod. xiv. 2. The scribe throws the Amalekites upon 
600,000 Isareli debouching from Sinai.—Exod. xvii. 8. 

7 Matthew, ii. 15, quotes this passage out of Hosea and applies it not to Israel but 
to Jesus the Healer ; possibly holding that the prophet’s statement was not to be taken 
literally. Chabas gives As-ra (Osiris) ; Sa-Rah is probably Asherah. 

8 Exod. xxv. 10. Achio drove the wagon of Iachoh.—2 Sam. vi. 2, 3. The Arab 
God Iauk was the Sun and his image (the Sun’s Horse).—Rev. i. 11, 12, 13, 16 ; xix. 
11-13) was surrounded by 7 images,—the 7 Sabaoth, or planets.—Exodus xxxv. 31, 37. 
The Arab idol Iaghut (a lion) represented the Sun, as Life-god. See Univ. Hist, xviii. 
384, 388. 


230 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in which the twelve staves of the tribes are kept! Twelve 
points to the twelve signs of the Zodiac or to the twelve months. 
The young Bacchus was with his mother Semele 1 put in a 
chest, committed to the sea, which carried it to Brasiae. Aleus 
laid his Daughter, together with the Child born from her 
by Herakles, in a box and threw it into the sea. 2 Iason was 
as Child placed in the nighttime in a chest and brought as 
corpse to the Chiron. 3 Moses too was placed in the ark and 
set adrift on the Nile to indicate his mythical divine mystery; 
for the God in the ark is Horus or Taaut-Tkotk. These ark 
stories all belong to the theological legends of the priests. 
Anius 4 is, according to Nork, son of the Yine-god Staphylos 
and so is Dionysus himself. And since Bhoo, Mother of Anius, 
is, as some said, the Mother of Iason (Jason), both heroes are 
one person. Noah too invented wine, whose Aek contained 
the assurance of the continuance of the races ; and Osiris also, 
whose head swims to Byblus, whose phallus alone escaped the 
destructive fury of Typhon. So the same emblem of Attes 
was carried in a holy box to the Etruscans, which Clemens 
Alexandrinus 5 considers to be that of Dionysus, the Greek 
Osiris. 6 The ark that Noah sailed in contained in its mystic 
recess the seeds of future generations. 7 Consequently the 
lunar ark is indicated. That it was the ark of Sol-Saturn 
(HaBal, Hobal) is evident because Hobal held 7 arrows in 
his hand (representing the 7 planets) of which Saturn was the 
chief Angel, and not only are they referred to by the number 
7 in Genesis, vii. 2, but by the Seven-rayed Candlestick in the 


1 the tradition in Pausanias, iii. 24. 3. 

2 ibid. viii. 4. 6. 

3 Tzetz. Lycophr. 570.—Nork, I. 111. 

4 Ani is the Sun, and name of an Egyptian priest. Dionysus is Amadios and Oma- 

dios. Jason's wife is Medea (Madaia). Regarding priestly government, Exodus, xxx. 
15, suggests the very contribution called Peter’s pence, every house one penny. 

6 Protr. p. 12. 

6 Nork, I. 112. The sun’s cave was sought in the east; the Magoi learned the 
birth of the Year-god by a star’s ascension in the east: t'ov aarepa tv t avaroXfj. The 
Dionysiacs were ithuphallic ceremonies for the Cyllenian Hermes. Set seems originally 
to have been Sol-Hermes. 

7 See, further, Numbers, xvii. 2, 6, 8, with the commentary of Nork, Real-Worterb. 
I. 113, also his comparison of the arks of the Syrians with the Isis-cista, and the 
almonds of Aharon’s rod. Nork’s perception of the sense of the word “iy propagare 
and the connection of pH voluptas with py Adonis-garden is significant of the pur¬ 
pose of the Garden of Eden and the origin of mankind. Serpents were signs of vital 
nature and productiveness, the propagatio spiritualis of the Kabbala. 


ISIS in PHOENICIA. 


231 


Holy of Holies at Jerusalem. 1 —Exodus, xxxv. 37. The Arabs 
turned their Deity Aud (Ad, Od, Oad, Wadd) and the Deity 
Abrahm into ancestors (by the doctrine of Euhemerism) ; and 
by turning the suffix (i, ol } im) into a prefix they could make 
the name of the Jews, Iaudi. Again, Habal or Hobal was a 
deity-name carried from Syria into Arabia, as the source from 
whom they could get rain.—Universal Hist, xviii. 386. The 
Orientals held that “from the sun comes rain.” Therefore 
Bal or Bel was the Sol-Saturn, and so was Hobal,—“ Osiris 
in the moon ”; Osiris as a name of the Nile-water. 

The March from Tell-el Maschuta or Bamses to the north 
would be necessary to form a junction with the column coming 
east from San. The Hebrews claim that it was a march of 
troops, 2 and of course that the Jews were the martial Hyksos 
moving along the sea-shore road towards Palestine. In his 
earlier work Josephus began with the Makkabees in the 2nd 
century. In the “Antiquities,” he states that the Hebrew Ex¬ 
odus was by the way of the city of Latona, the later Babulon. 3 
Leaving out Itamses and Succoth, he makes a firm stand on Bel- 
seplion as the Hebrew line of march. 

On the march, the Jewish aron (ark) was about three feet 
nine inches long, 2j feet in width and twenty-seven inches in 
height. It was overlaid with gold, 4 which was the sun’s color. 
A camel could easily carry it, like the arks of the Arabian 
tribes. Like the atfali of the Arabs the ark was carefully 
guarded. The Loim 5 encamped about the mysterious emblem 
in the midst of the camp of the Israelites. 6 The Karnak tab- 


1 Codex Nazoria, III. 155 mentions the 7 Stellars in connection with the Spirit and 
the Messiah. —See Rev. i. 16. 

2 Exodus, xii. 41; xiii. 18; Numbers, xxxiii. 3. Zabaoth is the warlike hosts. 
The Jews were shaven on top, like Dionysus.—Jeremiah, ix. 24, 25; Herodotus, HE. 8. 
See the name Agab (a form of the name Acab, Iaqab).—Codex Nazoria, III. 76, vide 
Geba in the Bible, and the Agubeni in Arabia. 

3 Josephus, Ant. II. 15. 1. See Larsow’s map to Athanasius, Festbriefe. The Sep- 
tuagint and Josephus do not hesitate to alter the locations any more than the modern 
partisans of an Exodus. Babulon was Old Cairo.—Prof. J. A. Paine, in Am. Orient. 
Soc. Journal, May 6, 1885. Babulon built in b.c. 525 by Cambyses. 

4 Exodus, xxxvii. 1. 

5 Loi is the name of the Highpriest of Amon.—Brugsch, II. p. 133. The tents of 
Kiun (Saturn), the star of your God (El Saturnus).—Amos. v. 26. Kin (Cain) looks 
like a form of Kiun (Saturn), Earthgod and God of Life under earth.—Gen. iv. 2, 8, 10, 
11, 14. A vagabond that never sees the Sun.—iv. 14. 

6 Numbers, i. 50, 51; ii. 17. They were bound for ‘ the mat Chatti, the mat Achar- 
ri, the mat Surru.’—See E. Schrader, Keilins. u. d. A. T. 213, 214. Sur (Zur) was king 


232 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


let represents the Lnten or Buten, “ races of the Upper 
Buthen, who lived nearest to the Egyptians, and the Phoeni¬ 
cian Khalu of the hinder lands.” 1 According to this, the Arad 
Botennu were nearer to the peninsula of Sinai and to Egypt 
than the Khaleb (Caleb) of the lands behind the Arad position, 
which is the fact. Compare the Ailut in the land of Edom 
(Idumea). 2 Amos compares the sortie of the Pliilitians from 
‘ Kaft oer ’ to the sortie of the Isarelites from Kaphtor. 

Are you not to me as Beni Kasiim, Beni Isarel! 

Did I not make Isarel go up out of the land Mizraim and Phelestiim from 
Kaphtor ?—Amos, ix. 7. 

I destroyed the Amorite before them.—Amos, ii. 9. 


What prevents the Beni Kasiim (Hyksos ?) from being the 
Sons of Mt. Kasius ? What is in the way of seeking for the 
Shepherd Kings between Gath and Mt. Kasius, among the 
warlike Kesh Kesh and Philistians ? The Akasii or Beni Ke- 
siim w r ould give us one Kesh at least. The following evidence 
will supply the remainder of the Okousos or Kasii. 

The names Geshuri and Gez-uri (Akas, Okus, Ukous ??) may 
be related to the name Hukusos. In reference to the point 
who were the Hukoussos (Hyksos) certain proper names should 
be taken into consideration. These are the Kushites of Arabia, 
then Mt. Kasius, Kusi (2 Sam. xviii. 21), Akasaph, Okasah 
(Akasah, Kaleb’s daughter), and the valley Qasis, Joshua, 
xviii. 21. As names are apt, for brevity’s sake, to lose their 
first vowel we should, first of all, restore it to Qasis, making 
Aqasis or Akasis (the z being but another s). Here we then have 
Kk&saph, Akasis, Gesur, Okasah, and Ukusos or Hukousos to 
compare together, in order to decide in favor of the Hyksos 
being Phoenicians, Philistians, Karu and Hebrews united with 
the people of Garar (the Kharu) in a raid into Egypt to estab¬ 
lish a permanent lodgement there. While the name Ukousos 

of Midian.—Numbers, xxxi. 8. Assur was the name of both Syria and Assyria. The 
words ‘ bluestone of Babel ’ and ‘ utensils of Assur ’ do not necessarily imply an Egyp¬ 
tian march to Assyria, for the Phoenicians and Arabs probably brought these things on 
camels to Sarra (Tyre), Arad in the Negeb, Hormah and all Idumea, whence they 
could have been taken to Aupa, Akko, even to the Jewish canton of Aser, near Tyre. 

1 Brugsch, I. 319. 

2 1 Kings, ix. 26; 1 Chron. i. 11. Munk, Palestine, p. 82, identifies the Philistians 
with the Kaftorim (the Kefa) and Kasluchim. Go down to Gath of the Philistians. — 
Amos, vi. 2. 


ISIS in PHOENICIA. 


233 


may have been altered in Egyptian pronunciation and writing, 
the name of Kaleb’s daughter Okasali is nearest to it. The 
wars of Ramses II. seem to have been waged against these 
Hebrew and Kanaanite peoples, in the lands of the Katti or 
Kheta. Moreover, we have Okhozath , the name of a friend of 
Abimelecli of Gerar, in proximity to Egypt. The name Gazar 
(Gezer.—1 Kings, ix. 16, 17) may be added to OkhosatfA, to get 
at the root of the name liukousos (the Hyksos, or Shepherd 
Kings). The conjunction of the name Amalekites, Pliilistim, 
Geshuri, Gezeri, 1 with Gath and the Egyptian Kesh Kesh 2 
shows us who the Hyksos were and their primitive homes, 
whence they entered into Egypt. The Amalekites in 1 Sam¬ 
uel, xxvii. 8 follow the names Geshuri and Gezeri. 

In Exodus, xiii. 18 the Jewish Scribe takes the precaution 
to state that the route of the Exodus lay through the Desert ; 
but Josephus claimed Hyksos ancestry, and changes the line of 
march from Ramses and Succoth to from Babulon (Old Cairo 
or near it) to Baal Sephon, in apparent violation of the narra¬ 
tive in Exodus xiii. 18. Considering the numerous evidences 
of Jewish animus that are recorded in this work it is allowable 
to fancy that the story of the Exodus is a work of the imagina¬ 
tion, probably intended to change some accounts of the expul¬ 
sion of the Hyksos driven out of Egypt, and to represent such 
events, if they ever occurred, as the Exodus of the Jews. 3 

1 1 Sam. xxvii. 1-7, 8, 10. 

2 Birch, Statist. Table of Karnak, p. 14. 

3 If Jacob had informed the priests of the pharaoh concerning the prophesies of the 
Lord to Abram (Gen. xii. 2, 3) and himself (xlvi. 3, 4) that they should become a Great 
Nation, we might conclude that their retreat out of Egypt would have been more accel¬ 
erated than their advance into it. See Genesis, xxviii. 3, 13, 14; xxxv. 11 , Malchos 
Kleodemos the prophet, Jew, Phoenician, or Syrian, names three sons of Abraham by 
Khetoura: Afera, Asoureim, lafra. Asoureim gives name to Assyria; the city Afra 
and land Africa were named after Afra and lafra, since both marched with Herakles 
to Libya and against Antaeus. They were admitted to companionship with Herakles 
owing to the similarity of Abrahm-Kronos-Herakles. See Movers, I. 86-87, 415-450. 
At Alexandria, the medium between the West and East, Afra is turned into the Latin- 
Greek Afrikus, and in the Aethiopic Axum the father Abraham, ‘as Abrahah,’ is again 
thrust upon the adventurous sons. From there the Jewish triumvirate has wandered 
into the South-Arabian myths. The transplanting of the remnant of the Kananites 
to Africa is found in Prokopius of Caesarea only as a shadowing forth of the story of 
the emigration of the peoples, from Sidon to Egypt before the victorious Joshua, first 
into Egypt and thence along the North-African coast.—Rosch, Konigin von Saba, 23 ; 
Prokopius de bello Vandal., II. 10, Ed. Guil. Dindorf, I. p. 450. Among the Children 
of Abrahm by Khetoura were Madan, Madian and Souos ; and the Beni Souos were Saba 
and Dadan —Gen. x. 7 ; Job, vi. 19; Isaiah, xxi. 13. Sabathan.—Jos. Ant. I. 15. 

They bury Sai'ra in ‘ Khebron.’—Josephus, Ant., I. 14. 


234 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Iahob brought the Beni Isarel out of the land of Misraim by their army 
corps.—Exodus, xii. 51. 

Before the camp of Israel.—Exodus, xiv. 19. 

Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the sea shore.—Exodus, xiv. 30. 

The tent of the Erra (Pha-Ra. 1 ) is beheld in the midst of 
the Egyptian camp, and near it is the movable shrine of the 
Great Gods of Egypt. The standard of Amanuel is there. 

This is the first legion of Amon 2 who bestows victory on King Ramses II. 
—Brugscli’s translation. 

And they departed from Sakotli and camped in Atliam in the edge of Med- 
bar (the Desert). 

And Iaclioh preceded in a column of cloud before their faces in the daytime 
to lead them on the way, in the night in a pillar of fire to give light to them ; to 
go by day and by night. 

And spake Iacholi to Mase 3 as follows : Say to the Beni Isarel to stop and 
encamp before the Cliiroth (Gulfs) between (the fortress') Magdol and the sea, 
opposite Bal Zephon : before it, let them encamp by the sea.—Exodus, xiv. 20, 
21 ; xv. 

Ialioli, who made the Beni Isarel 4 go up from the land of Misraim. 

Iahoh who made the Beni Isarel go up from the land Sephon 5 and out of 
all the lands which he expelled them to ; and I will bring them back upon their 
land 6 which I gave to their fathers.—Jeremiah, xvi. 14, 15. 

The reader will have to remember that whatever evidences 
of a former gradual upheaval of land out of the waters at the 
Isthmus of Suez geology may point out, and whatever may in 
the way of upheavals have been discovered from Akabah 
along the Valley of the Arabah, past Mt. Hor, through the 
Ghor to the Dead Sea, it is impossible to connect such teach¬ 
ings of geology with the Biblical Exodus , 7 because all such 


1 Compare the words Horus, Ares, Iar with the lion’s head. 

2 B.c. 933, Shashanq, brother of Sargon, was high-priest of Amon and commander 
in chief of the whole Egyptian army.—Brugsch, II., 214, 215. The account given by 
Captain Ahmes of the storming of Abaris is not to be reconciled with the Exodus- 
story or the Manethonian fiction. Manetho denies the storming. 

3 Amasis, Ahmosis, Ahmes are somewhat similar names. Numbers, ii., 3, 34. 

4 Osar Suph, or Osarel. 

5 Bel Zephon. Io Suph on Mt. Kasius. 

6 Adamah, or Edom, up to Iebus perhaps ? 

7 Rawlinson, II. 184, 185, and Brugsch, II. 255, 256, regard the Hyksos invasion 
as a real occurrence. Brugsch, II. 256, 257, says that the Hyksos kings preserved 
the works of by-gone ages and adorned Tanis. A memorial stone found in Tanis 
belongs to the time of Ramses II., it is said, and bears the inscription : In the 
year 400 on the 4th day of the month Mesori of King Nub ! Put Ramses II. at 
B.c. 1350 and King Nub’s reign at 1750, we then find that Genesis, xv. 13 puts the 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


235 


anteliistoric changes on the routes from Memphis to Jericho 
cannot be shown to have taken place subsequent to the de¬ 
scription contained in Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. 
Moreover, the account given, in the Bible, of Sinai, 1 is by no 
means at variance with its present condition after all the up¬ 
heavals have terminated , 2 —the identity is sufficient for the 
purpose of Biblical criticism. It has been said 3 that ‘ Arabs, 
as everyone knows who has had to do with them, have a re¬ 
markable facility for making up a story to meet a supposed 
occasion.’ Was it ever said Orientals could not lie or that the 
ancient Jews could not ? And are we to strictly swallow all 
the marvels, myths, tropes and figures like Exodus, xix. 4, 
where the Lord ‘ took them on eagles’ wings ’ and brought 
them to him ? Could not the Jewish scribes know the whole 
geography of the country from the Dead Sea to Midian, 
Sinai, the Till plateau, the Amalekite country and the Egyp¬ 
tian border ? When the Amalekites had annoyed the Jews 
by ‘ raids as far north as Ziglag (Zachelach ?) in Dauid’s time,’ 
and had Egyptian captives, is it supposable that a Jewish 
scribe at the close of the 2nd century before Christ could not 
have described the rather questionable march of the Israelites, 
with the necessary accuracy as to the details of topography, 
over the desert, through Sinai, Atuma and Madian, past Mt. 
Hor into Moab to the Jordan, with all the mythical interpola¬ 
tions required to assure the Jews that the word of the Lord 

stay of the Hebrews in Egypt at 400 years, while Exodus, xii. 40 puts the Hebrew 
stay at 430 years (Brugsch, II. 259). What is King Nub’s date? Is it certain that 
the stone belongs to the time of Ramses II.? Does this prove that the Exodus 
ever took place ? Merely nothing at all is yet proved in relation to Hebrew history by 
Nub’s date, supposing it read rightly. Deuteronomy, xii. 3 may have been substituted 
by Josephus in place of Manetho. It is just what he quotes Manetho as saying. 

1 Exod. xix. 4, 18, 20. Prof. Edward Hull, Mount Seir, 1885, pp. 49, 180, 103, 
mentions that the granites and porphyries are traversed by innumerable dykes of por¬ 
phyry and diorite both throughout the Sinaitic mountains and those of Edom and 
Moab ; and he considers it probable that the volcanic rocks which are largely repre¬ 
sented along the bases of Mt. Hor and of Jebel es Somrah near Es Safi eh are contem¬ 
poraneous with these dykes. 

2 Gen. xix. 17, 24, 25, 30. Lut (Lot) went up out of the Burnt District and dwelt 
in a cave in the mountain range. Hull, Mt. Seir, p. 129, says: These caves give egress 
to the torrents which issue forth after rain, and along their walls the rock salt is con¬ 
stantly melting. Gen. xix. 26 effectually shows that the Upheavals preceded the pillar 
of salt , Lot’s wife. The salt was deposited at the bottom of the sea. The upheaval 
took place. Then the rain waters made caves; and finally Lot lived in one. Conse¬ 
quently the Biblical story is later than the geological changes mentioned. 

3 Hull, p. 200. 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBROS. 


was always £* tl* w&xtk of the priesis that served the Ark of 
the Covenant ? The scribes of the Temple woe at least as 
able to make up the whole story as modem travellers are to 
prove that it is a narrative of facts ! 

The AakV r^.ra of Khebroo, the people of Sadem and Sedm 
' Sethim were Gtebes. The lire worship was also in Ar of 
Moab. Here we have to conader a priest caste, as in Egypt, 
elevated to supreme power, holding - the government of the 
Jewish people entirely in their own hands, determined through 
the power that the superstition and ignorance of the masses 
placed ir irm their grasp to Train tain the perpetual sway over 
the zhi which universal suffrage always trustingly grants to 
the f Mil i The erneeptkm of a departure out of Egypt, 
lighted up with miracles, loomed upon the scribal fancy, sug¬ 
gested by the traditions of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. 
So. like Hoses, the scribe leads our imagination from the 
picture of slavery in Egypt to the passage between the waters 
of the lam Soph, the destruction of Pharaoh's army, the trials 
of the desert, the loneliness of Sinai to the giving of the Law 
by the God himself to Moses out of the mountain cloud upon 
its summit amid this awful scene of desolation and the grandeur 
of sublimity itself. £ Nothing- can exceed the savage grandeur 
of the view from the summit of Mount Sinai .’ 3 Forty years of 
communion with the God, led solely by the Almig hty hand.— 
with the Law always before their eyes, and their dependence 
upon it ground into their souls ! Finally they march to Mount 
Cbof winch rises 5275 feet above the level of the Dead Sea. 

JLzii Xase- sc *«*ss«lz*s fr«L lii-si ua&> the Kisx of Arfomz Edom, 
TLis sss2l At Ir^er Israel ; See, we are 5m zLe etf j K&is&h. ia the extreme 
~ it -Jlj b.rigg. As*i fr» * azAthe Beni Iirael went. 

Xnnii^a. nr 1; Jt&L *r. If fed is* sk 'era rf tk k&ts.' fejk 
temfi i np 5* k sad Tk isk pray/nct & srjtiad a ordj- 

Tarj t—S^Esa. P$n?t* lead. 343 . 

1 kra-wa 5H«riT fran. tk ' -.f m Htim ’ «ct rf Bp|*. 'Tkhte 

PsfeBsnr Piaay acnei « ttas to* Lsd dwsski «a fe.W Mna 

nnai cui -aser* ktn=-sr**i t&etaxjest «f vot L*ar w Mmkc. wfe* is term dtdrrereb 
-I^TL m* w frsnt EU* S«fs*5sa. Tfc* sageseae «fiC ra*=af msHj 

fees »-scut ieai id SLexT^nmrr^ nSter wA ea^tnusari te aSvri ezmx&tx^ fer 

-se frttn. n«us 'aaej «akt feduMii tot ds^iw <rf Bdriat jr/r*T » 

ex 5 ^: pimsf v. aiT*i»»r v. flcam isqfla . zrr*tt it tlu* *a»r»d texs rf t£u* «ee&e «f tb*** 
evsnfe.*—1W£* Jfcrnnc S*rr. F . 5I_ T<*7 Sb^r tie Jerob Krika ca-l iz^ ^zEkj 

-rmss&t %tvm& rvzaL wr 7 W 6 fees aftpre sut 
* HmT* Sear. ft 52L 

4 i*VBiX&. xr. S3. 







ISIS IS PHCEXICIjL 


th£ entire congregation, to Mount Har. aad to Ifjs&t sad AtLsrc^i 
near the border of the land Edom I—Number*, ix. ; rri 


And to keep this priesicaste in power, the element of cir¬ 
cumcision (in the Mysteries; was invoked to preserve them a 
distinct and peculiar people. In all Jewish exclusiveness 
Iahoh was to be the God for them alone I * But the Patiimist 
writer repudiated such a limited view, declaring that God i^ 
God both of Jew and Gentile. 

Is be the God of the Jews only, and not of tk G^mfZss * Aye. of she G-es- 
tiles too. since it is one God who will justify eircnnicaoQ hr sacir- 

emncision through the faith !—Romans, iii. 2J. $fji 

Let ns never forget that we have to do with the writings of 
a caste of priests 3 4 in Judea, whose sacred stories, whatever their 
relation to history, were presumably connected with the in¬ 
terests of their caste. 

Inritaris ergo per hoc ut ad orientem semper aeririss.—Tow arv 
invited. therefore, through this, always to keep your eye ob ike Onsai! * 

And near Arsinoe too is the City of the Heroes 5 and tke Kkaptdi in the 
corner of the Arabian Gulf that is towards Egypt—5«nba. Sdi 

Taking Bmgsch’s view that Ramses is Aharis (Pelusdxmr. 
M&sen, Zara. et<_% the fleeing Israelim must have marched south 
to Thuku, then to Atam on the edge of the Desert of Idumea 
(Atuinu. Edom). Giving np this route they turn 4 and encamp 
before the Chiroth near Bal Zephon . 1 and then pass between 
the Sea (iam) of Reeds (the lam Suph^ and the Mediterranean.' 
to escape pursuit. In thus fleeing towards Suez, then return¬ 
ing to the north by some route not mentioned, the In r-* 
a picture of ItaV distress in order to Aeigktm tke aspect tf tie 

3 Mount Hor. when? Aharon died 

* Irenaens. L xxiii. 

3 Joshua. xxi. 

4 literally, to look towards the R**t! When Iaqab kfk Boer >ei» «a hi? war » 
Charan in Mesopotamia, be finally teaches the Bead Qodau of wk® Lahus i? erne.— 
Gen. xxviii. 10; xxix. 1, 4. >\ The name Beni Qadaa. says Reeax. i? of the Sara¬ 
cens of the oriental desert.—Renan, SIT, $31 $3t Bat in Gen. xxrrai 10; xxix 1. as 
far as the Euphrates is meant, 

* Strabo says nothing here aKvat Pa-Tnst; ahhvxs^h he refers to l l io iofci > iS 
times. 

* Rxtxhis, sir. 3, 

3 ibivl xiv. 3, 0. 

* ibid xiv 31, 31 





238 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


miracle that he describes as the waves pour again 1 over the nar¬ 
row isthmus between the lake of reeds and the Mediterranean. 
This is strictly in accord with the scribe’s plan; for subse¬ 
quently he lets them wander in anything but a straight course 
towards Palestine, more as if they were bent on visiting the 
mines of Wady Magharah and exploring Midian than anything 
else, and had time enough (40 years) to do it. As to thfe at¬ 
tempted identification of Tuku (Thuku) with Succoth, it is 
enough to quote the words of the Egyptologue Eugene Bevil- 
lout: Quant a l’identification de Tuku et de Succoth je n’en 
dirai rien; on a pour l’egyptien nombre d’exemples de t changes 
en s et reciproquement. Mais j’avoue que l’argumentation est 
moins rigoureuse, etc. 2 M. Kevillout, therefore, was not yet 
convinced that the identification is completely made out. Now 
as the “ tents ” of the Arabs were at furthest only just the other 
side of the Suez Canal, a short distance from M. Naville’s Thuku 
or Heroopolis, the Hebrew writer really had no occasion to be 
as particular about Thuku as M. Naville has been. Any neigh¬ 
boring Succoth (Tents) would have answered his purpose 
equally well (for all on the same parallel east of the Nile was 
then Arabia). 

The Egyptian priests abominated the sea and called salt 
the froth of Typhon. 3 Typhon’s evil influence was observed in 
the inundations at the seaside spot called Baal Zephon (zepli 
= inundare ; zeph = inundation) whom Brugsch calls the Lord 
of the North (zephon = north, north wind). Plutarch speaks 
of Typhon’s overpowering force and connects him with marine 
violence. 4 He is the Adversary, represented with the boar’s 
head 5 or with the ass-head. Thus we have Adonis slain by 
the Boar, and Jupiter’s sinews cut by Typhon upon Mt. Kasius, 

1 v. 26. The waves were sometimes so high as to carry vessels across the road at 
that spot. The astute Josephus is careful to let the Israelim go past Bal Zephon, but 
he is.particular not to say anything about their route, after leaving Babulon, until the 
Chiroth are reached. Perhaps he had not located Thuku or Atam! Why then does 
Josephus, instead of following the Exodus from Ramses to Sukoth and Atam (as the 
Bible says), begin the Exodus from Babulon instead of Ramses? His object was to 
connect the Hebrews directly with the Hyksos, whose capital, Memphis, was near the 
Pyramid of Kheopa at Gizeh, and to stick to the line of retreat of these invaders via 
Bal Sephon. 

2 The “Academy,” April 4, 1885, p. 249. 

3 Compare Nonnus, I. 258 ff. They regarded the sea as thrown off from fire as a 
foreign excrement destructive and baneful.—de Iside, 7. 

4 de Iside, 31, 42. 

5 Compare Matthew, viii. 32; Isaiah, lxv. 4; lxvi. 17. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


239 


which Nork compares to a solar eclipse. It was on this nar¬ 
row tongue of land, says Brugsch, bounded on one side by the 
Mediterranean, on the other by the Sea 1 of weeds between the 
entrance to the Khirotli or Gulfs on the west and the sanctuary 
of Baal-zephon on the east that the great catastrophe oc¬ 
curred ! After the Hebrews, marching on foot, had cleared the 
flats that extend between the Mediterranean Sea and Lake 
Sirbonis, a great wave took by surprise the Egyptians in flank. 
It had happened so before, Diodorus says ; 2 the basin being 
long and narrow and the Bog impossible to get out of, owing 
to soft mud and slime, the traveller is exposed to great dan¬ 
gers. When Strabo was at Alexandria the sea so inundated 
the land around Mt. Kasius that vessels passed over the road 
to Phoenicia; 3 and when the Persian king Artaxerxes marched 
upon Egypt a catastrophe befell his army at the same spot, the 
Gulfs. 4 So that it was no new idea, to enter a scribe’s mind for 
the first time. Strabo says that, being a mixed population of 
Egyptians, Arabs and Phoenicians, the most correct report of 
those who are trusted in regard to the temple at Jerusalem ex 
hibits the Egyptians as the ancestors of those now called 
Ioudeans (Jews). 5 Credat Judaeus Josephus! 

The ark is a symbol in the Mysteries of the orientals from 
Egypt to Phoenicia and Greece. 6 The Good Principle 7 en¬ 
tered his ark ; the Loim 8 surrounded it. Then the long cara¬ 
van of more than 600,000 men on foot (or borrowed cam¬ 
els) moved away to the northeast from the land of Bamses, 9 


1 Brugsch, II. 364 uses the word “ lagoons.” 

2 Brugsch, 361, 365; Diodor. i. 30; xvi. 46. 

3 Strabo, i. p. 58. 

4 Diodorus, xvi. 46. Typhon (the Adversary) is also the Great Bear that looks 
down upon the golden apples of the Adonis-garden. Mars-Typhon according to Nork, 
was recognised by the Rabbins as Esau (the Phoenician Uso) and was clearly the prin¬ 
ciple of Darkness (the matter, earthy principle), for he betrays this character by saying 
“ Let me go, for day is breaking .”—Gen. xxxii. 24, 25, 26, 28. Aso is also an imp of 
Satan (Seth), who assists in destroying the Good divinity, Osiris. Typhon was changed 
into a crocodile. —de Iside, 50. 

3 Strabo, 760. 

6 Inman, Anc. Faiths, I. 283-291. 

7 Agathodemon. 

8 Leuites, Eloim. 

9 Gen. xlvii. 11, to the “lam Suph,” the Sea of Weeds, Lake Sirbonis. The heights 
of Allah Sin (Sinai) were in an uninhabitable region ; besides, the Hyksos marched to 
Hebron and Jerusalem, according to Manetho, The Beni Isarel marched out in corps 
d’armee.—Exodus, xii. 51. 


240 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


after borrowing' the gold and silver jewels of the Egyp¬ 
tians. 1 

According to Josephus the Hebrews are the Hyksos. 2 It 
is evident that Josephus and Manetlio and Exodus describe 
very different events. The Egyptologists in Europe in some 
instances lay down a convenient canon of criticism that the 
stations of the Exodus were districts, not cities. M. Hevillout, 
in a recent article in the “ Academy,” 8 referred to Genesis, 
xlvi. 28, where Iacob 

Sent the Ieudah before his face, to Ioseph to signify 4 before his presence, 
to Gesen, and they came to the land Gesen.—Gen. xlvi. 28. Hebrew. Do not 
fear to descend into Egypt for I will place you there a great people.—Gen. xlvi. 
3. Hebrew. 

The Septuagint Version alters Gen. xlvi. 28, by inserting the 
words in Greek “to meet him in the city of Heroes in the land 
Harnesses; ” and the Coptic has it “ to the city Pithom in the 
land of Harnesses.” If one admits that Patum is Pithom and 
Pithom Heroopolis, how does this help to show the Exodus 
movement out of Egypt ? The Bible distinctly says that the 
Israelites departed from Hamses to Succoth (or Sokchoth, in 
the Septuagint), and from Succoth to Atham (Otliom in the 
Septuagint) on the edge of the Desert. 5 The object of the 
movement into Egypt is openly confessed to become a great 
people ! We see the national bias in these words. The whole 
is written for Israel’s glory! Egyptologists cannot help the 
Jewish account much. Dr. Hobinson prepared a map that was 
published in Horne’s Introduction, 6 on which Pithom is laid 
down near the “ ancient canal ” and Atham not far from Suez. 
But Exodus, xiv. 9, rather favors Mr. Brugsch, when it says : 

Hard by the jaws of ha-Chir5th before Bal Zephon.—Exod. xiv. 9. 

1 It is not easy to reconcile the Egyptian dislike of foreigners with this reported 
loan. The Egyptians would not eat at the same table with a foreigner. Besides, the 
Hebrew slaves had taskmasters put over them. Evidently Exodus was written when 
the Jews were bankers. 

It would require a large amount of capital to move 600,000 men, without counting 
the transportation deficiencies and commissariat. 

3 Jos. c. Apion, I. p. 1052. 

3 April 4, 1885. 

4 announce him. 

6 Exodus, xii. 37; xiii. 20. 

6 New York, 1852. 


ISIS IJST PHCENICIA. 


241 


If the Hebrew Bible (Exodus, i. 11) says that the Israelites 
built Pithom and Bamses, what becomes of the inconsistent 
Revelation in the Septuagint (Exodus, i. 11) that adds to Pithom 
and Ramses the Egyptian city On, Heliopolis. The object 
was to maJce out a strongercase than Revelation had done already ; 
for the Hyksos ruled at On and Memphis. What shall we say 
of the further tradition that they built also Kessa (Katieh ? or 
some place in Kassistis ?). That it is doubtful,—but no Reve¬ 
lation! We are indebted to the past for our very existence; 
and, as a physician once said of a fashionable Sulphur Spring, 
we have to swallow the bad, to get the good in it. Mr. Poole 
tells us that “ the true interest of this reconstruction 1 of the 
map of Eastern Lower Egypt lies in its bearing on the route 
of the Exodus.” Before M. Naville attacked Tell-el-Maskutah 
it was uncertain whether the Israelites marched by the Wadi-t- 
Tumeylat, where the site lies, or by the Yalley of the Wan¬ 
derings, parallel to the other wadi but leading from above 
Cairo to Suez. The uncertainty disappears when one looks 
closely into the motive of the Temple Scribes in writing the 
account of the Exodus, which is discredited for many reasons. 
The orientals were great poets and novelists; and it is not 
surprising that every author who has attempted to explain the 
Exodus as history comes to grief. In fact, the wanderings of 
the Egyptologists in search of orthodoxy are more striking 
than any marvels that ever occurred during the march of 
Moses 2 for the promised land. 

Josephus says that the Exodus occurred at a time when the 
Assyrians had obtained control in Asia, 3 and “ fearing the power 
of the Assyrians, for these then controlled Asia,” the Hebrews 
settled in Jerusalem. 4 There is a choice here between the 14th 

1 by M. Naville. 

2 Did it ever occur to an Egyptologist that to carry an army of 600,000 men on 
foot, not counting children (Exodus, xii. 37), without carrying any water along, eating 
quails and manna for sustenance, would be as “unreasonable” as to “force a great 
body of people into a space far too small for them and into inevitable conflict with the 
Egyptian garrisons ? ” 

3 Jos. c. Apion, I. p. 1039, 1040; Chwolsohn. die Ssabier, I. 328. Josephus is 
careful to state that King Saulatis foresaw the future power of the Assyrians.— c. 
Apion, 1039. The skill of Josephus in argument would lead him to make this point at 
starting, to use it later as an argument already admitted and accepted ! Did Manetho 
state this of Saulatis ? 

4 contra Apion, I. p. 1040. On p. 1039, Manetho (according to Josephus) tells us 
that “Saulatis dwelt in Memphis, and made the Upper as well as the Lower country 

16 


242 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and 8th centuries before our era. In the eighth century the 
Assyrian armies were quite active to the west, very much as 
Josephus states. If we take this view, it would bring the Exo¬ 
dus into the reign of Bocchoris 1 where Lysimachus placed it, 
say about b.c. 725. 2 But, returning to the Biblical narratives, 
the question is whether they are historical fact or scribal fic¬ 
tion. They make Eber the Ancestor. 3 But Heber (Eber) can 
be derived from Gheber, 4 Chebar, Abaris, 5 or Ober (over, be¬ 
yond). A more probable derivation of the word is, ’Hebron 
(once CAebron) where their Grandmother Sarah was buried. 6 
They came somewhere from that neighborhood originally, for 
the on is but a termination to the root Hebr (in Hebraioi). 
The Exodus account and Josephus’s own “wanderings” and 
the March of Moses all have Jerusalem as the point to be 
reached ! Does the inspired account give any explanation why 
Jebus was selected by a lot of people who had never heard of 
it, unless perhaps as a place too strong to be taken f To a Jew¬ 
ish writer at Jerusalem, inside its walls, it might not occur 
that any explanation on that point was necessary. 

The Arabs had a deity Hheber (compare Chebar, Gabar, 
Chebron and Gheber 7 ) a most ancient idol. 8 Mount Kasius di¬ 
vides Egypt from Syria 9 and Judea, 10 and the Arab Cloud-god 11 
was named Kuzah. Koze is Edomite Zeus. Nehemia vii. 63, 
gives ’'Akcos, a man’s name. 

The Arab God Koze, “the Idumeans think him God.”—Josephus, Ant. 
xv. 9. 

tributary.” This is likely to be the fact; and this is a great help to understand the then 
condition of Egypt. 

1 Bocharis, or Bokkhoris (inManetho).—Sayce’s Herod., I. 470; Knotel, S3^stem, 
p. 102: Lauth, Aegypt. Chronol. p. 176, has “ Menophihis-Pheros-Bokkhoris, Pharao 
des Exodus, 1511-1491.” The influence of Egyptian and Assyrian students has tended 
towards an early date for the Exodus. 

2 August Knotel puts it B.c. 727. 

3 Eber, actually the designation of a district.—Konig, Lehrgebaude der Hebrais- 
chen Sprache, p. 21. But Konig only says this in reference to the east, not at all in 
reference to Abaris. 

4 2 Samuel, v. 3; psalm, xix. 4, 5. Septuagint. The elders of Israel anointed Daud 
at Chebron, ’Hebron. Heber could be construed from Hebron! 

6 Abaris, Abaris. 

6 Gen. xxiii. 2, 3. 

7 G, ch, hh, ’h interchange, like k, g, ch. Cabar, Cabir. 

8 Univ. Hist, xviii. 387. 

9 Herodotus, II. 158 ; Strabo, 760. 

Strabo, 760. 

11 lacchos. 


ISIS IN PIICENICIA. 


243 


Josephus states that the Hebrews in Egypt were forced to 
build Kessa. Kesem (Gosh-en) is said to have been the abode 
of the Ebrews (Hebrews) in the mythic period. Judea in 
Strabo’s time extended to Mt. Kasius. 1 Abar ith is the Hebrew 
speech, 2 and Abaris was the fortified post of the Hyksos on the 
Egyptian frontier. Jerusalem is said, in the Egyptian narra¬ 
tive, to have been attacked from Abaris in Egypt, and the 
Bible account admits that the invaders and the native Iebus- 
ites had a joint occupation, although it was long before the 
Hebrews got possession of the entire city Iebus (Jerusalem). 

The Initiated of Jupiter Kasius were in Pelusium. 3 Abaris 
was also called Typhon 4 because “ Typhon cut the sinews of 
Jove on Mt. Kasius.” 5 Achaz reigned at Jerusalem b.c. 743- 
727, Iochaz, 609-608, Ochozia, 888-887, and Ocliozia in Israel, 
b.c. 900-899,—exhibiting prope7' names based on the name 
Koze (or Iacchos) the Arab God of the clouds ! That this was 
the Jewish God we are told by Juvenal when he says that the 
Jews adore nothing but the clouds and heaven’s divinity. 

They adore nothing but the clouds and heaven's divinity.—Juv. xiv. 97. 

THE REPORT OF THE SPIES TO MOSES. 6 

To Amasah (Mase) in the Desert of Pharan, at Kadesh : 
“ Brave the people settled in the land, and cities fortified, 
very great; and, too, Sons of Anak we have seen there. 
Amalak dwells in the land of Negeb, and the Khatti and 
the Iabusi and the Amari dwelling in the mountains, and the 
Kanani 7 settled on the sea and as far as Jordan’s bank.” 8 

1 Strabo, 760. 

2 Simonis Introd. p. 4; Gen. xiv. 2 ; 2 Sam. xx. 14. The worshippers of Seth 
were in Abaris, Pelusium and Tanis. 

2 Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, II. 110; quotes Sextus Empiricus. The name Huksos would 
seem to locate these Scourges of Egypt not far from Mt. Kasius, and the city Kessa. 

4 Seth-Typhon. Seth was the God of the Philistians. In the 230th year of 
Adam, in which Seth was born, is the year 160 of the Kain.—Syncellus, I. p. 16. 

s Jos. c. Apion, I. ; Apollodorus, i. 6, 7; Apollonius Rhod. ii. 1214: Mackay, 
Progress, II. 86. Joshua, xv. 16, mentions Achsa. There are also Achaziah, Chosah, 
,and Hakos, or Akos.—1 Chron. xxiv. 10 ; xxvi. 24. 

Joshua, xv. 4, claims to the River of Egypt, which is not quite up to Mt. Kasius. 

e Compare Mt. Mas, or Mons Masion with the name Ms?, Mase. 

7 AgSnor, the Phoenician Bel, or Agni, appears to have given an impulse to the 
change of the Phoenician Ken (or Ogen) into Kanani “ lowlanders ” ; for the tendency 
was, at one time, to name a people after its deity. We may regard Abel and Ken as 
the two opposites in Palestine dualism. 

8 Numbers, xiii. 28, 29. 


244 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Go not up (into these highlands) for Iaholi is not in your midst. 1 For the 
Amalaqi and the Kanani are there in your front, and you will fall by the sword. 

And the Amaleqi and the Kanani who dwelt in that mountain came down 
and struck them and pounded them as far as Chormah. 2 —Numbers, xiv. 45. 

And Iesous being now aged, and seeing that the cities of 
the Chananites 3 were not easily captured, by reason of the se¬ 
curity of the places in which they were and the strength of 
the walls, which, owing to the natural advantage of the cities, 
the surrounded expected to keep off their enemies from besieg¬ 
ing them through despair of taking them (for the Chananites, 
learning that the Israeli had made the Exodus out of Egypt to 
their destruction , 4 were during all that time at work making 
the cities stronger), gathering together the people unto Silo , 5 
he orders an assembly . . . He said, declaring that kings 
thirty plus one, having ventured to give them battle, were 
overpowered, and that every army whatever, which trusting in 
its own force entered into action, was destroyed, so that no 
posterity to them remained. As to the cities, since indeed 
some have been taken, others required time and a long siege, 
etc. etc. . . . 

And Iesous , 6 having thus said, found the multitude willing, 
and sent out men to measure their country, giving them some 
skilled geometricians . 7 There were such under the Pliarolis. 
Egyptian land-surveyors are mentioned in an inscription on 
the tomb of Seti . 8 

Take up the Ark of the Covenant and cross (the river) before the people.— 
Joshua, iii. G. 

1 They had left the ark of Iac/mh behind in camp.—ibid. xiv. 44. Iachoh is a man 
of war.—Exodus, xv. 3. The Book of the Wars of IacAoh—Numbers, xxi. 14. 

2 Hormah. The Phoenician cities ran from the Mediterranean at Tyre across 
Galilee to the region of Jordan in late times. 

3 Joshua* xii. 1. There is a good deal of mythos connected with the name of Ramses. 

4 Phoenicians, Chna. 

6 Shilo. 

6 Joshua-Iesous. 

7 Josephus, Ant. v. 1. 20, 21. Josephus takes care to show that the Hebrews knew 
geometry, and he is careful not to tell that the Jews had no smith in Israel (1 Sam. 
xiii. 19). If at a later period no Israelite could obtain a spear or sword except Saul and 
Jonathan, how could the Israelites have gone out of Egypt an armed host ?—Exodus, 
xiii. 18 ; xiv. 8. It would not be strange if the Temple scribes had chosen to see a 
likeness between the names Akoub or Iakoub and the Egyptian Kouphu the builder of 
the Great Pyramid. Where a political motive is the leading one, it is not probable 
that Asiatics would have chronological scruples ; particularly if one is a fictitious char¬ 
acter or a deity-name euhemerised. 

8 Brugsch, II. 41. 


ISIS in PHOENICIA. 


245 


“ And they began the calumnies against ns to be sure in 
Egypt. 1 And some wishing to favor them undertook to per¬ 
vert the truth, not admitting the coming of our progenitors into 
Egypt as it really happened , nor speaking truth about the Exodus. 
And they took up many causes of enmity and ill-will. The 
first thing was that our ancestors grew powerful in their coun¬ 
try and, removing therefrom into their own, were again suc¬ 
cessful.” 2 These words reveal a great deal. They admit that 
the Jewish story of the Hebrew entrance into Egypt and their 
Exodus from Egypt was already denied in the first century. 3 
Strabo, however, had heard, at Jerusalem or elsewhere, that 
the Moses was one of the Egyptian priests, 4 that the Ioudaioi 
(Iaudi, from Aud, Ad) 5 were descended from the Egyptians, 6 
that Judaea (Adah, Adaia) was inhabited by mixed races of 
Arabs, Phoenicians and Egyptians, and that (as Juvenal said) 
they had no image. As this was about b.c. 50, it was high 
time for Strabo to have heard of it. He holds that the Jewish 
idea of the Deity is “ this one (unity) which surrounds us all 
and earth and sea, which we call heaven and kosmos and the 
essence (phusis) of the intelligible entities.” 7 A most intelli¬ 
gible description of Judaism ! Theism at the root of the Intel¬ 
ligible Entities! Rather Platonic. 

In endeavoring to connect the Exodus of the Israelite 
Iaudi (the name Iaudi is taken from E. Schrader, Die Keilin- 
schriften und das Alte Testament, p. 188) with the Egyptian 
history we must leave out of the account Manetho’s narrative 
of the expulsion of the Hyksos. It is only by means of the in¬ 
terpolations of Josephus that it has appeared to describe the 
Exodus of the Israelites. Manetho never represents the Hyk- 

1 for nev aiyvnTtov, a better reading perhaps would be neu ev alyvnrco; reading ‘ ‘ in¬ 
deed in Egypt.” 

2 Jos. contra Apion, I. p. 1051. If Manetho had mentioned the Exodus as described 
in the Old Testament Eusebius would not have been silent about it. He merely quotes 
Josephus, who claims in his own favor a disputed point. 

3 The scribe’s national bias appears in the words : Alohim sent me before you to 
place for you a residuum (a posterity) on earth ; and for the living, for you, unto a 
great liberation !—Gen. xlv. 7. That is, for you to live for a great deliverance! In the 
Saturn-Seph religion (the Religion of Sephura) they adored Suphis or Ioseph, Sev. 

4 Hence Initiated into the Mysteries; for Moses was learned in all the sophia of the 
Egyptians.—Acts, vii. 22. 

5 Ad (Od); the altar of Ad.—Joshua, xxii. 34. 

6 Josephus denied this, as we have seen. The circumcision was Egyptian and Arab. 

7 Strabo, 760, 761. He here agrees with Exodus and Juvenal. The Egyptian 
Kneph represents a similar idea.—Compare Uhlemann, Troth, p. 26; Kenrick, I. 314. 


246 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


sos as the same with the Jews, although Josephus artfully 
slides the words “ our forefathers ” into the account which he 
has given, apparently on Manetho’s authority. 1 He is quoted 
by Josephus as saying that the Hyksos established them¬ 
selves in Judaea and built Jerusalem. The main motive of 
Josephus is plainly to be seen in his attempt, in his reply to 
Apion, to win a show of antiquity and former greatness for his 
nation that had always been a subject people, according to 
Tacitus, of Egypt or Mesopotamia, with the exception of the 
period when the Makkabees reigned. The tribes Judah and 
Sumeon are said to have taken Askalon and Azotos, 2 but not 
Gaza and Akkaron. 3 This is the furthest position that Judas 
Makkabaeus reached in his first campaign to the South. Jose¬ 
phus admits that Jerusalem belonged after the Exodus to the 
Beni Ammon and, later, to the Iebusim down to Dauid’s time. 4 
So that he cannot take much benefit from Manetho’s words, 
if they are really his, for Manetho identifies the Hyksos with 
the Beni Ammon, Seirites, or the Iebusites. The statement 
of Herodotus 5 that the Shepherd Philitios (Philistios) kept 
flocks in the regions near the Pyramids in the time of Khufu- 
Kheopha and Khafra-Khephren points directly to the incur¬ 
sions of the Philistines or Kefa as far as Ghizeh, and evidently 
gives support 'to the theory of a Phoenician dynasty in Egypt. 
The unpopularity of these Pyramid-builders is attested both 
by Herodotus, II. 128, and by Petrie’s account of the way 
Khufu’s and Khafra’s statues were smashed. 6 

Josephus tried to identify the Jews with the Shepherds of 
Syria, and in this follows the same line of argument that the 
Jewish scripture follows ; but his aim is to make out that the 
Shepherds left Egypt 390 years before Danaus went to Argos: 

1 Kenrick, II. 158, 159, 267. 

2 the name Aseth or Asoth ? 

3 Jos. Ant. v. 2, 4. 

4 Beniamin.—Jos. Ant. v. 5; vii. 3. 1, 2. 

6 Herod. II. 128. Josephus may have falsified where Manetho, for once, was tell¬ 
ing history. He, however, charges him with introducing an interpolated king, Amen- 
ophis.—Jos. c. Apion, I. 26. According to Manetho, Rameses is son of Amenophis.— 
Ibid. p. 1057. Ramses H. is son of Seti I. Having thus brought Manetho’s exodus to 
the period of Ramses, Josephus rests, content with denying plumply what does not 
suit his purpose. What now is to be said of Khufu, Khafra and Menkara, who are 
placed 2000 years after their time by Herodotus and Diodorus; so Mr, Sayce says! 
Rawlinson places the Great Pyramid at about b.c. 2500. 

6 Petrie, pp. 136, 217. 


isis nsr pikenicia. 


247 


which has a mythical aspect . 1 And what he maintains con¬ 
cerning' Hiram and Solomon has a similar look. So with Me¬ 
nander’s testimony and that of Dius, as related by Josephus ; 
they are not very convincing*. It is far different when he 
quotes Berosus to the campaign of Nabuchodorossar in Syria 
and to the Babylonian Captivity. Here we come to something 
probable, because he is not writing about his own nation, but 
foreigners. 

The mere fact that Masa, king of Moab, fought a cam¬ 
paign against the king of Jerusalem and overcame Iahoh (as 
the Moabite Stone records) refutes the statement (in Joshua, 
xii. 6, 7; xiii. 8, 9, 17, 25, and 1 Chronicles, v. 11) that the He¬ 
brews conquered that territory several hundred years previ¬ 
ously ; 2 for, about B.c. 890, Masa recorded his victory over the 
Jews on the Moabite Stone in an inscription with Tyrian let¬ 
ters. If Dibon had been given as a possession by Joshua to 
the Jewish tribes of Reuben and Gad, how came Masa (Mesha) 
and his father to be the reigning kings there as late as the 
ninth and tenth centuries before our era ? The third part of 
the inscription, which is less legible, mentions a subsequent 
war against the Idumeans. 3 This looks more like a Moabite 
territory than a Hebrew possession! 4 Jeremiah, xxvii. 3, 
mentions a king of Moab after Josiah’s time,—in spite of the 
pun on Mo-ab.—Genesis, xix. 36, 37. 

In an early period, from a thousand to two thousand years 
before our era there may have been writing and annals ; but 
the systems of chronology to which they have given rise have 
been influenced by different motives in different minds and 
countries, and sometimes probably by uniform theories that 
transcended local and national boundaries. The most unreli- 


1 According to Mr. Sayce, the varieties of an account given in Herodotus, III. 45, 
regarding Polukrates and the Samians show that even in Samos, where a library had 
once existed, and where Herodotus had every means of procuring information, events 
which had happened hardly a century before were differently reported. It is clear, 
therefore, that the history was handed down by tradition, not in written records (see 
ch. 55). So at Athens it was possible for the contemporaries of Herodotus and Thuk- 
udides to doubt which of the two sons of Peisistratos, a century before, was the elder 
(Thuk. i. 20).—Sayce, Herod. 250,256. 

2 Josh. xv. 1-4. 

8 Taylor, Alphabet, I. 210. 

4 Especially if we remember that the Hebrew Bible was not complete without the 
Book of Daniel which dates at least as late as the middle of the 2nd century before our 


era. 


248 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


able factor at such remote periods was man himself. When 
however we come to a later period, hear Lepsius. “ Criticism 
was completely out of their sphere, historical as well as philo¬ 
logical; and when, nevertheless, we do meet with it, it is 
generally unsatisfactory, and even from the most distinguished 
writers, astonishingly feeble. The school of professional Alex¬ 
andrian critics is by no means excepted. We find the most 
striking examples of this, particularly in the Christian chro- 
nologists, who were not wanting either in abundance of authori¬ 
ties, nor in extensive learning and honest intention. 1 But we 
have actually seen, from the example of Josephus, as well as 
from earlier and later authors, how the opinion above men¬ 
tioned, of the identity of the Hyksos with the Jews, really 
gained admittance from various very superficial foundations, 
and yet Josephus belonged undoubtedly to the most learned 
antiquarians 2 whom we can place under our observation here. 3 
“ The necessity for an agreement between the Christian-Jewish 
and the Egyptian computation of time produced, towards the 
end of the third, or the beginning of the fourth century, two 
spurious writings: first, the Old Chronicle, which retained the 
Egyptian cyclical point of view, that, namely, of the history of 
the gods, and even extended it, yet in such a manner that the 
means of reduction was suggested by which these large num¬ 
bers might be compressed into the period assumed as that 
given by Moses for the time since Adam. 4 With the same end 
in view the first 15 dynasties of man were transformed into 15 
generations. The next spurious work, the Sothis, professed to 
be Manethonic; and could do this more easily because a long 
time had elapsed since the genuine history had been lost. This 
writing proceeded upon the same road as the Old Chronicle. 
By means of alterations and abbreviations it reduced the Egyp¬ 
tian numbers to certain epochs, which were considered as Bib¬ 
lical, and on the other hand partly abandoned the Cyclical 
basis. Eusebius, who wrote in the fourth century, was deceived 
by both these writings and endeavored to make their state- 

1 probably intense partisans, and not wholly without personal motives. 

2 Lepsius is more charitable to Josephus than the author has been. 

3 Lepsius, Letters, p. 487. Syncellus, in the 8th century, A.D., follows the false 
Sothis.—ibid. p. 490. Lepsius, p. 494, thinks B. c. 3893 the first year of Menes. Lauth 
locates Menes in Memphis b.c. 4125. 

4 Lepsius must assume that Adam’s successors could record events, or else that this 
piece of information was handed down by Arab tradition !—Lepsius, p. 458. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


249 


ments agree with, the genuine Manethonic lists.” 1 “ The 

arrangements proposed by the Book of Sothis and by Syn- 
cellus agree strictly with those of Eusebius ; they give also 
two national dynasties before the Shepherds ; but it is easy to 
see that the lists of names that they bring to these national 
dynasties do not deserve any confidence.” 2 If a nation loses 
its monuments, either through its own fault or through cir¬ 
cumstances, it will be unable to preserve its history, which 
becomes confused and traditionary, and in place of the purely 
historical account which it has lost, it obtains, at the best, an¬ 
other principle of internal order; a poetic-mythological, as 
with the Greeks ; a philosophic-mythological, as with the In¬ 
dians ; or a religious one, as with the Israelites; but it always 
loses its original value as a reproduction of a series of real 
facts. 3 

In Homer’s Iliad we find these Phoenician names : Agenor 
(xi. 59), Plioinix (ix. 168), the River Iardan in Krete, the R. 
Sangarius in Phrygia, Aphareus the name of a leader, Meriones 
(II. v.), Gargarus (compare the Hebrew name Karkar or Khar- 
khor, Gara,—Judg. iii. 15—also Beth Kar), the R. Iardan (II. 
vii. 135); and the intercourse between Troja and Sidon is shown 
to have been over the broad sea in Iliad vi. 291. In the 
Odyssey, viii. 100, Akroneus appears. Compare Akkaron, Ek- 
ron, the Pliilistian city. Greek trading with Egypt, Libya 
and Egyptian Thebes is seen in Odyssey iv. 80, 130. Akkaron 
is seen in Joshua, xix. 43. The Hebrew Iachi (Life) is likewise 
the source of the Name Iacchos. 

Iahoh thundered from the heavens.— 2 Samuel, xxii. 14. 

Zeus thundered greatly from Ida.—Homer, II. viii. 75. 

Ilium, 4 Kadmus 5 and Plioinix 6 are names, like Dor, that con¬ 
nect Syria with Asia Minor, Kyprus, Krete and Greece. The 
Syrian myths were common to the Kilikians, 7 who lived north 

1 Lepsius, Letters, p. 498. Bohn. 

2 Les arrangements proposes par le livre de Sothis et par le Syncelle s’accordent a 
la rigeueur avec ceux d’Eusebe, etc.—Chabas, les Pasteurs, p. 15. 

3 Lepsius, Letters, Introd. to the Chronol. of the Egyptians, p. 368. 

4 Compare II, El, Eli : the city Elaeus at the entrance of the Dardanelles. 

6 Kadmah means “to the east.” Kadmah.—Gen. xxv. 15. Kadmath.—Joshua, 
xiii. 18. Kadimah, a district, further east, mi kedem “from the east.” 

6 a palm. 

7 Strabo, 626. “ Others in Kilikia and certain ones in Syria make up this particular 
myth.”—Strabo, 626. 


250 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of Kyprus, from Tarsus westward. Then we liave a migration 
from the Orontes and Kilikia through the countries repre¬ 
sented by the names Lud, Kar, and Mus, into Phrygia, past 
Tereia and Troia to the Propontis, thence to Thrake, Boeotia 
and Thebes. Phoenician (or Klietian) arts passed up to Kap- 
padokia and the Black Sea, associated with such Syro-Phoenician 
and Hebrew ideas as are found in the drama of Ipliigeneia at 
Taurus: namely, not to touch a corpse, nor even a child-bed, 
nor even lightly with his hands touch a dead body. 1 Do not 
shave a spot between your eyes for one dead.—Deuteron. xiv. 1. 
No Hebrew priest was allowed to be contaminated for the 
dead, except in certain cases; and the Higlrpriest must not go 
to any corpses of the dead. In the note 1, it will be seen that 
these notions extended from the Black Sea down through Syria 
to India: mater sit immunda per puejperium, and continues 
so for 7 days.—Leviticus, xii. 2, 4; Liglitfoot, 734. 

Euripides, Iphig. in Taur. 3S1, 382. If any priest of Byblus (in Syria) should 
look on a corpse he stays away that day from the temple; and he goes there the next 
day but one after having purified himself. All the relatives of the deceased are impure 
and keep away from the temple for thirty days, when, having shaved their heads, they 
enter it. Before doing this it is unholy for them to enter.—Lucian, de Dea Syria, 53. 
The Hindus also have this horror at the remains, of all that has been alive.—Jacolliot, 
Fakirs, 198. So too the Jews-.—Numbers, ix. 6, 7. The Hindus, like the people of 
Tauris and the Syrians, regarded a child-bed as defilement. “ There cotnes a new life 
into the world, and in those sacred hours when a mother trembles between this world 
and the next, she is usually treated like a thing, even in the best orthodox Hindu-Pagan 
families. She is put into the worst room, probably, and for days and weeks no one is 
allowed to go near her. The air of the roo'm may be like that of a miniature black-hole 
of Calcutta, and yet there is no attempt made to purify it. She has only coarse food ; 
any touch of this mother by other members of the household is pollution.” Rev. 
Joseph Cook, Lecture. Boston Daily Advertiser, March 13, 1883. Nimirum, hae sunt, 
magnae et mirae, illae res quas Deus patrat in formatione infantis.—R. Jochanan; 
Wagenseil’s Sota, p. 71; Lightfoot, Hor. Heb. 619, 806. Childbirth makes a woman 
unclean seven days. During her purification, which lasts thirty-three days, she is to 
touch no hallowed thing, and is not allowed to visit the Temple.—Leviticus, xii. 2, 4; 
Epistle of Jeremiah (Baruch, vi. 29) 29. No one could die or be delivered of an infant 
within the sacred grove of ^Esculapius.—Pausanias, II. 27, 2. We now see what defiled 
the Jewish temple, when dead men’s bones were strewn there, as Josephus relates. 
The Hebrew Deity was the God of Life, not the God of the dead bodies. 

In the Vedic period, on the day when the corpse of a Hindu was burned the rela¬ 
tives bathed. The following ten days were dayg of mourning, or, as they were after¬ 
wards called, days of impurity , when the mourners withdrew from contact with the 
world. After the collection of the ashes, they bathed and offered a /Sraddha to the de¬ 
parted.—Max Muller, 234. They stuck to Bal Pour and ate the sacrifices of the dead. 
—Psalm, cvi. 28. The funeral feast was a Babylonian institution.—Epistle of Jere¬ 
miah, 32. The feasts given to those invited to assist at a £raddha were sometimes 
very sumptuous, and meat was eaten, even the killing and eating a cow was allowed at 
them.—Max Muller, 241, 375, 376; Monier Williams, Ind. Wisd. 207, 208, 253-256. 


ISIS IN PIICE NIG I A. 


251 


Kyprus is visible from Brumanah in Syria, in the Lebanon 
about four hours’ distance from Beirut, and on the death of 
one of the family of the emir of the village, the people were 
not permitted to wash their clothes for 40 days. This was the 
custom. 1 In most respects the Jew and Moslem did not differ. 
Neither can eat the flesh with any of its blood left in it; the 
hare defiles the Moslem, and the Jew was forbidden to eat it. 2 
Like the Moslems and Hindus, Jacob had four wives. 

The accident is this. He is not pure ; for he is unclean.—1 Samuel, xx. 26. 

Homer mentions Arubas, a Phoenikian from Sidon. 3 Homer 
also has the name Kebriones (II. viii. 317) which is the Phoeni¬ 
cian and Hebrew Gabor (and Akbar). In Rhodes whole layers 
of discoveries have a purely Phoenician character. 4 Agenor, 
Assaeus, Phoinix (Iliad, ix. 168) point at once to Phoenicia. 
Kebriones’ is formed from Kabar. 

From Syria in different currents Semites penetrated into 
the peninsula of Asia Minor, the Lydians to the Hermus- 
valley, the Phoenicians to the south coast. The first emigra¬ 
tion of the Phoenicians from their narrow native land was to 
the shore of the sea of Cyprus (Kupros) to the lands at the 
southern foot of Taurus. They entered by sea and by land ; 
Kilikia, the nearest border-land, became a portion of Phoenicia, 
and in the mountains of Lukia (Lyeia) a race related to them, 
the Solumi, firmly established themselves. In the regions 
most thickly settled by Phoenicians the races mingled so that 
the true nationality could appear doubtful. Such mixed races 
were known also to the ancient inhabitants of Asia Minor and 
to them the Karians belonged first. Astura was a Phoenician 
city on the Karian coast opposite Rhodes. Phoenicians and 
Karians are in the oldest history of the peoples of the archipel- 


1 Syria and the Holy Land, pp. 83, 85. See Meuschen, p. 937; Levit. xii. 2, 4; 
xxi. 2, 3 ; Numb. ix. 6, 7 ; xix. 11, 13 ; Euripides, Alkest., 21, 22, 99-101; Hippolyt., 
1437. 

2 Syria and the Holy Land, p. 292 ; Levit. xi. 6. 

3 Odyssey, xv. 326. Compare the Hebrew name Arba.—Joshua, xiv. 15. The 
lion is an Eastern symbol of the Sun, Mithra. The fore part of a lion devouring his 
prey is found on the early coinage of the cities of Western Asia Minor, which M. Fran¬ 
cis Lenormant considers to have been struck in Ionia.—Lenormant, l’Apulie et la Lu-. 
canie, II. 396-398. 

4 Milchhoefer, p. 125. 


252 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


ago 1 indissolubly connected together. 2 Homer, Iliad, v. 9, 
has a Trojan named Dar-es. 

The name Dardanus shows that the Assyrian and Syrian 
Herakles (Melicertes, Melcarth), was very anciently known at 
Smyrna and Ephesus, as well as to the Trojans and Jews, by 
his name Adar, which is a name of the Phoenician Herakles- 
Moloch, that of a Jewish month, is retained in two places as 
the name of Dor in Palestine and is identical with the names 
Adar (1 Chron. viii. 3, 15), Adar-melech, Adars tower (Gen. 
xxxy. 21), DARius, Dorus and the Dorians. The Phrygian 
Herakles is the Phoenician. He took the city Ilion. Ach, the 
name of the Achaians, 3 resembles Iach, Achis, Agis and Aug, 
means fire in Hebrew, and the Syrians, Hebrews, Moabites and 
Achseans w T ere all Sabian fire worshippers. Dardanus is said 
to have taught the Mysteries of the Mother of the Gods, that 
appear to be the Mysteries of the Kabiri. “ Among the ancient 
population, the Phrygians, Semitic immigrants from the Eu¬ 
phrates had pushed in, pressing to the west along the Halys- 
valley, especially in the fruitful lowlands of the Hermos- 
stream, where they disappeared among older clans of Pelasgic 
origin. Thus the race of Ludians was formed upon the basis 
of a population related to the Phrygians and Armenians.” 4 
The Ludians derived their first dynasty of rulers from Atus, or 
Atys, a deity belonging to the circle of the Mountain-Mother, 
whose worship with its infuriating music filled the whole up¬ 
land country of Lydia and Phrygia. 5 

The Pelopids were by descent Phrygian Thrakians. The 
affinities of the Thrakians lie with the Slavs and Lithua¬ 
nians on the one side and in other directions with Iranians and 
Greeks. 6 The line of connection between Phrygian and the 
other Aryan languages would seem to have been Pelasgian, 
Sclavonian, Sarmatian, Turanian, Median. Mr. A. H. Sayce 
says : “ The scanty relics of the Aryan languages of Asia Minor 
found in inscriptions and the glosses of Greek grammarians 
belong to the Western division of the (Aryan) family, and thus 

1 Compare E. Curtius, Griech. Gesch. I. 48-58. Kadmeia, a citadel founded by 
Kadmus.—ibid. I. 80, 81. 

2 Curtius, I. 38, 50. 

3 Primitive Achaians were in Kyprus and in Krete.—ib. I. 83. 

4 ib. I. 67; Rinck, Relig. d. Hellenen, I. 121. 

6 Curtius, I. 67. 

6 Academy, Dec. 29, 1883. A. T. Evans; August 23, 1884, p. 127. 


ISIS IN PHCENICIA. 


253 


bear out the old traditions which made Lydians, Karians, Mys- 
ians and Phrygians brethren one of the other, which derived 
the Mysians from Thrace (Thrake) and saw in the Phrygians 
the Thracian Briges. The Halys formed the eastern boundary 
of Aryan domination in Asia Minor ; the country beyond was 
possessed by Alarodians, 1 certainly by tribes not of the Aryan 
stock.” Mr. Sayce remarks that the Medes had not advanced 
from the west so far as Media Rhagiana before the ninth cen¬ 
tury b.c. 2 The Pelasgians may be traced step by step to a 
primitive settlement in Media. The Thracians, Getae, Scuthae 
and Sauromatae were so many links in a long chain connecting 
the Pelasgians with Media, the Sauromatae were at least in 
part allied to the Sclavonians, and the Pelasgian was unques¬ 
tionably most nearly allied to the Sclavonian. The Sclavonians 
originally dwelt in the north of Media in the countries close to 
Assyria, and Sclavonian is the point of transition from the 
Semitic to the Indo-Germanic languages. 3 Movers, Phonizier, 
I. 20, points to an expansion of the Phoenician race into Thrake 
and the neighboring islands, and the festival of the Adonia was 
celebrated in Macedonia.—ibid. 21. Then we find the worship 
of Zahara, Zaretis, or Zaharet, in the north Aegean and in 
Thrake, where the Thrakian Venus was called Zerunthia.—ibid. 
22. The Phoenicians preceded the Greeks in their settlements 
along the coasts of Asia Minor from Kilikia and Karia to 
Troja and Thrake. 

The Beni Kadm were in arms and pitched their tents in the 
valley Izrael. 4 Kadmos was from Samothrake, and, as his name 
shows a Hero equivalent to Hermes. 5 

Numenius believed that the wisdom of Greece flowed origi¬ 
nally from an Eastern source. He referred Plato to Pythag¬ 
oras, and Pythagoras to the sages of the East. 6 The Adonis 
worship is traced to Babylon where Hea 7 ruled over water and 
Hades. 8 Adonis in Hades is Pluto (represented as Bacchus 
with cloven foot and horns), and Zeus sent Iris (the Lunar 

1 from the Kaukasus. 

2 A. H. Sayce, II. 71, 72. 

3 Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 323. 

4 Judges, vi. 33. 

6 Gerhard, p. 261. The Hermes-worship came from Samothrakg. —ibid. 262. 

6 Ritter, Hist. Phil. iv. 512; Eusebius, pr. ev. ix. 7; x. 10; xiv. 5. 

7 Is it not Chia, the God of life, Iacchos in Hades ? Iah or Ea ! 

8 Dunlap, Sod, I. 28. note 2; Hesiod, Theog. 783, 786. 


254 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Goddess Iriah, Rachel) to bring- up the subterranean water. 
The Babylonian cylinder in the British Museum, which has 
been said to be a representation of Adam and Eve tempted by 
the Serpent to pluck the apple and eat, may perhaps be a 
Plutonian or Dionysiac 1 emblem having the horns of Diony- 
sus-Iacchos and the pine-tree as well as the serpent. But as 
the serpent is a chthonian emblem among the Etruskans, the 
scene seems to refer to the Hesperides Garden or some gloomy 
spot below, and the two figures may represent the priest and 
priestess in the Mysteries of Proserpine when they disappear 
below ; after which they reappear, and their appearance sym¬ 
bolises the return of life tp the earth, of which the two pine- 
cones at the end of the lowest branches of that most forlorn 
tree may indicate the first budding in the realm of Hades. 
But the horns point to Lunus or Sin, the Osiris-Dionysus. 
This Babylonian cylinder representing the two figures clothed 
cannot indicate Adam and Eve, as both were naked; as the 
custom was to represent (the spirits) Dionysus and Demeter, 
the mother of every living. As the serpent did not necessarily 
signify the Evil principle, but was a symbol of the spirit in 
the Mysteries ; it is a fair inference that the third chapter of 
Genesis and the whole Pentateuch point to a late period of 
the Dionysus-worship between b.c. 150 and B.c. 85, when it was 
possible to mould the Old Testament religion into a jjositive 
form. 

“ ra fxvcrroiv S’ opy l zvTvyr]<j i8wk” 

The Two Great Principia, Apasson and Taautha, the Taaut 
(Chochmah) and the Bena, Bel and Mulitta, Adonis and Yenus, 
Moloch and Melechet, Amon and Mene (Minerva), Attis and 
Athena, were translated from the Euphrates and the Jordan 
into the Mythologies of Asia Minor, Egypt, Carthage, Greece 
and Italy. Adam and Eua (the Mighty Mother) were incor¬ 
porated in the Mysteries of the 4 entire inhabited earth.’ The 
oriental philosophy of dualism in the Mysteries before Christ 
became extended beyond Palestine, as Christianism afterwards 
was. Thus in these Mysteries that were carried from Arabia 
to the West we behold the beginning of that unification that 


1 Orpheus is Dionysus Melampous, who founded his own Mysteries.—Nork, Rcal- 
Worterbuch, III. p. 350. The clothing is as great an objection to the Dionysus hy¬ 
pothesis as it is to the supposition that Adam is meant. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


255 


the Eoman Empire politically accomplished, that the Christian 
Church aimed at, the Paulinist of Asia contemiDlated, and Philo 
Judaeus forecasted. They all adored Astarta (Aphrodite, with 
Her doves). 1 —1 Kings, xi. 33. Adonis is the God of water and 
corn. 2 The Beni Don 3 lived in the midst of Adonis-revivals 
and Lebanon reminiscences ; for this tribe dwelt in the Leba¬ 
non. 4 Moses wrote Dan 5 as the name in Abrahm’s time, 6 
which contradicts Judges, xviii. 29, and thus discredits the 
written account. When in a drought 7 Adonis was mourned, he 
was called Bacchus, from the Hebrew Bacoth, Mournings. 

Oreb (n“iy) means the West, the dwellers in the West, the 
Hesperides. The Ereb, Erebus, is the Tamas 8 of Hades, 
where Orpheus, the Bephaim, and Erebenna Night dwelt. 
Orpheus is the Clithonian Bacchus Liber, 9 and Libera is the 
Euru-Dike. Kiriath Arba is a city of the Western Palestine, 
the ancient Chebron or ’Hebron. Take the b in Orb (siy), 
pronounce it a v, and we have Orva, Orfa, Orfe, Orfeus, the 
Dionysus orphneus. 10 Pronounce the Hebrew B, Y, in Binah, 
and we get the Homan Yenus. 

In the midst of the rock there is a dark cave 

Towards the West, turned to Erebus.—Homer, Odyssey, xii. 80, 81. 

M. Lenormant exhibits the resurrection-idea in the Diony- 
siac Mysteries in the eighth century before Christ. If then the 
scribes, sitting in the seat of Moses, do not in the Pentateuch 


1 Milchhoefer, Anfange der Kunst in Griechenland, p. 8. 

2 Compare psalm, lxv. 9. 

3 Dan, pronounced Don. We give the forms of the name, Adan, Adon, TanacA, 

Atan, Tan, Tanis, Atunis, Tunis, Tunes; compare the city names Adana, Danah and 
Tuana.—See the Academy , No. 535, p. 102. “ Tenedos” (Tan’s seat), Atten’s abode, 

“was left behind.”—Quint. Smyr. vi. 407. 

4 Judges, xviii. 27, 28, 29 ; compare Munk, Palestine, p. 33. See Joshua, xiii. 6; 
xvii. 18. 

5 These Danites in the Lebanon or near Ekron and Asdod are likely to have adored 
Bal Adonis and the fair-ankled DanaS, the Venus.—See Ezekiel, viii. 5. 

6 Genesis, xiv. 14; Deuteron. xxxiv. 1. 

7 Joel, i. 9, 10, 13, 14; Zachariah, xii 11. 

8 Tamaseion, Tamaseum, the Garden of Hades. 

9 F. Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 350. OrphnS is Darkness, my is dark, evening. 
Oreph in Isaiah, lxvi. 3, means Destroyer, Killer. Darkness belongs in Erebus.— 
Quint. Smyrn., xii. 117. At dark Pluto carried off Proserpina. 

10 from orphnos, dark. The ideas orbus, destitute, empty, bereft, deprived, uidua- 
tus are also connected with Hades and Orpheus. Urpha in New Persian means fire.— 
Nork, Hebr. Worterbuch, p. 21. 


256 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


once mention the resurrection of the dead, while the Prophets, 
Psalms and Job are full of it, indifference to this great Pharisee 
doctrine is undoubtedly owing to the influence of the Sadukean 
opinions at the Court of the Jewish Highpriest, and furnishes 
an approximate date for the Pentateuch. It is rather surpris¬ 
ing that the Egyptian “ Book of the Dead ” should unite the 
departed souls with Osiris in heaven, and that Moses, who is 
assumed to have brought the Mysteries out of Egypt, should 
keep his mouth closed tight in regard to the ascension of de¬ 
parted souls. It is a fact that the eschatology, the doctrine of 
the End of the world, 1 appears in Genesis, xlix. 1. 

It is perfectly clear that the great mass of Levitical legisla¬ 
tion, with the ritual entirely constructed for the sanctuary of 
the ark and the priests of the house of Aaron, cannot have had 
practical currency and recognition in the Northern Kingdom. 2 
The priests could not have stultified themselves by accepting 
the authority of a code according to which their whole worship 
was schismatic ; nor can the code have been the basis of pop¬ 
ular faith or prophetic doctrine, since Elijah and Elisha had 
no quarrel with the sanctuaries of their nation. Hosea him¬ 
self, in his bitter complaints against the priests, never up¬ 
braids them as schismatic usurpers of an illegitimate authority, 
but speaks of them as men who had proved untrue to a legit¬ 
imate and lofty office. The same argument proves that the 
code of Deuteronomy was unknown, for it also treats all the 
northern sanctuaries as schismatic and heathenish, acknowl¬ 
edging but one place of lawful pilgrimage for all the seed of 
Jacob. 3 Thoughtful and godly men of the Northern Kingdom 
understood the religion of Jehovah 4 though they knew noth¬ 
ing of the greater Pentateuchal codes. 5 6 

Who averts his ear from hearing Thorah, even his prayers are abomination. 
—Proverbs, xxviii. 9. 

My flesh also shall live in hope, 

For thou wilt not not leave my soul in Hades 

Neither wilt thou give thy chasid 6 to see corruption.—Psalm, xvi. 9, 10. 

1 Acharith hajjomin, the End of the days, the final days.—Gen. xlix. 1. 

2 Israel. 

3 W. Robertson Smith, the Prophets of Israel, 113. 

4 Ihoh, Ia’hoh, ‘the four letters.’ 

5 W. R. Smith, the Prophets, 118. Deuteronomy, xvii. 14,15, is not altogether in 
accord with 1 Samuel, xii. 19. 

6 2 Kings xxiii. 7 ; Ovid, Fast. iii. 528; Lucian, de Dea Syria, 50, 51. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


257 


The Chasidim were the casti (chasidi or chasdim); the Jewish 
religion requiring self-denial and chastity particularly. The 
Galli or eunuch-priests, according to Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, belonged 
to the order of the zadikim or chasidim, 1 and performed in the 
Mysteries. 2 

The Mysteries of Iac/mli are for those who fear him.—Psalm, xxv. 14. 

Let the praise of him be in the “ qahal ” 3 of the chasidim.—Psalm, cxlix. 1. 

They heard a great voice from heaven, saying : Come up here ! 

And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud.—Rev. xi. 12. 

The dead in Christos will rise first ; then we who remain alive will be caught 
up with them in the clouds 4 to meet the Kurios in the air.—Thessalonians, iv. 
17. 

Immortal time shall not indeed destroy the family of the blest!—Quintus 
Smyrn. xiv. 256. 

Clemens Alexandrinus, explaining the passage, in the tenth 
book of Plato, respecting the path of souls over the meadow 
which arrive at their destination on the eighth day, says that 
the seven days correspond to the seven planets, and that the 
road they take afterwards leads them to the eighth heaven, 
namely the heaven of the fixed stars or the firmament. There 
is an eighth door in the cave of Mithra which is on the sum¬ 
mit of the ladder 5 on which are the seven doors of the planets 
through which the souls pass. We have now arrived at the 
eighth heaven, or the firmament. 6 The place to which souls 
ascended before the last judgment was the moon. 7 The Elysian 
fields were situated beyond the cone of shadow which the 
earth projects when opposite the sun and which the moon tra¬ 
verses during eclipses. The virtuous souls remain in the moon, 
where they are in a condition which is agreeable but not per¬ 
fectly happy. 8 Pindar 9 represents Hades holding the staff 


1 Jennings, Jewish Ant., 262. 

2 Lucian, de Dea Syria, 50. 

3 Kalo in Latin, <eaA«o in Greek. 

4 In the Book of Daniel, the Messiah appears as bar Anos in the clouds. 

6 Iaqab’s ladder. 

6 Mankind, p. 526. 

7 ibid. 555. 

8 p. 556. Here is the holy city which had the mystic name Jerusalem, which, ac¬ 
cording to St. Augustine, de civitate Dei, XIX. cap. xi., means Vision of Peace.—Man¬ 
kind, 558. Lucian Verae Hist. II., 6, 11, describes this city of the happy, the city of 
gold, etc. See Rev. xxi. 18 ff. 

8 Born B.C. 522. Prof. Rossi found in the catacombs beyond the Porto Sebastiano 
a fresco representing a man seated at a table between two allegorical figures. On one 

17 


( 


258 THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 

with which he leads down by the deep hollow way the souls 
to the mansions below. 

My bone was not liid from Tbee wlien I was made in secret, curiously 
wrought in tlie lowest chambers of the earth.—Ps. cxxxix. 15. 

There is a certain primal Light blessed, incorruptible, 
boundless, in the power of Buthos (the Deep). But this is the 
Father of all, and is called first “Man;” but Ennoia (Mind, 
Logos) is His forth-proceeding Son, Son of the (Father) who 
sends him forth, and this is the Son of the “ Man,” second Man. 
Next after these is the Sacred Spiritus, and under the Spirit 
above were the elements separated, water, the tenebrae, the 
abyss, chaos.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. It is plain enough that this 
sort of gnostic ‘antecosmogony ’ preceded the first chapter of 
Genesis, verses 2, 3, 4, 6, 7. The infinite Power is Fire, says 
Simon Magus, and its nature is twofold. Adam is the £ Man ’ 
in the Moon that is at once both male and female; 1 “ for one is 
the blessed nature of the blessed Man on high.” 2 Adam is al¬ 
so addressed as the Moon’s horn and identified with Adonis- 
Attis. 3 He was adored as the Persian Mithra in male and 
female form. 4 The Naaseni called the “primal Power of all” 
Man, the same as Son of Man ; him they divide into three parts. 
For, say they, the Intelligent belongs to him, and the Psychi¬ 
cal and the material. And they call him Adamas and consider 
that the Gnosis (knowledge) of him is the beginning of the 
ability to know God! 5 Danae is Edem ; 6 which is the name of 
the Adonis-garden or Garden of Adan (Eden) in the sides of 
the North, under Ararat, whence the Phasis, Arases, Tigris and 
Euphrates flow. “ The Samotliracians, in the Mysteries per- 


side is the inscription, Irene , da caldam , and, on the other, Agape, misce mihi. The 
banqueter, says Rossi, is evidently a departed soul partaking of the eternal feast and 
attended by Irene and Agape. 

1 Hippolytus, v. 6, 8. Duncker, 132, 150; Miller, pp. 94, 106. Adam corresponds 
to Saturn-Kronos.—See Palmer, Egypt. Chronicles, 435. That is to Alohim.—Gen. i. 1. 

2 ibid. Duncker, p. 150 ; Miller, p. 106. “ Another is the mortal nature below.”— 

ibid. p. 150; p. 106. 

3 ibid. pp. 150, 168; Miller, pp. 106,119. Dionysus is on the breast of the Dark 
Virgin, Damia, DemSter. Iacchos is Demeter’s Boy and Spouse.—Gerhard, Gr. 
My thol. § 419. p. 453. Adonis is Son and Husband. 

4 Julius Firmicus Maternus, de Errore, v. pp. 65, 66; Gerhard, Gr. M. Anhang, 
part II. p. 332. 

6 Hippolytus, x. 9. 

8 ibid. v. 26. p. 228. Duncker. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


259 


formed among them, hand down that Adam is primal Man.” 1 
The Samothracian Mysteries came from the Orient; 2 in that 
case they are Adonis-mysteries, with which the Adam (Invic- 
tus) is closely connected, like Zagreus bimorphos in Hades; 
for both Adam and Zagreus are represented in dual nature, 
like Dionysus 3 and Amon-Mene. Posaidonios is the Hades 
Watergod (the spiritus in the sea-water), Adam Lunus, Allah 
Sin, Hermes-Aphroditus Adonaios. Zagreus is the Phrygian 
Serpent-God ; 4 compare the Serpent associated in Genesis with 
Adam’s moon-plant, 5 the holy Horn, or tree of life. The gene¬ 
sis took place in the moon, according to the ancients; for it 
was the seat of the four elements. Adonis enters the moon, 
like Adam and Osiris, and is become diphues, like the Kabba- 
list I-ah, Iachoh, Iao and Iaoh (the Hebrew tetragrammaton 
mrP). Adonis was called in Kyprus Ao (the beginning and the 
end, the alpha and omega). Damia (Eua, Demeter) is the name 
of the lunar half of Dionysus. 6 The Greeks carried their script¬ 
ures in the box (or ark) of Demeter. 7 Kora seems to come from 
Samotlirake and Thebes. 8 The Arabian Dionysus is Moloch- 
Saturn with offerings of slaughtered men and children. 

Philo’s remark that “ God, making Intellect 9 first, called it 
Adam ; afterwards he created Sensation 10 to which he gave 
the name of Life ” 11 appears to be kabalist doctrine. Servius 
tells us that from the moon we got our corpus. Now Isis (in 
Hebrew Asah, Issa, and Aisah 12 ) is the Moon, 13 where primal 
matter was in watery shape. 

“ Luna regit menses.” 

For the Life-god 14 had entirely closed every uterus of the house of Abime- 
lecli on account of Sarach the (lunar) wife of Abralim.—Gen. xx. 18. 

1 ibid. v. 8. p. 152. 

2 See Gerhard, pp. 496, 446, 428, 430-433, 435, 436, 440, 443, 445, 483, 485, 503, 504, 
506, 518, 140, 142, 382, 391, 484. Demeter Melaina is the Death-goddess.—ibid. 452, 
465. 

s ibid. pp. 503-505. 

4 ibid. 435, 502, 504. 

5 Compare the man-woman Aphrodit.—Gerhard, pp. 534, 535. 

s ibid. 441, 451. 

7 443. 

8 451. 

9 Divine Mind, Logos. 

10 Sensum. Eua. 

11 Philo, Quaest. i. 53. See below. 

12 The point being added. 

13 Diodorus Siculus, I. 10. 

14 Bromius, Iacchos, Iachoh, Ia’hoh, Iao, and Kneph. 


260 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON ,. 


Abralim and Sara’li are brother and sister, 1 like Osiris and 
Isis. 2 The Logos and its Sakti could always be represented 
as brother and sister, like Apollo and Diana or Minerva, or 
Adam and Eua, in the Hermaphrodite or Hermatliena. This 
completes the mythological parallelism between Osiris, 
Abrahm, Brahma and Isis, Ishah, Sara’h, Sarasvati. The 
Egyptians held that the legends about Osiris and Isis and all 
their other mythological fables refer either to the stars, their 
appearances and occultations and the periods of their risings, 
or to the increase and decrease of the moon, or to the cycles 
of the sun, or the diurnal and nocturnal hemispheres, or to 
the Biver. 3 Those Egyptian priests, says Lepsius, "were 
versed in astronomy, but mysterious and far from communica¬ 
tive ; it was only after the lapse of time, and by polite atten¬ 
tions, that they allowed themselves to be induced to commu¬ 
nicate some of their doctrines : but still the most part was kept 
concealed. 4 Plutarch mentions “ the philosophy which covers 
up most subjects in myths and tales that have obscure sem¬ 
blances and manifestations of truth; this they verily declare 
when they fitly place sphinxes before the temples, as if their 
theology had enigmatic wisdom.” 5 This is the philosophy of 
the Jewish chacham ; and it has passed from the synagogue 
to the Church. 6 

In Saturn and Osiris the Syrians beheld the rulers of Dark¬ 
ness and Light, 7 and as they dreamed of the Resurrection of 
Osiris from Hades, the Sphinx (Mithra’s emblem) rose above 
the sands pointing beyond the cemetery of the pyramids to the 
ever-recurring morn in the east,—the eternal symbol of the 
Return of Osiris from darkness to light. This consolation of 
the oriental religion has been handed down from Persian, 
Egyptian, Arab, and Jew until it has become the pillar of the 
Christian faith. In the hall of the martyred Adonis the per¬ 
fume of myrrh filled the air. 8 In the temple at Jerusalem the 
ceremonies of the God’s death and mourning were performed, 9 

1 Gen. xx. 2. 

2 Diodorus, I. 13. 

3 From Chaeremon. 

4 Lepsius, Letters, p. 386 ; Strabo, xvii. p. 806. 

6 Plutarch de Iside, 9. 

6 Whatever has been created is finite, and the finite is included in the infinite. 

7 Gen. i. 18, points to the separation between the light and the darkness, 

8 P. Gener, la Mort du Diable, p. 62. 

9 Ezekiel, viii. 3, 5, 14. 


ISIS IJST PHCENIGIA. 


261 


and when the Magi appeared before the new-born Child of 
Light they brought as offerings the Mithra-symbols, gold, 
frankincense, and myrrh 1 to Jerusalem. The ancients seem to 
have founded their hopes of the resurrection of the soul and 
body entirely upon the notion that the Sun 1 2 returns from the 
region of Darkness and death under the earth’s surface. 

According to Josephus 3 the Greeks related that the oldest 
of their Gods were bound in Tartarus. Josephus might have 
added in reference to Osiris and Turn (Atam) that the same 
mythology occurred in the case of the Phoenician, Egyptian 
and Oriental Saturn. Take the names Ilos, Kronos, Rhea, Seb, 
Maut, Iachabel, Kab (Khabal) 4 or Keb, Kubele, Gabal, Dion¬ 
ysus, Adonis, Eua: these are mostly names of the oldest dei¬ 
ties. Seb and Saturn were Gods of the earth or infernal dei¬ 
ties, like Turn, Atamu, 5 Tammuz, or Adonis. We have the 
Deep couched beneath the earth (Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 13), the 
Abyss of waters (Genesis, i. 2, 7, 9), the subterranean waters 
(Exodus, xx. 4), the giving form to man in the lowest parts of 
earth (Psalm, cxxxix. 15), the description in Job, xix. 24, 25, of 
a redeemer God at the Acheron standing over the dust, the de¬ 
scription in Hesiod, Theogony, 783-786 of the water at the 
river Acheron, the great oath of the Gods, the many-named 
water beneath the earth, and lastly the hope expressed by 
psalm, xvi. 9, 10, unequivocally and distinctly expressed for 
both soul and body, as in Job, xix. 25. Saturn was earth-god 
in Egypt and in Homer, and we have the right to assume in 
the regions between Greece and Egypt. At any rate Osiris 
was regarded as a Saviour in Egypt, and Turn, like Adonis, 
was considered the Greatest of Gods. Turn was styled £ the 
maker of men,’ ‘ the Universal Lord,’ £ the Creator God,’ and 
‘ the great Lord of created beings,’ £ the producer of the gods.’ 6 


1 Matthew, ii. 11. 

2 Adamatos, Invictus. 

3 contra Apion, II. p. 1077. 

4 Josephus, Vita, 1016. 

6 Rawlinson’s Egypt, I. p. 347, gives the hieroglyphs of Atm and Tmmou, which 
can be read Atam and Tammu (like Tammuz). Atam.—Exodus, xiii. 20. 

6 Rawlinson, L 348; Records of the Past, ii. 131; vi. 52; iv. 95 ; viii. 143. The 
water of life was in Hades the original place of Creation of the world. This feminine 
life was in Syrian philosophy called Hug the moist, or Eua the All-Mother, Rhea in 
Greek. In the Binah (Venus, Mother of all) every life was comprehended.—Rosen- 
roth, Apparatus in librum Sohar, p. 391. Hue Eua is therefore in Gen. iii. 20 called 
Mother of every life, of all living. 


262 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Like Adonis and Iao, lie was the Sun. Turn’s name would 
seem to have been given to the place named Atam in Exodus, 
xiii. 20, since the hieroglyphs corresponding to the letters Atm 
and Tmmu are given in Rawlings on’s Egypt as names of Turn ; 
and there is no reason why the vowel a should not have been 
associated with the next preceding consonant,—a rule that has 
been generally followed in reading the Hebrew proper names 
in this work. Nor is there any reason why the Tamus (Tmuz, 
or, more strictly, Atamuz) 1 mentioned in Ezekiel,’ viii. 14 
should not have been adored by the Hebrews at the North gate 
of the Temple, since the entrance to the pyramids of Gizeh 
faced the north ; moreover, we find the names Asarac, Asour, 
Aser (a tribe near Tyre), and Sarazar (2 Kings, xix. 37). Israel 
(altered from Iasar and Asarel) is the same name as Asar (Osi¬ 
ris) with el (the usual termination of angel-names) added. 
Osiris is (with Isis, Issa) one of the first two Gods of Egypt, 
and returns, according to the Mysteries, like Adonis (Adoni, 
Adonai) from Sheol (Hades), and his resurrection from the 
Underworld was supposed to be in and by or through the con¬ 
stellation Orion. The worship of Tammuz was also known in 
Arabia 2 and his title Adon merely signifies the Lord ; so that 
we can assume a close connection between the polytheism of 
Syria and Egypt when Asar (Osiris) is death-angel, Osrain 
(Azrael) in Egypt, and the Hebrew Sacred Books do not allow 
the pharaoh to deprive the Egyptian priests of their lands (by 
the ministration of Ioseph) and Joshua 3 grants 48 cities to the 
priests and loim (levites). Then we have the Beni Amon be¬ 
yond Jordan, and Amon, a Jewish king, bears the name of 
Amon the Bamgod of Egyptian Thebes. Osiris is Adonis the 
lover of Yenus. Iaqab means lover in Hebrew ; he loves Lea 4 
and Bachel, both phases of the moon. Adonis goes to Hades, 
and Iaqab goes there , and is mourned by the Egyptians 5 with 
the Abel Misraim on the floor of Atad. 6 Now in regard to 

1 hatamuz, in Hebrew text. 

2 360 idols were at Mecca, among others Habal or Hobal, Saturn. Saturn is Iao and 
El.—Movers, I. 259. El is Elios, Helios, and Iahoh. 

3 Gen. xli. 46 ; xlvii. 22, 26; Joshua, xxi. 41. 

4 Aelios = Sun. Ilia (Lia, Lea) is Solar goddess Luna. Osiris enters the moon. 
He presides over the lunar world. Et in Biuah comprehenditur omnis vita.—Rosen- 
roth, p. 391. Asah means fire.—Movers, I. 319. But Asah is the Benah and Eua.— 
Gen. ii. 23. 

s Gen. 1. 3, 7, 9-11. 

6 Atad = Adad, the Sun. Hadad = Hatad here; for the Abel Misraim is Egypt’s 


ISIS in PHOENICIA. 


263 


Hadam, Adam is by tradition said to have been the Moon’s 
liorn; that is, he must, like Osiris, the Adonis and Herakles, 
have entered the moon. Ezekiel, viii. 3, 5, 12, 14, mentions the 
ceremonies performed in the Dark, in the scenery of the 
Shades, where the descent of the Adon to Hades is symboli¬ 
cally portrayed, and the services of the dead are performed to 
him,—while at the North gate of the Temple lay the image of 
the Lebanon Yenus in misery, jealous of the Persephone or 
Proserpina to whom her Lover (Adamatos) has gone down. 
That North Gate of the Great Pyramid and the North Gate of 
the Jerusalem Temple faced in the same direction ! Adon 
beloved in Acheron ! The image of Aphrodite in the Lebanon 
is made with covered head, with a look of sadness, supporting 
her face with the left hand under her covering ; tears are be¬ 
lieved to distil in the sight of those looking at her.—Macro- 
bius, Sat. I. xxi. 5. This Old Phoenician idol is described by 
Francis Lenormant in the Gazette Archeol. 1875, pp. 98, 101, 
plate 26. The figure exactly corresponds to the description 
given by Macrobius, by Lenormant, and by Ezekiel, viii. 14, 
as to its attitude. It is Yenus jealous for her Adonis that she 
has possessed! “ Bring back Adonis from ever-flowing Ache¬ 

ron ! ” 

The Persian Kaiomaras left at his death a tree of two sexes 
which produced the first pair. The tree was androgyne, like 
Adonis, Adam, and Meshia-Meshiane. The Moon of Hades 
was associated, for Iris (Irach) brings up the water of the Styx 
in a golden pitcher. At Memphis Aphrodite’s temple was the 
temple of Selene (Luna), according to Strabo, 807. 

O Daughter of bright-girdled Sun, 

Selenaia, golden-cireled Light.—Euripides, Phoenissae, 175, 176. 


According to Ammian, Chaldaea was the nurse of the ancient 
philosophy. Athena is from Atten, and is the name of the 
Persian Goddess Anaitis. In the times of the Caesars the 
Moon-deity (Adam, Adon, Adonis, Sin, Tamus, Lunus) at 
Charran in Mesopotamia was androgyne $ . Having precon¬ 
ceived, or prefigured, the Generative Man, in whom they say 

Abel, the Mourning for the Adon (Adonis). Abel’s death is the death of Bel the Adon, 
Bal-Adon. In Gebal (Byblus), Gabal was Sun-god.— Creuzer, Sym. I. 259. Josephus, 
p. 1016, mentions a place named Khabal. It was named after Gabal, the Sun. Aka- 
bal, perhaps Saturn’s name. 


264 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


is tlie male and the female gender, afterwards he turns out the 
visible figure Adam.—Philo, Legal Allegories, II. 4. And the 
Monad is divided, which generates two, Adam and Eua. Mi¬ 
nerva’s emblems are the olive, the moon, and the owl. The an¬ 
cients regarded Athena as synthronos (occupying the same 
seat) with Apollo.—Julian, iv. 149. 

Korubas, then, the Great Helios, sharing his throne with the Mother, and 
uniting with Her in creating all things.—Julian, Oratio, v. 167. 

Seeing the similarity of Athena to the Mother of the Gods on account of the 
foreseeing (forecasting) resemblance in both the natures ( ovaiats ).—Julian, v. 
179. 

Bearing the Sacred Light where they 

All night perform rites to the Goddess.—Aristophanes, Frogs, 417. 

Athena was represented on a sarcophagus with a light in her 
hand. Athena was a feminine Apollo.—Nork, Eeal-Worter- 
buch, III. 169. Demeter rises black from Hades, holding 
torches, with the Child Iacchos also holding a torch. Com¬ 
pare the Festival of lights at Sais in Egypt, mentioned in 
Herodotus, ii. 62. The Sacred Tree is cut on that day on 
which the sun comes to the top of the equinoctial circle ; on 
the next day they go around with trumpets, on the third 
day the sacred mystical summer first-fruits of the God Gallus 
are cut: after these are the Hilaria Feasts.—Julian, in Matrem 
Deorum, 166, 168. The two principles, Spirit and Matter ap¬ 
pear in Julian, v. 162, 165. 

Giving to God the beginning of what is according to logos (Power creating 
through Wisdom), but not despoiling Matter of the causes necessary to the being 
born.—Plutarch, Defect. Orac., 47. 

The Gnosis of the First both Lord and mentally recognised, whom the 
Female God invites us to seek near Her, since He both is and coexists with 
Her. 1 The temple’s name also announces plainly both gnosis and knowledge 
of the absolute divine being; for it is called Iseion, as belonging to those about 
to know to ON (the divine entity), if with wisdom and holily we should enter 
in to the Sacred Mysteries of the God in the feminine nature.—Plutarch, de 
Iside, 2. 

Under the logic of this reasoning the Ashera was certain to be 
found on Bal’s altars. The moon borrows her light from the 
sun at the approach of evening and restores it to him again 
in the morning.—Philo, Quaest, in Gen. 90. The moon ob~ 


1 As Simon Magus said. 


ISIS IN PIKE NIG I A. 


265 


tains her light from the snn.—Plato, Cratylus, ed. Stallbaum, 
p. 123. The moon is born of the sun, and the rain is produced 
from the moon. 1 The Manicheans held Christ’s power to be 
located in the sun, his Wisdom in the moon. The Moon was 
male-female, Sin, Lunus, from Babylon to Egypt. Tuch 
(Zeitschr. D. M. G. iii. 153) says that the Arabs at the close of 
the sixth century worshipped the Moon. 

The women wove huts for Ashera .—2 Kings, xxiii. 7. 

The oldest symbols of Ashera were a tree, tree-trunk, un¬ 
worked wood, a living tree, since in its green growth an in¬ 
stance of physical life was apparent. 

He placed the sculpture of the Ashera in the temple of which Iahoh said 
... in this temple and in Jerusalem ... I will put my Name to eternity .—2 
Kings, xxi. 7. 

The scribe in this passage is chargeable with making a polit¬ 
ical allusion; but Ashera represented the “ Mother of every 
living (thing).” Hera in Thespiae was the branch of a tree, 
in Samos it was a sanis (anything made of wood), at Argos a 
long wooden pillar, Artemis was a piece of unhewn wood, 
Athena at Lindus a smoothed pillar, statue, or base. Tertul- 
lian calls the attic Pallas crucis stipes tree of the cross. 
Ceres (Keres) was a rude stake, without image. Latona at 
Delos was represented by wood not shaped into a statue. 
The Ashera, or some corresponding Goddess in Persia, appears 
at times represented in oval shape. Wherever the Sungod 
(Bal) was adored the Ashera was with him.—Movers, I. 564; 2 
Kings, xxiii. 5, 6. The two upright cones 2 of stone were the 
Asherim of the Old Testament, the symbols of the Goddess of 
fertility (Hapharahdite), which stood at the entrance of the 
Phoenician temples, says Mr. Sayce. The Asherah is a repre¬ 
sentative of the receptive Power in the world, the Woman- 
power Diana, the Isis or Yenus ; and belongs to the Adonis- 
Dionysus-Poseidon worship in the East,—to the mystic lore 
relating to Dionysus-Zagreus and Persephone, to the “ Man ” 
and “Woman” in Hades (of which the serpent is a symbol), 
to Adam and Harmonia-Eua in the Hesperides-Garden. The 

1 Colebrooke, Relig. of the Hindus, 25. 

3 See Movers, 344, 345. 


266 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


isolated monuments were the stone cones or the bare tree- 
trunks which symbolised Asherah, the Goddess of fertility, 
and Baal the Sun-god. 1 

Achab built an altar in the temple of Bol in Samaria and 
made an Ashera. 2 The identity of the sacred Plant of the 
Assyrian monuments and the asherah of Palestine has been 
claimed by Ferguson and G. Bawlinson. 3 On a cylinder of 
hard stone in the British Museum the figures of a man and 
woman can be seen, he wearing the Babylonian turban, seated 
face to face at the two sides of a tree with branches extended 
horizontally : from the lowest two branches two pointed pine 
or cedar cones hang down (at the same level on each side of 
the tree) towards an extended hand of the man on the one side 
and of the female on the other. Behind her a serpent stands 
up on the tip of his tail 4 like some of these guardians depicted 
in Etruscan tombs. Possibly these figures are Dionysus and 
Demeter in Hades; for the serpent is an indication of some¬ 
thing spiritual and the Mysteries. In the most ancient Greek 
Mysteries they shouted Eua, simultaneously a serpent was 
shown.—Orelli, Sanchon., p. 14. Taking then the Lord Diony- 
sus-Adonis as Adam 5 and Eua as Persephone, the statue of 
the Binah is Hue (Venah, the All-mother rising from the foam 
of the sea) that is sent every year to bring up the water from 
the sea, having a golden dove on its head,—the “ Aphrodite, 
Original Mother of our race,” as Aeschylus calls Her, the 
Magna Mater and Ashera, the Iana novella. Bacchus was Son 
of Luna 6 and Nah’s dove returns to the Ark with a lunar em¬ 
blem in its mouth, the olive-branch of Athena. Semiramis is 
Daughter of Yenus 7 and Yenus is Asah, Issa, Isis, Heue, Hue 
Eua, and Eve. The dual emblem of Bal and Ashera was a 
base with a tree, trunk, or pole rising up from it, the pole 
often rising from the round altar of Bal, a symbolism agreeing 
with that of the Hindus. Manassah set up a graven image of 
Ashera at Jerusalem. 

1 Sayce, Hibbert Lect. 409. In Judges, vi. 25 an Ashera stood on Baal’s altar.— 
Movers, I. 563. 

2 1 Kings, xvi. 32, 23. rov TereKeafievov re? /3eeA</>e-ywp.—Numbers, xxv. 3, 5. 

3 Lenormant, Origines de l’histoire, I. p. 90, note 1. 

4 Lenorm. I. 90 ; Lajard, Culte de Mithra, plate xvi. no. 4. 

5 The Gnosis and Theory of all Wisdom, which is Christ.—Justin, Apologia, II. 
viii. Christ is the fountain of the Gnosis of God.—Justin, Trypho, 81. 

6 Cicero, N. D. iii. 23. 

2 Munk, 62. 


ISIS IN PIKE NIG I A. 


267 


Kupris, the race’s primal Mother, 

Defend ;i from thy blood we are born !—Aeschylus, Seven vs. Thebes, 140- 

142. 

The Mother, Sophia, through whom the universe was completed.—Philo, 
Quod. Det. 16. 

The seed of life is much and superabundant in the (Mind) that is mind- 
perceived.—Julian, p. 140. 

In Syria we found the Adon and Binah (Vena), in Greece 
Apollo and Atena. Minerva is the fontal Intelligence and Life . 1 2 
Her emblem is the moon , 3 and the moon is called nature’s self- 
seen image . 4 God’s left hand power has control over suste¬ 
nance, wdiich agnostia called Keres ; its (Hebrew) name is Bena 5 
(Vena). The moon is the rainy source, Hue, Eva. “ The moist 
nature, being Beginning and Genesis of all things from the 
beginning, made three bodies, earth, air, and fire.” 6 Venus 
(the Eua, Binah) was the Primal Mother of all. They call the 
Moon the Mother of the world ; 7 and She declares herself all 
that has been, is, and will be , 8 being undoubtedly a form of 
Allah Sin, his sakti . 9 Sakia Sinha, the Indian Herakles, the 
Lunar Lion, is the active energy 10 identified with Budha . 11 
The light of the moon is given to the Goddess from the sun . 12 
Selene, whom being the last of the revolving bodies this God¬ 
dess filled (made full) by means of the Wisdom. By which the 
Selene contemplates both the mind-perceived things above the 
heaven and the things under her, adorning Matter (ten hulen) 
with the ideal forms . 13 


1 avert. 

2 Proverbs, viii. 23, 29, 30. 

3 the Woman , Aisah, Isah, Isis, Sarah. 

4 Taylor, Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, pp. 74, 87; Proklus in Tim. p. 260; 
Apuleius, Metam. xi. 

5 Hippolytus, p. 186. 

« Plutarch, de Iside, 33, 35, 36; Diodorus, I. 7, implies this. See Cory, Anc. 
Fragments. 

7 ibid. 43. 

8 ibid. 9. 

9 Compare Genesis, ii. 22, 23. 

10 the Logos, Hermes. Some of the ancient books of Hermes were still existing in 
the time of the Christians.—Cudworth, I. 548. They are mentioned in Clemens Alex- 
andrinus, Strom. 6, p. 633; Plutarch, de Iside, 57-61. Plutarch mentions them in his 
time.—de Iside, 61. 

11 Uph'am, p. 12. — 

12 Julian, 152. 

13 Julian, iv. 150. 


268 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Quare magna Deum Mater, Materque ferarum, 

Et nostri Genetrix Haec dicta est corporis una. 

Hanc veteres Graiuni docti cecinere poetae 
Sublimem in curru bijugos agitare leones : 

Aeris in spatio magnam pendere docentes 
Tellurem ; neque posse in terra sistere terrain. 

Muralique caput summum cinxere corona : 

Eximiis munita locis quod sustinet Urbeis : 

Quo nunc insigni per magnas praedita terras 

Horrific^ fertur divinae Matris imago.—Lucretius, II. 609. 

Ia’hoh makes die and live ; makes descend to slieol (Hades) and rise again! 
—1 Sam. ii. 6. 

Genesis, ii. 7, describes Ha-Adam as filled with the breath 
of lives by Iaoh Alahim. During* the 130 years when Adam 
was under rebuke he begat spirits (ruachoth) says the Midrash. 1 
The souls are spirits existing under the throne of God. 2 Ab- 
rahm, Izchaq and Iaqob are the spirits. 

My spirit shall not always strive in Adam (man) because he is also flesh.— 
Gen. vi. 3. 

The Hebrew sahel signifies to shine bright. Suliel is the planet 
Saturn. 3 Zehra means resplendent. 4 Fatimatu ’z Zehra means 
£ the resplendent Fatima,’ Muliammed’s daughter. Zoliar 
means (in Hebrew) ‘ splendor.’ In the same way, we have the 
brilliant planet Saturn, called in late Arabic Zulihel; Suhel. In 
Egyptian, anciently, 1 and r were apparently expressed by the 
same letter. Consequently Zahel and Zahar are, perhaps from 
the same root. In the later Arab style of writing Saturn’s 
name (as planet), ^ is the letter now read hh. But a dot below 
causes it to be read g ; a dot above makes it ch. In Hebrew 
ch softens (in being written) into ’h ; and the li (he) like the 

1 Maimonides, ch. vii. Friedlander, p. 50. 

2 Wagenseil, Sota, 72, 73; Dunlap, Sod, II. 34, added page. Maimonides suggests 
that the Biblical account of Adam is to be taken in a figurative sense.—Friedlander, 
p. 64, note. 

3 Movers, I. 290. Sakia is a deity of the Arab tribe Ad (Aud).—Univ. Hist. vol. 
xviii. 385. Compare the Jews, or ‘ Iaudi.’ Izak and Isak, in Hebrew, mean 1 to pour 
out.’ Zachaq would suit, with Demoniac laughter. Zachar means to shine. 

4 London ‘ Academy,’ Nov. 27, 1886, p. 366. See also Ludwig Ideler, Sternnamen, 
p. 316. In Hebrew, means candor and candidus, nitidus, color illustris. The He¬ 
brew name (of Isaac) is Izchaq pflV'-—Gen. xvii. 19. Izchaq is interpreted ‘making to 
laugh’; which may refer to ‘ shining,’ or to the harvest festival of the ingathering. 
Izchaq, the Laugher. 


ISIS IJV PHOENICIA. 


269 


Arabic Jih must then represent the originally written ch. The 
name Sakia means c shining *; for in Hebrew we have the 
roots HU and ns, each with the signification candidus, clarus, 
brilliant, shining; and the root nns (Zachach) meaning shin¬ 
ing, nitidus, in Latin. The Shining Star is Saturn ; izachach 
(izchak) means that “ it shall shine ”: therefore Izchak is the 
Shining Star of Isaac, whose name is written Izchaq in Hebrew. 
Considering that Saturn (Zachel, Suhel, Zouhhel) was regarded 
as a bad sign (as a baleful planet) and that Asu (Esau) is a 
name of the Evil Spirit (in Idumea) in the Desert, it is in this 
connection to be noted that Isaac (Zachel?) has one bad son, 
Edom (Zohak), and Iakab (Keb) the good boy. Izchaq is then 
Saturn. The Arab relations with Set and Satan have never 
been called in question by the cultivators of Palestine, who 
were aware of the doctrine of Persian Dualism. 1 It is clear 
that Abralim is represented as a people on the move contin¬ 
ually, between Kadesh and Shur, sometimes at Gerar on the 
Philistian border. So that he abode in Idumea among what is 
later called the Esau tribes; and his son is Ishmael. And 
Abrahm went down into Egypt. 2 In fact, as the Scribes of 
Genesis taught a monotheist system of some sort (compare the 
7 Archangels, Persian Dualism, Dan. iii. 25, and Job, i. 6 3 ), the 
getting rid of deities would be accomplished by turning them 
into patriarchs. 

With the Iahoh Elohim of the Hebrew Bible we may com¬ 
pare the Mana Rabba of the Chaldaean Gnostic Nazarenes or 
Mandaeans. Mana Rabba is the Lord of Glory throned in the 
aether of the shining world, through which flowed the Greatest 
Jordan, which is the River of the water of life, whence all 
things and plants that dwell in the shining world derive the 
spark of life. As Elohim calls ’Hadam (Adam) into being, so 
Mana created the “ First Life,” Hayya Kadmaya, and then re¬ 
tired into the profoundest obscurity ; which idea is conveyed 
in Genesis by the expression : Elohim ended his work which 
he had made, and he rested! The Shining World and the 
Hule of the Chaldaean Nazarenes seem to correspond tolerably 
to heaven and earth in Genesis. Like Adam, or Chadmaeus- 
’Hadmaios, Hayya Kadmaya is the creative, working God, the 


1 Zachariah, iii. 1. 

2 Gen. xii. 10; xx. 1; xxxv. 12. 

3 Sons of the Gods, Beni ha-Alohim. 


270 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Logos proforikos, but he is not the Demiurgus of these Gnos¬ 
tics, who is rather the Gabriel of the Nazarenes. Hayya Kad- 
maya is the God to whom they pray, and he is often con¬ 
founded with Mana-Rabba. 

From Hayya Kadmaya proceeded the Second Life, Haya 
Tinyana (their Cain 1 ), and Manda d’Hayya (their Abel), who 
is the ideal of goodness and purity, called Father, Angel- 
king, Beloved Son, Lord of worlds, Good Shepherd, Word of 
Life, Teacher and Saviour, Conqueror of hell and Chainer of 
the Devil; he dwells with the Father and is the Christ of the 
Mandaite religion. This is Gabriel, the Abel Ziua of the Man- 
daeans; but the Christians sometimes and Jews usually de¬ 
volved on Michael 2 and his angels the task of fighting the 
Devil. Manda d’Hayya, who is also called Adam Kadmaya 
reveals himself through his three sons Hebei, Sethel and Anus, 
which correspond to the Jewish Abel, Seth and Enos. The 
priests at the service dress in a white stola and white turban. 
They have a gold ring on the little finger of the right hand 
with the inscription “ The Name of Yaver-Ziua.” An olive 
staff is borne in the left hand, the feet bare. If this is Clial- 
daean and Nazarene, it is also Jewish gnosis, and the Jewish 
Highpriest carried on the front of his turban the name of the 
God of Life Yahoh mn\ or, as many prefer to wrongly read the 
“ four letters,” Yahveh. This name corresponds to Zeus and 
Adonis 3 or Adonai. The object of this comparison of Mandaite 
with Jewish is to show that their gnosis is nearly akin; in 
other words that the Jewish patriarchs in Genesis are merely 
so many gnostic aeons closely agreeing in number with the 
Babylonian precosmogonial Powers. Adam is Dionysus- 
Adon, Hue the Moist, is Bena, Yena, Yenus; Asu (Esau) is 
the Spirit of destruction, Mars Saueh or Shemal-Ishmael, but 
Iacob is Cupido. Like as (to breathe), Heuah (nifl) means to 


1 in Hebrew, Kin or Ken. The Mandaite Queen of hell is named Kin. 

2 The Mandaite Abatur is the Father of angels, and Gabriel, called also Fetahil, is 
his reflection in the water of chaos. Ptahil is another translation to Fetahil. 

3 A Mohammedan historian of the 10th century asserts that in his time the Man- 
daeans kept the Feast of Thammuz, the Babylonian prototype of Adonis.—Edinburgh 
Review, July, 1880. See Ezekiel, viii. 14, for the Jewish worship of Thammuz, and St. 
Jerome, Ep. 49, ad Paulinum for its continuance in the immediate vicinity of the Holy 
Sepulchre in a.d. 386.—Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. vii. viii. 

The Mandaeans consult astrological books to learn what will happen in the new 
year and whether it will be fat or lean. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


271 


breathe ; She is the vital sensation , breathing-, actual life, fall, 
rnin. Max Muller says 1 that as with the meaning 1 “ to breathe ” 
was not a Semitic root. The Hebrew contains, however, tiW, 
meaning “is,” aiti TTK meaning “is” (ist, esti, asti), and 
ntLW meaning female life (asah, asa) coming from as “fire,” “to 
be ” 2 ntn iashah (Isis) to be, to exist (iasah); for s and sh are 
one letter in Hebrew, WH (as) is the verb “ to be ” in 2 Samuel, 
xiv. 19 ; Micah, vi. 10. Maimonides, in his Guide to the Per¬ 
plexed LX., states that the verb “ to be,” in Hebrew, has also 
the signification “ to exist.” The fire was regarded as the 
“ vital fire ” by the Jews, the fire of life, like the expression 
“ the breath of life,” in Gen. ii. 7 ; Exod. iii. 2, 3, 4, 14. Here 
Fire, existence and supernal life are exhibited in the Great “ I 
am,” and breathed into Adam as the breath of the lives. In 
philosophical principles (Grundsatze) the Hebrews and Arabs 
were as well off as the Sanskrit-speaking peoples, and some 
writers are suspicious of an Arabian influence anciently exerted 
upon Hindustan. At least, there are some points of resem¬ 
blance to be met with, in mythology and traditions. 

The Hebrew Supreme Alohim appears in the dual. — 
Gen. i. 1. 

The Generative Man, in whom is the male and female sex; afterwards he 
works out the form.—Philo, Legal Alleg. II. 4. 

Men, the dual God, was worshipped at Sinope and found 
on coins of Tiberias, Caesarea, Sebaste, and Aelia Capitolina. 
Mene is the Moon. Mn, men, in Egyptian means ‘to found.’ 
The Arabs worshipped the moon. The moon in Egypt is 
male. Menes means the Founder, Mena. The Gods in the 
likeness of men have come down to us (Acts, xiv. 11, 13). The 
moon is born of the sun, said the Hindus: 3 and Eua is cer¬ 
tainly born of Adam (Adonis) of duplex genus. 4 As the Hin- 

1 India, What can it teach us, p. 26. 

2 Compare Gen. ii. 23 ; xxxi. 29; xxxiii. 9. 

3 Colebrooke, Relig. of the Hindus, p. 25. Ammon is father and mother. The 
father engenders himself in the womb of the mother and thus becomes at once his own 
father and his own son.—Mariette Bey the Monuments, 5, 24. 

4 God has created the Adam of two faces, afterwards cut him apart and therefrom 
formed the Eua.—Talmud, Tr. Beracoth, fol. 61 coL 1. see Bodenschatz, Kirch. Verf. 
d. Juden, part III. p. 231. God has made the Adam so great that he reaches from the 
earth up to the firmament of heaven, or even from one end of the earth as far as the 
other.—Talmud Tr. Chagiga, fol. 12. col. 1. If Adam is arsenotheus, duplicis naturae, 
why not the Mena (menoeides), even if euhemerised into men? We here see the 


272 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


dus liad their royal races both Solar and Lunar, there is no 
reason for refusing* to Egypt her Solar or Lunar races, de¬ 
scendants of Menes and Horus. Next to the Royal Gods 
came the Hor-shesu, the successors of Horus. 1 The Akkadian 
Sungod had a formidable rival in the Moongod. From the 
Moongod the Clialdaean monarclis traced their descent. 

The moon at the conjunction disappears within the sun.—The Aitareya 
Brah man a . 2 

The moon having conjunction duly with Helios.—Manethon, Apotelesm. 
iv. 537. 

The moon is born of the sun. Viewing it, say : May the Moon be renewed. 
—Aitareya Brahmana.—Colebrooke, 25. 

'Zvvobov ironjaa/xeyr] irpos 7 } \iov .—Plutarch, Qusest. Rom. 24. 

Sinai is the range of Mts. of Sin, the Babylonian Moongod. 3 
Beginning with the bisexed Sin in Babylonia, we come to the 
bisexed Adam, Dionysus-Ourania, in Arabia, the holy, heav¬ 
enly, horn of Mene, Men the bisexed Moongod in Asia Minor 
and Syria (compare Mt. Sini and the Hebrew lunar worship 
on the ‘ Newmoons and sacred Sabbaths, seven being a sacred 
fourth of a lunation,—compare the seven years of Jacob), and 
finally to Menes in Egypt. 

Aiovvcrov Se &ebv novvov ical r)]v Ovpavlvjv 7]y^vvrai elvai. 

Dionysus and the Ourania (Aphrodite) they think to be sole God.—Herod¬ 
otus, iii. 8 . 

Dionysus they think is only God and is the Heavenly Venus.—Herodotus, iii. 8 . 

Hindu, Egyptian, Babylonian and Hebrew forms of “Allah Sin” to be identical 
with the Dionysus, Iachos, Iachoh, Iahoh, lad, Adonis, Lunus, mythological traditions. 
In the Transactions of the Royal Berlin Akademy, 1856, p. 216, Lepsius argues that 
Isis is not a Moon-goddess because the Moon in Egypt was a male deity, Lunus. But 
the same thing occurred in Mesopotamia among the people of ’Harran ; the Sabians 
adored the moon as male-female and as a female (Chwolsohn, II. 23) ; and, like Isis in 
Egypt, their Baalti is apparently also Venus. Osiris is Dionysus. Dionysus was rep¬ 
resented with horns; and Nonnus, a resident of Panopolis in Egypt, expressly says so : 

Tavpo(f>vrj Aiovvaov ipuTpunravTO Kepaarrjv. —Nonnus, Dionus. ix. 15. 

Kal (ipe<f)o s, evicepaoio <f)vr)<; iv&aApa SeAjjnjs.—Nonnus, ix. 27. 

They crowned the bull-shaped, horned Dionysus. 

And, a child, the image of the form of well-horned Selene. 

Hermes (the logos) is seated in and goes round with the Selene.—de Iside, 41. 

1 Sayce, Herodotus, p. 319. 

2 Colebrooke, p. 24. “ The seventh chapter opens with a hymn in which Surya, 

surnamed Savitri, the wife of the Moon, is made the speaker. . . A very singular 
passage occurs in another place, containing a dialogue between Yama and his twin- 
sister Yamuna, whom he endeavors to seduce; but his offers are rejected by her with 
virtuous expostulation.”—ibid., 15, 16. 

3 Sayce, Hib. Lect. 42. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


273 


Like Alohim lie includes both sexes within himself, else he 
could not be the sole cause. Dionysus is Osiris, and he was 
said (de Iside, 43, 50, 51) to enter the moon. When entering 
the Moon, the crescent becomes Lunus, Sin, the Male Moon. 
Adonis entering the Moon loses sex. Hence the Hebrew 
Newmoon worship. Dionysus, Adonis, Osiris, Herakles enter 
the Moon. The city Ur was dedicated to the Moon-god, and 
the Clialdaean priests held the Moon-god to be the father of 
the Sun-god. The Harranites regarded their Moon-deity as 
man and woman. 1 The worship of the Moon under the name 
Sin in Harran was very ancient. 2 The Jews had the Newmoon 
worship to Iahoh 3 (Allah Sin). As soon as the Newmoon 
came in, the Temple Gate Nicanor was opened, as on the 
Sabbath. The citizens hurried to the Temple, the priests and 
levites to their posts, and burnt-offerings were made. A full 
description of the ceremony is given in Bodenschatz, II. p. 
160 (from Lundius, Jud. Heiligth., V. c. 8, num. 4). As usual, 
when the he-goat was killed as an offering, the priests ate 
nearly all of him. The people came with their thankofferings 
and their peace-offerings (Numbers, x. 10). The Sabians had 
the sacrifice of seven male lambs to the planets. 4 The Jews 
sacrificed seven yearling lambs at the Newmoon. The Sabians 
ate lambs in the last of March (Chwolsohn, II. 23, 24, 75, 76); 
the Jews had the feast of the paschal lamb: and the Old 
Syrians were declared to be Sabians. The Jews were, there¬ 
fore, Sabians. 5 There is one tradition, on the testimony of 
Africanus, that the Hyksos kings were Phoenicians who took 
possession of Memphis and made Abaris in the Sethroite 
nome their chief fortress. 


1 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 37, 183. 

2 ibid. II. p. 158, 156; Norberg, Codex Nazar. I. p. 54, 98. 

3 Numb, xxviii. 11-15. 

4 Chwolsohn, II. 22, 24, 26. Sin was the Moongod of the Old Sabian religion.— 
Blau, in Zeitschrift D. M. G. ix. p. 89. Sin could well be named Menes. 

5 Numbers, xxix. 10; Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, II. p. 25. As Adam is the holy 
MSnes horn, he is both Ish-mSng and Issa-mSne.—Gen. ii. 23, 24. He is the light 
of Israel, like the Christos of the Manicheans whose power was in the sun, but 
his wisdom in the moon. Men was adored as Men and Men5, Lunus and Luna 
in all Asia Minor, in Sinope and Laodicea.—Blau, in Zeitschrift D. M. G. 88, 89; 
Movers, Phonizier, 649. This MSn-worship followed the coast down past Caesarea 
to the land of Menes, Egypt.—Compare Movers, 649; who regards MSn as the sun¬ 
light proceeding from the moon. Also Mt. Sini (Sinai) and the Saturnian Moonwor- 
ship. 


18 


274 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


And he removed the Mysteries (r&s reA.eTas)from the land, and accomplished 
all the business that his fathers did. And he removed Ana his mother, so that 
she should not be the regent, since she made a sunodos 1 for Ashera. And Asa 
destroyed her places of concealment.—Septuagint, 1 Kings, xv. 13. 

Mysteries are the basis of all religions, not at all in order 
to lock up from the people the door to wisdom or because the 
priesthood wished for the private profit of their caste to use 
the preference of the uninstructed for the mysterious, as the 
frivolous rationalism, drawing an inference from the Christian 
priestcraft to the childish, naive, ancient world, asserts, but to 
heighten the feeling of devotion and awe before the Creator, 
who veils himself in mystery, withdraws himself from the pro¬ 
fane regards of the sensualist, by the separation of the holy 
from the profane, through the exclusion of the worldling, who 
holds fast to the things of earth, from the service of the Being 
of light. When the eye of the senses is darkened by a deep 
slumber and the body is as if dead, as in Magnetic clairvoy¬ 
ance, the Father of light lets the true illumination come near, 2 
as Iamblichus 3 seeks to explain to Porphyrius that Beholding 
in the light , that at times an invisible spirit floats around the 
sleeper who perceives through another perception than sight, 
just so the Initiated into the divine Mysteries named them¬ 
selves Enlightened, Illuminati, 4 and before their reception into 
the band of the saints must become dead to the body, through 
chastity and strict regimen, fasting etc., seek to slay the flesh, 
if they wished to celebrate already in this life a spiritual 
resurrection. As the hieroglyphic language of the soul in 
dreams and visions is different from the language of intellect 
so must therefore the hieratic language of the Mystae and of 
sanctified archives of religion differ from our language in 
books, since the former contained the divine Word, owing to a 
higher significance concealed from the profane and only com¬ 
prehended by the Initiated. Hence only the priest is entitled 
to read in the Law. Astronomy, astrotheology and geometry 
were commonly taught in Egypt. The Egyptians had the 
doctrine of the Transmigration of souls, and they (in the 
Mysteries) taught the unity of God. But the priests declined 

1 meeting. 

a Ezekiel, i. 27; Psalm, xviii. 29; xxxvi. 10. compare Ovid, Fast. 6, 5. 

3 de Myst. Aegypt. sect. 3, cap. 2. 

4 In thy light we see the light.—Psalm, xxxvi. 10. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


275 


to communicate this dogma to the masses who owing to their 
earthly conceptions of the Creator were unable to understand 
the language of the Wise. The secret doctrine is based upon 
nature worship to be sure, but in accordance with the Hindu- 
Orphic doctrine that the material world is a copy of the spirit- 
world (kosmos noetos) the ethical side of the cultus (the 
history of the soul) could be attended to as well as the physi¬ 
cal (the history of the seasons of the year). The astrotheol- 
ogy of the nature-religions transposed heaven and earth, the 
realm of light and the realm of night, into the zodiac through 
whose two hemispheres the souls, compared with the stars, 
wander, led by the clear-shining Dogstar whose heliacal as¬ 
cension announces in Egypt and Greece the beginning of the 
year, consequently also the commencement of the period of 
circulation (transmigration) of souls. The Dog Sura, Sirius, 
accordingly leads stars and souls in and out of life, or in and 
out of the zodiacal course, hence the Dog is Leader of souls, 
Hermes kunokephalos the psychagogos 1 when he carries them 
into the hemisphere of light; psychopomp os, when he leads 
them in the other solstice or Equinox (Libra) into the dark 
hemisphere. From the moon’s gate the soul came upon the 
earth, because the Hule corresponds to the moisture of the 
maternal Night-light. Elysium and Acheron are in the poles! 
At the end of the Wandering, the soul returned back to its 
Father, the sun, from which it came, through the sun’s gate. 
In the Mysteries, therefore, Hermes Leader of souls plays, 
with the sun and moon, 2 the most important part. The 
Sacred-herald represented him, the Torchbearer, the sun, the 
Epibomios, 3 the moon. Hermes on the dividing lines of the 

1 The Chaldaean called the Raiser of the souls up to the heaven Anagogeus. As¬ 
cending, and lifting up the souls to the mind-perceived world.—Julian, in Solem, p. 
136. The Ascension is made through Zeus-Bel, Bel-Mithra.—Movers, I. p. 553 ; 
Proclus, in Plat. Alcib. Tom. IV. p. 96. This is Metatron Iesna, the Saviour of souls. 
The Unspoken Mystery about which the Chaldaean raved, bringing up the souls 
through him, the God of the Seven Rays.—Julian, V. p. 172. This is the Chaldaean 
Iao called Sabaoth (from the Seven Planetary Rays).—Movers, 550; Lydus, de Men si- 
bus, IV. 38, 74. 

2 Kneph was the God who made the sun and moon to revolve.—Rawlinson, Anc. 
Egypt, I. 331. Herodotus, II. 104, on the priority of circumcision evidently contra¬ 
dicts Genesis, xvii. 10. The Egyptian Sacred Books are older than the oldest parts of 
the Book of Genesis, which paints the life of the priests just as it was known to be in 
later times.—Movers, Phonizier, 112, 113. Visnu is represented as blue, as Water- 
God and the continual Benefactor of men, Lord of all Beings. 

3 Gabariel was the Jewish lunar angel. He was the Fireangel. 


276 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


year’s season is always between heaven and hell, brings the 
souls from the upper world to the lower one, but also, through 
night, to light. The first takes place at the autumn equinox 
when the nights lengthen. Therefore the astronomers laid 
down the Styx in the 8th degree of Libra. 1 This was the Old 
Sabian worship before our era. Julian 2 shows that in the 
Mysteries the scheme of the heavenly bodies was considered, 
saying that “ the Sun is not the centre of the Planets but of 
the three worlds, according to the hypotheses in the Mys¬ 
teries (rcXeo-rtKas wroJeWs).” This view of Julian is consistent 
with the theology of the Osirian Mysteries. 

Brilliant Lords that bring frost and harvest to mortals.—Aeschylus, Agam., 
4. 

All the Teirea (constellations) with which heaven is crowned.—Homer, II. 
xviii. 485. 

The star-gods were regarded as the causes of the orderly 
succession of times and seasons. 3 Near Libra the constel¬ 
lations which rise with it and which bring back winter after 
the fruit harvest are shown. Among these constellations is the 
celebrated Dragon of the pole who guarded the apples of the 
Hesperides, whom the spheres represent as wound round a 
tree like the Serpent of Eve. Lastly, the constellation Ser- 
pentarius, or Pluto and his serpent, who ascends at the same 
time as Libra. The name of this serpent, the serpent of Eve, 
as it is still called by the Persians, or Heua, as it is called in 
the Arabian spheres, 4 has been preserved. This is the cele¬ 
brated Star-serpent spoken of in the Persian cosmogonj^, the 
Serpent who is the mother of winter and whose form Ahri- 
man assumes in order to introduce evil into the world. 5 On 
the walls of a rock-temple Krishna is seen trampling on the 
Serpent Kaliga whom he has destroyed,—the Spring-sun as 
Vanquisher of the Winter-serpent. 6 The Jews, like the Baby- 

1 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 221-233. Art. Mysterien. They worshipped the 
astral powers, the planets, Bal, the Sun, Moon, and all the array of the heavens.—2 
Kings, xxiii. 5 fig; Jer. viii. 2. Beth-Samas.—2 Kings, xiv. 11. The worship of the 
planets was carried on in the temples of the Bamoth Bal. The 2 Kings, xiv. 4, reminds 
us of the “ sacred tree ” that appears on Assyrian and Persian sacred representations. 

3 Julian, Oratio iv. p. 148. 

3 Mankind, p. 416, 417. 

4 Eua, in Genesis, iii. 20. 

5 Mankind, 465, 466. 

6 Nork, Real-Wort. I. 217. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


277 


lonians and other Sabians, appear to have been well acquainted 
with the heavenly host. 1 The Ass was a sign of antnmn. A 
golden head of an Ass stood in the Jewish temple and the con¬ 
stellation of the Ass stood in the sidereal heavens near that of 
Dionysns. 2 The Apokalypse mentions Yirgo holding the Sun- 
child in her arms ; and in the Garden of Adonis the king comes 
forth from the “ Bird-nest ” and appears descending from the 
heaven. The ass of the Messias indicated the End of the 
world and the Judgment to come. 

In the Chinese popular religion the Heaven, the highest 
revealed form of the primal-potence that had penetrated the 
primal matter, took the place of the primal-power, which was 
more accentuated in the philosophical conception, in the full 
divine meaning of this idea. The divine essence (Sein) is thus 
a duality. The Heaven, that is, the natural, visible, blue 
heaven 3 with the sun and stars is not the pure primitive 
power (Urkraft), but this Power united with the primitive 
matter. 4 The Urkraft is related to the primal matter as the 
Fire is to the burning material. 5 

All the inhabitants of the Thebais (which, they said , was the 
most ancient part of Egypt ?) judged it the greatest oath when 
any one swore by the Osiris who lies in Philae. 6 In the temple 
of Osiris at Philae 7 Amun 8 appears fashioning upon a wheel 
or lathe the limbs of Osiris, while the figure of the Nile-god 
stands by and pours water on the wheel. At Elephantine he 
appears working a lump of clay upon the lathe. 9 In the mys¬ 
tic chamber of the temple of Philae Amun-Kneph is repre¬ 
sented turning a potter’s wheel and moulding the mortal part 

1 2 Kings, xvii. 16; xxi. 3, 5; xxiii. 5. 

2 Bahak (compare Bak = Light) is the “Genius” who called the world into exist- 
tence.—Codex Nasar. II. 233 Norberg; Genesis, i. 3, 4. 

3 Exodus, xxvi. 1, 4, 31. 

4 Adolf Wuttke, Heidenth. ii. p. 25. 

8 ibid. ii. p. 15. 

8 Diodorus, i. 22. To swear by my name, Chi Iachoh, as they taught my people to 
swear by Bal.—Jeremiah, xii. 16. 

7 Monuments at Philae are considered among the latest. 

8 The Creative Mind or Logos. The Demiourgic Producer. The description which 
Porphyry gives of Kneph as a human figure, dark blue, with a girdle and sceptre, and 
a royal feather on his head, accords with the representations of Amun, not of Kneph. 
From his mouth was produced an egg from which Ptah (the Perfecting Intellect, act¬ 
ing with truth, according to art) sprung. Like Vishnu, he represents Sun and Water. 
He is also identified with Khem, Kneph and Horus.—Kenrick, i. 314, 318. 

9 Kenrick, Egypt, I. 314. 


278 


THE GIIEBEIfyS OF HEBRON. 


of Osiris, tlie Father of men, out of a lump of clay. The hiero- 
glyphical inscription is: “ Knum, the Creator, on his wheel 
moulds the divine members of Osiris 1 in the shining house of 
life.” 2 This is the same as the Hebrew belief: “ Thou, Ia’hoh, 
our Father art; we the clay, but thou our potter; and we 
all (are) the work of thy hands.” 3 

And Ia’hoh Alahim moulded tlie Adam, dust out of the ground.—Gen. ii. 7. 

The soul from the Edem in like manner too was placed in the Eua (Moon) 
in idea (ideal form without body), but the spirit (is) from the Eloeim.—Hippo- 
lytus, v. 26. 

The same doctrines were in the Greek Mysteries. 

The Garden of Eden 4 was by some placed near the throne 
of the Lamb, that is, near the sign of the vernal equinox. 5 
O/thers, like Plutarch and Lucian, placed it in the upper part 
of the moon. But Plato in his Phaedo has placed a celestial 
and holy earth above the other which resembles the celestial 
Jerusalem of the Apokalypse. 6 The moon, however, being the 
place of meeting of Adam and Selene, 7 at their conjunction, 
and also sinking below the plane of the earth’s surface, suits 
best the general mythology of the ancients, for an Adonis- 
garden. We know the worship of Dionysus (Adonis) to be 
older than Homer. The Egyptian Eden of departed souls was 
in the eastern heaven. The Garden of Eden lay to the east 

1 the type of man, the First Man. 

2 in the solar disc, “ in the bent arms of the sun.”—de Iside, 52. Just as Snefru 
set up at Memphis the greatest piece of sculpture in the gigantic form of the Sphinx 
through the art of Ptah (Hephaistoteucton), so his son Chufu used the means of the 
God Chnemu, the Architect.—Lauth, Chronol. 72. 

3 Isaiah, lxiv. 8. itsar, figulus, formator. —Mankind, p. 736. 

4 The Garden of Tamaseus is the Garden of Tomas “the Sun:” compare Turn 
“ the Setting Sun,” and Thamus the Egyptian Monarch, and Tammuz (Adonis). 
Adam (Adamatos) presents the apple to Eua, in the Eleusinian Mysteries. . Apples 
were lovers’ presents. Persephone in Hades (Sheol) eats the apple of Aidoneus.—Prel- 
ler, I. 472. Compare “ Maneros ” in Egypt, and the “ apples of Bacchus ” who is both 
Osiris and Adonis !—Dunlap, Sod. I. p. 150; Theokritos, iii. xi. xxix.; Champollion, 
Egypte, 131; Ezekiel, viii. 1-12. Women sat (on the ground) deploring Thamus — 
Ezekiel, viii. 14. This is all presumably late, since 70 Israelite Elders (Ancients) of 
the Hebrew Senate with Iasanios (Jason, Iasan) at their head are mentioned.—Eze¬ 
kiel, viii. 11. 

6 This Lamb is evidently Aries, placed above the Whale and ascending with it.— 
Mankind, 545. The throne of the God and the Lamb will be in it.—Rev. xxii. 3. But 
the Lamb represents the Adon living, “ Adonis lives.” Was dead, and is alive.—Rev. 
i. 18. Chi Adon ! 

6 Mankind, p. 462, 566, 630, 631. 

7 Selenia, a town in Kupros-Cyprus. 


ISIS IJST PHCENICIA. 279 

near tlie Sun’s gate, the Equinoctial sign of Aries, and is to 
be found in the celestial heaven. 1 

Nork considers Adah Esau’s wife. She is Ade, Deo, Dem¬ 
eter the Moongoddess of Hades. 2 Jared, in Gen. iv. 18, is 
Airad (Irad) the founder of the ancient city Eridu. 3 Movers, 
Phonizier, 471, connects Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter, with 
Orion ; and, according to the Chronicon Paschale, I. p. 51, the 
Assyrians said that Ninus the Nebrod taught them to worship 
fire; and they made him their first king after the Deluge. 4 
Nimrod was called Ninus by the Greeks. 5 Orion is Agron 
(the Hunter). 6 Orion is Mars the God of Fire. 7 Mars, as 
Spring-sun, is identical with Ha Aur (Horus) as Spring-sun; 
and Horus enters Orion. Ninus-Sandan is Orion-Nimrod. 8 
The Mars-Typhon kills Adonis. Ken (Kon? Saturn) kills 
Abel. The Lydian Herakles - Sandan was animal - hunter. 9 
Lamos is a son of the Lydian Herakles.—Diodor. Sic. iv. 31. 
The Hunter Adrastus kills Atys the pious brother (Abel), the 
Youth ; and Lamus (the Hunter Adrastus) is, apparently, the 
Lan \ach who kills a man and a Youth in Genesis, iv. 23. 10 Ade 
(Adah) is the Babylonian Iuno, 11 and consequently is Light or 
Pleasure ; while Zilla is Darkness. 12 Sair (Osiris) means fire 
like Aud, 13 Sar, Asar, Azar ; and Azorus, Zorus, Zohar, Zaratas 
mean fire: Er (Ar) Zoroaster (Zaratas), or the God (in the 
myth) burned upon a scaffold for 12 days was a God of the 
Pamphilians, and the Cham or Zaratas was burned through 
the fallen fire of Orion. 14 The Lamach of Genesis, iv. 23 ex¬ 
hibits the use it makes of the mythology. 

1 Baliol College.—Mankind, pp. 462-464, plate xxii. 

2 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. I. 361. Ata was the Goddess of Adiabene, east of the Tigris. 
—Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archaeology, vii. p. 260. Movers, I. 340, seems to have regarded 
Ada as Hera and Adna. 

3 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 1887, p. 185; Gen. iv. 17. 

4 Movers, 471. 

5 Clementine Recognitions, liber iv. cap. 29. 

6 Movers, 475, 476. 

7 Movers, 473. 

8 Movers, 474; Gen. x. 8, 9. Hebrew. Nimrod is the Gabor, “Giant.” 

9 Movers, 474. 

10 Movers, 477. 

11 ibid. 477. 

1 2 Zill = umbra. Zelem = imago. Zalmuth = umbrae mortis. 

13 See the altar of Ad (Aud, Od) and the prophetes Ado.—Joshua, xxii. 34; 2 
Chron. xii. 15. Hebrew. 

14 Movers, pp. xviii. xix., 338-342, 349. Sair is a name of the Dogstar Sirius.— 
Movers, 473, 338. The fire-pillars of Sair (Oseiris)!—Movers, 338. Asar is the root; 


280 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The (times?) of the Sesu-Hor, years 13,400 (plus ?), 

The reigns down to Sesu-Hor, years 22,300 (plus ?).—De Rouge, Re- 
cherches, p. 163. 

The Horshesu can be translated c Servants of Horus ’ or ‘ Suc¬ 
cessors of Horus.’ Sesu-Hor, in the singular, is cited in the 
inscription of Tombos (under Totmes I.) as the most remote 
type of human antiquity. The Semites named the Angels 
Sons of God. 1 The Sesu-Hor had in the eyes of the Egyp¬ 
tians a character entirely analogous to that of the first Biblical 
patriarchs ; justified by Osiris, they inhabit the regions of the 
blest destined for the virtuous souls, and the Bituel funeraire 
shows them to us gathering the abundant harvests produced 
by the celestial fields of Aaru. This information proves that 
the Sesu-Hor are merely human, and we are induced to think 
that under the name of dynasty of the Manes the Greek lists 
have transmitted to us merely a souvenir of the first Egyp¬ 
tians. 2 The Semites named par excellence their ancestors 
Children of God. 3 

Genesis, xi. 2, makes a claim for the origin of the Jews in 
Mesopotamia. Lamech, or Lamach, is the equivalent of the 
name Lamga who is the Moon-god. 4 In Sippara (Sepharoim) 
was the God Alamelech (also Adarmelech). This Adarmelecli 
is the Sun’s Eire, and, since Adar is Mars, the destroying fire. 5 
Alamelech is one with Adarmelech, consequently destructive 
in tendency. Shortening Alamelech, and dropping the initial 
vowel (which often happened in time), we should have, instead 
of Alamelech, Lamech the husband of the Babylonian Juno 
(Adah) and a martial character of warlike and murderous 
aims. 6 Adar the Warrior, the Sun of the South, the Sun of 
mid-day, like Adar-malik corresponds to the Phoenician and 
Palestine Moloch ; he devours the productions of the earth 
and human victims alone can appease him, who in the month 
of Tammuz (June) kills Dumouzi (Tammuz-Adonis) the Young 


as we have Ousorus, a Phoenician God (Eusebius, Laud. Constant, c. 13; Movers, 120), 
and Ousir in the Seal of Iar Ammonios, in the Abbot Egyptian Collection. 

1 Gen. vi. 2, 3. 
a De Rouge, 163-165. 

3 ibid, 164. See Deuteron. xiv. 1; Romans, viii. 16; 1 Cor. iii. 16. 

4 Sayce, Hibbert Lect. 1887, p. 186; Zeitschrift fur Keilschriftforschung, ii. 47 

66 . 

6 Movers, I. 410. 

6 Genesis, iv. 19, 23, 24 ; v. 30, 31. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


281 


and gracious Spring Sun. 1 This was the “ Charming Youth ” 
from the Lebanon! 


I have killed a man to my wounding and a Youth to my calamity.—Gen. 
iv. 23. 

Moreover Lamech’s two wives are Adah 2 (Light) and Zillah 
(Darkness). 

There is a complete difference between the two genealogies 
in Genesis iv. and v.; they spring from different sources. 
Nothing is more dry and monotonous in form than that of the 
Sethites, borrowed in chapter v. from the Elohist document; 
nothing which exhibits to a higher degree the stamp of that 
particular sort of euliemerism that is peculiar to the Bible which 
its rigorous monotheism has breathed into it, and which while 
depriving them as much as possible of their allegorical char¬ 
acter, reduces to strictly human proportions the heroes of the 
popular tradition whom it accepts while recording the most 
ancient souvenirs received from its ancestors by the people 
Israel. 3 

Mach means “ to destroy.” 4 A1 Mach means the Destroyer. 
But A1 Amach means ‘ the one who descends 5 into the depth,’ 
hence Adonis is meant. 6 Lamach has Beauty (Audah, Light) 
as one wife, Sillah (Obscurity, Darkness) as the other. Adonis 
fills these conditions, as Hades, 7 and so does Osiris. Genesis, 
iv. 23, therefore represents Lamach as Mars, and lets him 
marry Yenus. Aud and Adah (Audam and Ashah) would rep¬ 
resent fire (Adar, Moloch, Ia’hoh) and the feminine principle in 


1 Lenormant, les Origines de l’hist. I. 256. 

2 Ad, Aud.—Univ. Hist. 18, p. 387. 

3 Lenormant, les Orig. I. 182. Movers, Phoenizier, I. 165, long ago recognized that 
the fact of the equivalence of the duration of the ten antediluvian reigns “with ten 
periods of 12 sars established a relation between each of them and one of these periods, 
months or hours of the greatest celestial cycle ; that thus the antediluvian patriarchs 
of Chaldaea had been referred to these solar mansions of the zodiac mazzaloth which the 
infidel Hebrews in the time of the Assyrian influence adored with the sun, moon and all 
the celestial array, and which the Chaldaeans already designated by the figures whose 
use has come down to us through the intermediation of the Greeks,—Lenormant, I. 
255. 

4 Seder Leshon, p. 171. 

6 ibid. p. 252. 

6 In the theology of Eridu, the Sun-god Dumuzi or Tammuz was the offspring of 
Ea and Daukina.—Sayce, 144. 

7 Etana’s throne was placed in Hades. 


282 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


the moon. 1 Adah (Ade) gave birth to Ibal (Adonis) father of 
the tented Arabs 2 and his brother was IoBel, the Apollo. 3 
Adah is said to be the Inno of Babylon. Adah or Oda means 
‘ the shining,’ according to Nork, Bibl. Mythol. I. 361. Lamech 
seems to be Lamos son of Vulkan (Ptah, Bal). With Elam, and 
Lamos connect lampo * to shine ’ and lumen, light; also Lem¬ 
nos the Sun’s isle, 4 Eill who is Lucifer (compare eial, illumi- 
nare), Ilus, and Lampos son of Eos. Anos represents the 
Anasse Arabs.—Gen. v. 7. 

The Giants and Titans were interchanged at an early pe¬ 
riod. 5 Genesis, vi. 4, makes hardly an allusion to the War 
of the Titans against Zeus in which Minerva (Athena) was 
engaged, and only states that the Gabarim, Anakes or Anakim, 
were the sons of the ‘ Sons of the Gods ’ in the Aither (burning 
heaven), and the Gabarim of old. The Seven Kabiri are the 
Seven Spirits of fire about Saturn’s Throne, 6 like the Seven 
planet-effigies around the Sun’s Horse in Arabia; and the 
myth relates that these Titan Kabiri tore Iacchos (the God of 
life) into seven pieces, but that Minerva saved the heart. 
Osiris was torn into twice seven pieces by Typhon. 7 Osiris is 
Dionysus, is the most primitive conception of the Sun. 8 

Look at the battle-rout of Giants, on walls of stone.—Euripides, Ion, 206. 

Great Giants 

Shining in weapons, holding in hands long spears.—Hesiod, Theog. 185. 

1 Ada is, according to Hesychius, the Babylonian Iuno, who is Melechet, the Spouse 
of Moloch (the Sun, Ptah) ; but, as the Hebrews had an altar inscribed Ad (Od), 
Adah is the feminine of that Name. See Joshua, xxii. 34. Aud (Od, or Ad) is then 
the name of the Fire-god Ach, Iach, Yauk, whose altars were the fire-altars of Moloch 
and blood-besprinkled.—Joshua, xxii. 34; Levit. x. 1, 2; vi. 13; xvii. 11 ; Movers, I. 
263 ; Lenormant gives a compound of Elam and Adon, Lamedon. 

2 Gen. iv. 20 : Ausonius, epigram 30. 

3 Gen. iv. 21 : Nork derives Lamech from Lacham or Laham to consume, eat, 
conquer by force, which is in the sense of Gen. iv. 23, 24. Lamia is Bel’s daughter. 

4 Nork, Worterbuch fiber das alte Testament, p. 345. 

6 Gerhard, Gr. Mythol. § 130. The Giant fables and Titan stories sung among 
the Greeks and some lawless acts of Kronos, and contests of Python against Apollo, 
and Flights of Dionysus, and Wanderings of Demeter do not differ from the Osirian 
and Typhonian stories which all are allowed to freely hear in the form of myths.— 
Plut. de Iside, 25. But the science of astronomy was studied by the priests.—de Iside, 
41. 

Deuteronomy, iii. 13, calls the Basantis the land of the Rephaim. Aug was the 
last of them, in Astarta’s city. We find Akis, 1 Sam. xxxvi. 5; Agis in Sparta. 

6 Rev. iv. 5 ; v. 6. 

7 de Iside, 18. The land of Sifis.—Josephus, Ant. I. 2, 3. 

8 de Iside, 35 ; Meyer, Set-Typhon, 17. 


isis nsr Phoenicia. 


283 


Nor did Sons of Titans smite him 

Nor lofty Giants set upon him.—Judith, xvi. 7. 

Consequently, the story of the Titans was well known to the 
Jews. 

Patach in Hebrew means door (janua, Eanus, Ptah) and is 
the Hebrew Janus (Patah) that begins the year opening and 
ending the period of time. Simeon (Hebrew, ‘ Semaun ’) is 
the Biblical Semo (Herakles) the Phoenician or Samaritan 
pillar-God Bal Hamman (Chamman). The Shoulder-God 
Sechem (S-k-m), the son of the ruttish Ass (Hamor), lets him¬ 
self be circumcised after an interview with a daughter of Iakob. 
Soq means appetite (Nork says, desire); hence Isoq, Iskaq 
(Isaac). Agabah meaning * amorous,’ like Iaqab. Simeon 
requires the circumcision of Chamor, because he was himself 
worshipped with the* phallic cultus, for the sun-pillars (the 
chammanim) have reference to the phallus. Justin testifies 
(Apologia, 26) that nearly all Samaritans (Sichem people) 
adore Simon Magus as their first Power of God. Semaun’s 
son, Iachin, has the name of one of the two Jewish sun-pillars 
(Gen. xlvi. 10),'and Zohar (meaning the light of the sun, Sem, 
Semal) is another son. Simeon is represented as a Warrior 
(Gen. xlix. 5, 6) and the Assyrians first erected pillars to Mars 
(Herakles). Iamin points to Simeon as the finger-god He¬ 
rakles Daktulos, for Iamin means the right hand. Nork com¬ 
pares Simeon and Loi (Levi) to Herakles and Apollo to Gem¬ 
ini.—Nork, iv. 258, 296; Gen. xlix. Samson (Smson, Semes, 
Hebrew) is the Sun man, the Biblical Herakles. He is son of 
Manoc/i; so, Adonis is son of Manes.—Nork, iv. 296. Joshua, 
x. 11, mentions the city Asaqah. 

According to tradition Ischaq (Isaac) was buried in Kheb- 
ron, but the Laughing One is the Sun and the stars are said to 
laugh; Ischaq’s name means ‘he laughs ’ or ‘ the laughing.’ 1 
Sakakah (Joshua, xv. 61) could be made Isakak, by prefixing i 
(ol) to the name of the city in the wilderness. Nork has tried 
to connect Izchaq with Zochak (Zohak). Genesis, xxiii. 8, gives 
us the proper name Zochar meaning ‘splendens.’ Zochach 
means shining. Nork mentions the love of the flesh and Aso’s 
care for his kitchen as the Darkness in Izchaq’s eyes. 2 Izchaq’s 

1 Goldzieher, Hebrew Mythol. 92-96, 278, 279. 

2 Genesis, xxvii. 1, 3, 4, 7. Spirit and flesh, spirit and matter is the philosophy.— 
Gen. vi- 3. Nork, Real-Worterbuch II. 307, regards Ischaq as the Biblical Saturn. 


284 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


blindness evidently has reference to the Darkness of night. 
Zo’liak chooses the arch-fiend for his master-cook. Therefore, 
the book Jalkut Chadash (fol. 3) made the singular assertion 
that the soul of the sweet-toothed Eua, in other words, the soul 
of a woman , had transmigrated into the body of Izchaq. His 
wife is Rhea (Damia, Tamia, Rebecca, Eurudike), Rhea 1 being 
Saturn’s wife. 2 When Orpheus turns towards the Darkness, he 
loses Rebekah in Hades. Laughter is the predicate of him 
who sits in the heaven, the smiling Sun. The old poet al-A‘sha 
says of a blooming meadow that it rivals the sun in laughter. 
In the contest between Day and Night, Night says : Thou dost 
laugh at thy rising. 3 Zachar means “ to shine ; ” Sachar means 
the Dawn. The lover of the flesh follows Abrahm, as Siva fol¬ 
lows Yishnu, or as the evil Destroyer Saturn {satr = to de¬ 
stroy, darken, eclipse, obscure) succeeds to Ouranos God of 
Light. So Iakab follows Ischak as Jupiter (the lover, achabos, 
iacobus) takes the place of Saturn ; for these all are symbols of 
light and darkness. From the Moon, says Servius on the 
iEneid, xi. 54, we get our corpus. For love-matters they in¬ 
voked the Moon, and Isis (Yesta) presided over these affairs. 4 

That you may not corrupt yourselves and make for you a cast, the image of 
any similitude, the copy of Man or Woman.—Deuteron. iv. 16. 

The Man is Adam-Adonis; the Woman is Issa, Isis, Eve. Isis 
is Yenus, and Hathor is frequently designated the goddess 
Sothis (Sirius). 5 Sirius is the star of Isis. 

An untold amount of mythic intervening stories must have 
existed connecting the Asiatic circle of myths with the Greek 
world, and the latter had their root in the former. In regard 
to this we are too plainly reminded by the form of many 
Greek mythical and legendary complications 6 that exhibit 
such striking parallels and forms agreeing even to the names, 
that respecting their original identity there is no room for 

1 p&», to flow. She is, of course, Rhea Kubele, the Mater Sipylene, the Luna, Mother 
of the Gods. 

2 Nork, Bibl. Mythol, I. 339, 340. 

3 Goldziher, Mythol. among the Hebrews, 92-95. Zachaq means ‘ to laugh.’ 

4 Plut. de Iside, 52. Hermes and Typhon were intimately associated with the Moon. 
—Plut. de Iside, 8, 13, 18. Achab, in Hebrew, means “he loved,” which reminds one 
of the Eros of Hesiod, the Osiris (of de Iside, 57), and the Hebrew Adonis. 

5 Mariette-Bey, Monuments of Upper Egypt, p. 141. 

6 Mythen-und Sagencomplexe.—Popper, 308. 


ISIS IJST PHOENICIA. 


285 


doubt. Such a one we find in the instance of Rebecca, mother 
of Jacob and Esau, and Ino 1 the mortal wife of Athamas, 
whose son is doubly identified with Jacob, the wrestling Sun- 
god, even in name; for he is named Paloemon 2 and at the 
same time Melikertes, which places his identity with the Phoe¬ 
nician Herkales Melkartli out of all doubt. As first wife of 
Athamas in the Greek Myth is Nephele, the cloud, whose 
original representation was the cow, as we have already seen ; 3 
but with the cloud goddess whose humidity fructifies the uni- 
versum was united the Moon goddess, as the essence of the all- 
productive Power of Nature, in general, the feminine physical 
production, the symbol of the Mother and Maternity. Thus 
in the later development of this mythological idea a compli¬ 
cated circle of legends were built up whose offshoots can still 
be traced in the Grecian Mythology. We should not forget 
that mythological conceptions as ancient as those that lie at 
the foundation of the Bible’s Rebecca belong to a world that 
has wholly passed away. 4 As Athamas (Tamas, Atamu, Ta- 
muz, Adonis, Turn) is a Cthonian or Subterranean deity and 
Solilunar, we can well compare Sakia-Ischaq with Danaus and 
Ischaq the well-digger. 5 Zohak is in Old Arabian Historians 
written Ed-Dhahhak, Dahak, and Dechak in Arabic.—Popper, 
279, 293. Dechak means the laugher.—Popper, 293. Abralim 
is connected with the Yima mythus.—ibid. 284, 299. The fall 
of Zohak is a Persian myth drawn from the Indo-Iranian 
natural philosophy.—ibid. 289. Since the Arabic Dechak 
means the laugher and Izchaq in Hebrew means the laughing 
one it would appear that the Old Persian mythus has got into 
the Hebrew Bible; for Popper, p. 284, says that the Biblical 
Creation-legend is quite late, having been written under the 
monotheist idea. The contrast of Persian dualism appears 
kept up in the Serpent of Eua, Ken and Abel, Izchaq and Is- 

1 Ino Leukothea is Luna, Rhea, from Rheo, to flow. From the moon flow out 
many benefits, especially from a rainy moon. What more natural than that a rainy 
Luna should have a rainy son, Sakia the Arab Raingod ! Whence the good luck to 
the farmer, and laughing for joy of heart. Zaq in Hebrew means to pour out, to pour 
down ; zaqaq, to make liquid, to pour out; but sachaq and zaqaq, to laugh. One of 
the religious double entendres in the Hebrew Bible is here detected in the identification 
of Sakia as the root of Ischaq. 

2 Palaestra. The Wrestler. 

3 Popper, p. 308. 

4 Popper, 309. 

5 Gen. xxvi. 18, 20. 


286 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


mael, Set and Osiris, Esau and Jacob, (Izcliaq and Abimelecli 
in the strife about wells). It certainly was a dry piece of wit 
in the Hebrew scribe to set Abimelech (who here represents 
fire, like the Fire-god Adarmelech, Moloch) and the Raingod 
(Sakia) at variance over a well of water. The name Tharacli 
(Terah, Abrahm’s father) was probably also written Dharach. 
Similar names of the Fire-god are Adar and Adores. 1 If the 
Arabic Asar or Azar represents Terah it is due to the fact that 
all are names of the Fire-god. Among the Kanaanite, Syrian 
and Arabian races (Yolksstammen) we find several highly 
regarded Gods that mostly, from their names, are fire-kings, 
fire-lords and fire of God, adored in horrible fashion in the 
consuming fiery element through child offerings and men- 
offerings, fire-purifications and fire-trials, 2 very much as Salem 
once attempted to doctor her witches through the experience 
of “ a fiery law ” of ancient scripture written under a priest 
caste in the orient. What was human life worth in the hands 
of an ancient priestly politician, or human suffering compared 
with the spiritual policy of the Jesuits ! 

Baethgen, p. 54, Schroder (die phon. Spraclie, 196), and 
Renan (corpus Inscript. Semit. 145) find a god Asakan, Sek- 
kun. The Biblical Ischaq belongs in Garar (on the way to 
Egypt). Compare Sachor (—Josh. xiii. 3) Zochar (Gen. xxiii. 
8). That Ischaq is a form of the Arab Sun-god (at Garar.—Gen. 
xxvi. 6) is not wholly improbable. Amos, vii. 9, mentions the 
Highplaces of Ischaq. The Yama-mythus and Zohak-saga are 
said to be the Abrahm-myth and the Isaak-story. Abrahm is 
connected with the Yima-mythus. 3 But, as founder of a city 
or as Palestine patriarch, Ischaq’s name (like Iaqab’s, with 
Qebron, or Khebron) should be associated with some town 
bearing a similar name, such as Sakaka in Joshua xv. 61. The 
people of Sachaq could then be recognized as the Beni Ischaq, 
of Sakakah. Joshua, xv. 11, 35, supplies the two names Azaqa 
and Sakarona, whose root is Asaq. “ While the Mukerinos 4 is 
a kind father toward the citizens and makes these things his 
business the beginning of evils is his daughter dying, his only 
child in his household. And he grieving exceedingly on ac- 

1 Popper, 161; Movers, I. 322. 

2 Movers, 323. 

3 Popper, 284. Azi Dahaka and Zohak (contracted from it) and Izak-Sakia. 

4 Mu-kerinos, Saturn et Sol, the Spirit in the Bull Apis. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


287 


count of this thing and wishing to bury his daughter 1 with 
more honor than all the rest, made a hollow wooden cow 2 and, 
having gilded it, buried this daughter, already dead, in the 
inside of it. 

“ This Cow therefore was not buried in the earth, but was 
visible even in my time, being in the city Sais, lying in the 
palace in a curiously wrought chapel; and all sorts of incenses 
they sacrifice before Her every day ; and every night, all night 
long a candle is burned near (Her). And near this Cow in an¬ 
other chapel stand the images of the concubines 3 of Mukerinos, 
as the priests said in the city Sais : for they are wooden colossi 
about twenty in number at most, worked naked: who they are 
I cannot say, more than I have said. 

“And the ‘certain persons’ tell about this Cow and the 
Colossi this story : 4 that Mukerinos was smitten with his own 
daughter 5 and then violated her. And afterwards they say 
that the girl hung herself for grief; and he buried her in this 
Cow ; but the mother of the girl cut off the hands of the priest¬ 
esses 6 who gave up the daughter to the Father ; 7 and now the 
images are mutilated as when alive. But they say these things 
talking humbug, as I think, both regarding the other matters 
and certainly about the hands of the Colossi ; for these things 
we observe even now, that owing to time they have lost the 
hands, which are visible at their feet even yet in my time. 

“ And the Cow, as to the other parts, is covered up in purple 
clothing, but She shows the neck and head, haying been gilded 
with very thick gold; and between the horns the Sun’s circle 
is there represented in gold. And the Cow is not standing but 
lying on her knees ; in size like a great cow alive. And She is 
borne out from the chapel in each year. When the Egyptians 
beat themselves for the God (Osiris, Bacchus, Ia’hhoh) not 

1 Isis luna, the Spirit in the moon, Vena. 

2 Venus-Isis with cow-horns. Asherah. 

3 Each Hindu God had his sacti or female energy. 

4 the hieros logos. 

5 Venus, Isis, Laksmi, Hathor, Io, Ino. 

6 or handmaids. These Sacred Tales were meant to excite curiosity, by keeping up 
the Mystery. 

7 The moon is born from the Sun—in Hindu philosophy. —Colebrooke, Relig. 
Hindus, p. 25. The number 7 is distinctly hinted at in Gen. xxix. 27, where the word 

points to the Seven-day week. No doubt the union of the War Department, The¬ 
ology, Architecture, and Law in Ecclesiastical hands was to some extent an injury; 
but the Scribes had to work, to make things plausible and to influence the public. 


288 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


named by me for such a matter, at that time, then, they bring 
forth the Cow to the light! For they say, to be sure, that dy¬ 
ing She asked the Father Mukerinos that, once in every year , 
She should see the Sun .” 1 The holy ark of Amun was carried 
out from the Egyptian temple once in a year , and taken across 
the river . 2 The Hebrew ark was borne forth on the March 
equinoctial festival beyond the Red Sea . 3 The Romans once a 
year extinguished the Fire at the end of the year. On the 
first of March they kindled the New Fire on the altars of 
Vesta . 4 “ Wake, burning torches! ” Iacli! Iaeche! 

Adde quod arcana fieri Novus Ignis in aede 

Dicitur, et vires flamma refecta capit.—Ovid. 

The fire shall ever he burning on the altar; it shall never go out.—Leviti¬ 
cus, vi. 13. 

Hence we have the festival of the male-female fire in Osiris- 
Isis represented, as in the Hebrew As-Aisah, as in Apollo and 
Minerva, Amon and Mene, Bakchus and Venus. Vena is the 
moon’s Heifer Isis, Keres, Proserpine Soteira. The Egyptians 
robe and adorn a luniform image; they carried about in pro¬ 
cession a Gold Cow in a black cotton dress, considering the 
cow a symbol of Isis, Luna and Earth . 5 Apis is the symbol of 
the life 6 of Osiris . 7 Adam-Attis is the lunar horn , 8 Osiris in 
the moon. The moon was regarded in India as the Bun’s 
daughter; and Diodorus calls Isis the wife of Osiris and the 
daughter of Saturn . 9 

This “ holy story ” which the priests told Herodotus is not 
to be taken literally more than the “ holy story ” in Genesis 
about Abrahm 10 and Sarah ; 11 both stories refer to the sun and 
moon, Asarah’s Cow . 12 

1 Herodotus, II. 129-133. 

2 Heeren, 303, 304. ed. Oxford. 

3 Exodus, v. 1 ; xii. 17. 

4 Hyde, p. 144. 

B Sod, I. 77, 137 ; de Iside, 39. 

6 Vital Fire. 

7 Plutarch, Iside, 20. 

8 Holy, heavenly, horn of Mene.—Gerhard, Griech, Mythol. 149 ; Schneidewin, 
philologus, 3, 261; Hippolytus, v. 9. The Sabians considered Adam the Lunus-deity.— 
Mankind, p. 464. 

9 Diodor. I. 13, 24. 

10 Bromius, Brahma, Abrahm. 

11 Sarasvati, Lucina, SaracA the Arab Moon-goddess. Compare the name Khetasira 
with the names Khet (Kheth, Heth) and Asira (Asera, Ashera; and Asar = Osiris). 

12 The Hebrew sacred tale contains some political references to the Arab nations. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


289 


The Babylonians said that Bel was first born, who is Kro- 
nos. 1 From him was born Belns and Canaan, and this Canaan 
begat the Father of the Phoenicians. And from this Chonm is 
born a son that by the Greeks is called Asbolos (Askolos ?) and 
Father of the Aithiopians, but brother of Misraim (who is) the 
Father of the Egyptians. 2 Here we begin to note a peculiarity 
of these so called genealogies, that to each city, district or 
country a person is invented who is assumed to have been its 
Ancestor and to have given name to it. Thus Sarach (Sara’h) 
is here assumed to have given name to the Saracens, as Hagar, 
to the Hagareni or Agraei of Arabia. 3 The Agraei inhabited 
the southern foot of Mount Libanus and the frontier of Syria. 4 
The Hagarenes, Agraei or Gerraeans had an emporium called 
Gerra, on the Persian Gulf. 5 Genesis, xvi. 11, translates Ismael 
(God will listen to) by the verb sama “to hear.” With 
Ishmael, compare i Shammah, the Arab tribe, named from 
Shama-el, Samael or Sliemal, a name of the Sun. The Beni 
Shammah were by the scribe called i Shamaelites. 6 Ishmael’s 
first born is Nabioth, the Nabatheans. Roual 7 is the Baualla 
tribe of Arabs. 8 Pliny names nearly the whole of Northern 
Mesopotamia Arabia , and says it was inhabited by Arabs, 
among whom he mentions the Rhoali. 9 The oldest of the 
twelve Hebrew tribes was Arauban, Reuben Araby. Judges, 
viii. 11, mentions the place Iagabhah. 10 Genesis, x. 30, gives 
us Ioktan for Ancestor of i (the) Katan or Kahtan Arabs. 11 The 
Assyrians conquered Palestine in the 8th century before Christ 
and the Assyrian starworship is like the Persian. 12 

1 krona = sunbeam. Sol-Saturn. 

2 Eusebius, Praep. Ev. ix. 17. 

3 see Jervis, Genesis Elucidated, pp. 169, 382, 389, 464; 1 Chron. v. 19. 

4 Jervis, p. 382. Compare Sanchoniathon’s Agros.—Orelli, Sanch. p. 20. 

3 Jervis, 389, 395, 396; Baruch, iii. 22, 23 ; 1 Chron. v. 19. 

3 Dunlap, Sod, I. 201-205; Gen. xvi. 12. 

7 Genesis, xxxvi. 10. 

3 Sod, I. 204, 205. 

9 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 365, 366; Pliny, vi. 9. 

10 Compare Agabus and Aigobolos. Gebal was the sun-god.—Creuzer, Symb. I. 
259. The Angel Akibeel has a like name. Kebo is the setting sun; Kebir is fire ; and 
Cabar or Gabar is the Mighty One, Cabir. Iagob would seem to have been Iacob and 
Dionysus.—See Dunlap, Sod, I. 160, 164 ; Pausanias, ix. 8, 1. 

11 See Josephus, Ant. xii. 8. 1, where the Gentiles regarding unfavorably the rekind¬ 
ling of the Jewish power attacked the Jews in the time of Judas Makkabeus. Judas fell 
upon the Beni Esau, the Idumeans, whom the Jews always Avanted to conquer after the 
2d century Scriptures were written. See the prophecy in Gen. xxvii. 35, 36, xxxv. 1. 

12 Movers, I. 64, 66, 70. 

19 


290 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Za’liel (Zachel*) was (ch softens to A) possibly the earlier 
Arabian name of the planet Saturn (J^O Zuhel. Compare 
Sachelat 1 Kings, i. 9. Baethgen, 54, nnds a god Askan. 
Sichaeus the pure corresponds to the Phoenician Agathon 
who is killed with Adonis 2 by Adrastus. 3 Pygmalion murders 
Elion, Typhon destroys Osiris, Mars kills Adonis, Qen kills 
Abel. Esau is the evil spirit, Asu (Darkness) upon which light 
follows. 4 Horus succeeds Osiris, Apollo succeeds Aidoneus or 
Pluto! Esau is red (the color of the soil) like Mars-Typlion, 
which is the Devil’s color. The Egyptian Queen Aso, one of 
the allies of Typhon against Osiris, has just the same name 
as (Asu, or Esau). Plutarch tells the story that Osiris and 
Isis were united in the Darkness (of Hades ?) prior to their exit 
from the maternal alvus; which is fairly matched by the 
scribe’s description of the contest between Esau and Iaqab 
in Rebecca’s womb. 5 These twins created such a disturbance 
before they were born, that Rebecca inquired at all the doors 
of the women if they also in their days had been so unfortu¬ 
nate as to meet with such suffering, such painful delivery; 
and is said to have spoken: If childbed entails such sufferings, 
then I wish I had never become a mother. 6 

Two nations are within thy womb, 

Two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels. 

And people shall prevail against people, 

And the mighty 1 shall serve the younger.—Genesis, xxv. 23. 

Thy brother 8 came with subtlety and hath taken away thy blessing.—Gen¬ 
esis, xxvii. 35. 

Isaiah, xxiv. 23, gives the name of the Moon as Labanah, so that 
Laban is Lunus. Hermes and Luna gave increase to flocks. 

1 Zachelac^ (a name, perhaps, of a town, where Zahel was the planet) could readily 
be Zeglag, or Zuhhelag. 

2 Spring Sun. 

3 Burning heat. 

4 Julius Popper, Ursprung des Monotheis mus, 306, 308, 314, 364. 

6 Arabah, Raubach, “ Erebenna Nux,” or Nephthys. Edom was always raiding 
Judea. 

6 Popper, 329 ; Gen. xxv. 22; Medrash Beresith Rabba, 63. 7. Movers, Phoenizier, 
390, 393, 397, 398, 400, regards Esau as the Evil Principle. The Semitic Bal (Bol) is 
the Sun, but Saturn too, who is the Devil-Hades.—Movers, 180 ; Homer, H. xiv. 203, 
204; Servius ad Aeneid, I. 729. Saturnus is the Autumnal God, the year’s fulness, 
and identical with Adonis-Dionysus-Admetus. 

7 Idumean Seir, the Shasu, shall serve “the Kub,”.the Iakub, or Iakoub. 

8 Iakab, the tricky ! Kebt is a name of the Old Egyptians—Ideler, Handbuch, 
II. 504. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


291 


Now mark what Iakab did.—Genesis, xxx. 38, 39; xxxi. 8. Chab 
(sn) means to do a thing clandestinely, 1 iachab means one “ who 
will do a thing secretly.” Esau says: iaqabani “ he has sup¬ 
planted me,” 2 to the horror 3 of the shaking old Izchaq. 4 The 
chief of the Seven Kabiri was Kab (Keb) who is Saturn. “ Hera- 
kles the Mighty ” is a form of Aaaqabaar (the Mighty Iaqab) 
who was a Hebron Sungod, or Saturn. Julius Popper (in 1879) 
showed that the Mighty Herakles was Iaqab the Acbar (Mighty 
One) of Genesis, xxxii. 28. The Sun-chariots stood within the 
precincts of the Jerusalem temple.—2 Kings, xxiii. 11. Psalm, 
xix. 5 uses the very word (‘ Gabor,’ = Kab, iaqab) of the Mighty 
Sun. We have the Light of Mithra (a young man of high 
stature taller than all the rest—Esdras, v. ii. 43. The Angels 
were always represented taller), the death of Herakles and his 
Revival, the Death and Resurrection of the Adon Mithra. 
They told the deeds of Herakles (—Yirgil, Aen. viii, 287, 288), 
and Aristophanes, Frogs, 429, speaks of “ Herakles the Mighty.” 
The Turks say Allah acbar, God is mighty; and the Greeks 
said the same of Herakles, 5 who is both Saturn and Sol. 
Acabor, 6 a name of the Great Kabir, reminds one of Iacob. 
As to old Isaak (Saturn the Ancient) we find the name Sechm 
near a valley which opens into a plain watered by a fruitful 
stream that rises near the town. The Midrash Rabba to Gen¬ 
esis, xlix. 14, states that Iacob (Jacob) is here speaking of his 
land? 

Issachar is an ass of bone, lying between bundles.—Gen. xlix. 14. 

The twelve sons of Israel are twelve cantons. Asar is the ter¬ 
ritory in the rear and to the south of Sarra (Tyre, Syria); Dan 
is a district of west Palestine, or one located in the Lebanon; 
Rauban is one east of Jordan ; and so on. But the Seven days 
Mourning for Iakob are like the Mourning for Adonis, Kebo, 
Saturn, the setting Sun, the chief Cabir. Gabal was a name of 

1 Seder Leshon, p. 88. In Syriac chab also means to love. 

2 Gen. xxvii. 35, 36. 

3 Gen. xxvii. 33. 

4 Laughter ! Sekun is perhaps a form of Ischaq. 

8 Dunlap, Sod, I. p. 95; Homer, II. xi. 601. Archaleus is Herakles in Phoenicia, and 
Rachel was his flame. Laban is the Lunus, according to Nork, indicated by the num¬ 
ber seven (a quarter of a lunar month) and by the number ten.—Gen. xxxi. 41. The 
moon-year formerly consisted of but ten months.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol. I. 349, 350. 

6 Jer. xxxvi. 12. 

7 Wiinsche, Midrash Rabba, par. xcviii. p. 487. 


292 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Sun-deity, 1 the Kebir. The Little Genesis 2 says that Iacob 
learned letters, but Esau did not, being- a Wild Man and a 
Hunter. 3 

There is a resemblance in plan and idea between the dynas¬ 
ties of Manetho and Genesis. In those of Manetho compared 
with the early patriarchs of Genesis (which seems, as it stands 
to be later than Manetho) we find the Gods named first in order 
by both Manetho and Genesis, the former continuing- with the 
demigods and kings, while the Hebrew story stations demi¬ 
gods and patriarchal rulers next after the Gods. Phaleg 
(supposed patriarch of Phaliga), Rau (the Rawalla tribe of 
Arabs), Nachor (assumed to be the patriarch of Nahraina, 
Terah of Trachonitis, Haran of Harran, Lot of Lotaun, Esau of 
Saue, Abrahm of the Brahman sect (of Kalanus), Kanan 
(Cainan.—Gen. v. 19) of the Kananites, Ischaq, Iaqab are pre¬ 
ceded by undoubted deity-names in the first chapter of Gene¬ 
sis. See Adam, Eua, the Serpent (Typhon), Set, Methuselah, 
Lamach, Audah, Sellali, Anocli (Enoch), Iabal, Iubal, Thuval- 
kan, Nah (Noah). Jacob himself is Herakles (—Julius Popper, 
395-398, 428, 448). Har-m-achu means Herakles in Light. 4 
Herakles (as Homer tells us) descended into hell (Hades). 
Iaqab descended (kaboa. —Joshua, x. 27) to Hades.—Gen. xlix. 
33. Iaqab and Ioseph both descended after having lived re¬ 
spectively the sacred numbers 120 and 110 years. The name 
of the early Egyptian king Kab-en-acliu (Kabeliou) would 
then mean Iaqab (Herakles) of Light. Akabah, Keb, Keboa 
mean descent; and Iaqab is then, like Herakles, Kronos, 
Saturn, Osiris, Dionysus, the Descent of Light! See Isaiah, 
xliv. 5. 

After the Elood-myth (see Menu, Menes, M-nu and Nu) we 
find in the Hebrew text supposed founders of tribes and cities 

1 Creuzer, Symb. I. 259. 

2 et didicit Jacob literas, Esau (Asu) autem non didicit.—Ronsch, das Buch d. 
Jubilaen, pp. 24, 25. Asu means “Spirit,” the Evil Spirit, Father of the Idumeans. 

3 Job, ii. 2. Compare Ashima-el, the Dev-il, for Ishmael.—Gen. xvi. 12. 

4 Palaemon is Ino’s son, is a fiendish earth-giant.—Gerhard, Gr. Myth. I. p. 423. 
See Mithra (Herakles) as also Moloch.—ibid. II. 332, 333. With Mithra we are at once 
introduced to Persian Dualism. The Demon appears in Egypt near the Moon. Com¬ 
pare Typhon and Isis in Plutarch, de Iside, 18, 33, 45. Iaqab was an attribute of the 
Sungod.—Popper, 437, 438. He appears in the contest of Mithra against Ahriman, 
Iaqab versus Asu (the Ahriman side of the Mithra worship), Herakles contra Moloch 
or Palaemon.—See Popper, 437. Ino is the Goddess of Light, that sprung into the sea. 
—Preller, I. 378; Odyssey, v. 333. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


293 


mixed up as Euhemerised patriarchs with Abrahm, Ischaq 
and Iaqab. See Genesis, iv. 18-21; v. 26; xxxvi. The Arab- 
Egyptian names Saba, Seb, Asaph, Saf (compare Hasupha.— 
Ezra, ii. 43, Sept., Mt. Sephar.—Gen. x. 30) also are associated 
with the pages of Genesis. The Great Pyramid was called 
Khuti (Kliu-t.—De Rouge, Recherches, p. 42). In Hebrew, Ach 
means fire. So Achut (compare Neb-em-achu-t.—De Rouge, 
Rech. p. 57). Har, Horus, descended to Hades ! Har-ach-al-es 
was burned in fire at the evening descent in the west! Khut, 
fire, light, was the Great Pyramid’s name ; and pur, fire, is the 
root of the word puramis, pyramid, pyre. Hence Khufu’s 
cartouche is preceded by the signs of life, the water and the 
ram. 


elali hashems.—Gen. xxxii. 27. 

The Sun went up. 

wa serach lo hashems.—Gen. xxxii. 32. 
And the Sun rose to him ! 


Asu (Esau) is Diabolos-Invidia, Ashu the Red Adversary 1 in 
the Desert, where the scape goat was sent to the Devil (Aziz, 
or Azazel); hence Cubele (Kubele), or Arabecca, Orebecca, 
the mother of Iacob, covered Iacob’s hands with the skins of 
goats that Old Isaac (Saturn in Hades) should mistake him for 
the Wild Huntsman Asu, Esau, or Kenaz. 2 Iachab is Cupido, 
Adon, Keb, Saturn. The pillar that he set up on Rachel’s 
grave was a sun-pillar, suited better to the Phoenician Archal- 
Harakales (Herakles); who, however, sometimes appeared in 
female character and his priests in feminine dress, owing to 
the Lunus-Menes-Mene character of the Hermathene. Com¬ 
pare the pillar (oiled phallus stone) that Jacob set up on 
another occasion (Gen. xxviii. 17, 18; xxxv. 14). DaudorDod 
is declared to be the lunar Herakles by one writer, and Adad 
(the Phoenician Adodos) is the King of the Gods, the Sun. 
Iaqab, Herakles and Rachel all ‘ wrestle.’—See Genesis, xxx. 8. 
Adonis and Venus suggest love. Agab (in Hebrew, to love), 
agap (in Greek, to love) indicate that in the words Iaqab (Iacob, 
Jacopo) and Iacopo we shall meet a Lover of the Lunar Deity, 


1 Edom or Adorn means ‘ ‘red.” 

2 Nork, Re§,l-Worterb. I. 478 ; Gen. xxvii. 16. He is also connected with the Eden- 
story as Hades, Geno, Generator, and fond of delicacies or delights.—Gen. xlix. 20, 
edenim, or edeni. Note the Kenazi, in Gen. xv. 19, in relation to Qenaz. 


294 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Aphrodite ; else how came Iacob and Iacopo to correspond to 
Hebrew and Greek verbs meaning' love ? 

Apollo in the cave of Bakchos was inflamed with love for 
Kubele. 1 They say that Iasion (compare the letters Sion) mar¬ 
ried Kubele and Keres. 2 

be-oreb 3 kaboa lia-shems : at evening the Sun dies.—Deut. xvi. 6. 

Iakab put his feet together on the bed, and expired.—Gen. xlix. 33. 

Then beg'an the abel misraim, the Egyptian Mourning. From 
the rising (Serach 4 ) of the sun to the going down 5 (Kab, Kebo) 
of the same, our theme is Sarach and Iakab. Judas Makka- 
beus opened the war by an attack on Esau’s Sons, the Idu- 
means, killing and stripping many of them. 6 7 

And Iakab heard the remarks of the Sons of Laban, 1 who said : 

Iakab has taken all the property of our father, and out of what has been 
our father's he has made all this credit. And Iakab saw the face of the Laban, 
and behold it was not towards him as it was yesterday and to the third day ! ! 
—Septuagint Genesis, xxxi. 1, 2. 

In short, Jacob was advised to leave Lebanon without delay. 8 
The scribe rung all the changes on Jacob’s name whether as 
the tricky, or the lover, or as the one who makes the c descent ’ 
to Hades, like Herakles. The Indian Herakles was (according 
to Cicero, N.D. III. 16) named Belus; Saturn is the mythic 
Herakles of the Phoenicians, Baal-Chon (Bal Chon, Ptah, 
Yulkan) who wrestled with Typhon-Antaeus in the sand (as 
Iaqab = Isar-el, fighter of God) contends with Elohim in the 
sand, injures himself, as Herakles once on a time did, and 
receives the other name Isarel (Azar-el, Israel), another Palai- 
mon.—Movers, 396. Baal, who mythically is Herakles, was 


1 Diodorus Sikulus, III. 193. 

2 ibid. V. 323. 

3 Compare orphel. 

4 Compare Asarac, Osar, Osiris, Isarel. The Resurrection of Osiris. 

5 Saturn is Kebo, the Sun descending to Hades. Servius, on the ^Eneid, remarks 
that Bel, by a certain calculation of the sacred rites or priests, was both Saturn and 
Sol. Saturn is the concealed Kab or Keb (chaba means to hide, to conceal, to do any¬ 
thing secretly, and to be concealed). Chabah means to hide one’s self. 

6 Josephus, Ant. xii. 8.1. After gaining their own independence the Jews claimed 
sway over the elder races of Lotaun and Mt. Seir. 

7 Beni Laban in the Lebanon. * 

8 Gen. xxxi. 3, 5, 9. After getting Laban’s cattle by a trick Jacob says that Elohim 
took them from Laban and gave them to him. This is fatalism indeed! 


isis nsr phcrnicia. 


295 


also worshipped as Moloch the Firegod. Baal and Herakles 
are Mars. This Mars-Herakles is the Phoenician Ar, Archal, 
Harakles. — Movers, 400, 401, 432. So much for the Azara (the 
Fire-goddess) of Osiris, Har, Herakles the King of Fire! 
Isarel means (he will prevail over God) Gotteskampfer (in 
German) and is the second name of Saturn-Herakles among the 
Phoenicians. — Movers, 433. The Hebrew God was the Gheber 
God of fire and Life !— Deuteron. ix. 10 ; 1 Kings, xviii. 24. The 
God with whom Iaqab Herakles wrestles is Saturn, God of 
earth , darkness , water and time. After his struggle with Dark¬ 
ness he comes along at daybreak halting and limping. 

The ancient myth sends Iaqab (the root of his name in 
Hosea xii. 4 is ‘ aqab ’) from the West to the East, to return 
from the East to the West, to Beth El, the temple of El-Saturn, 
whence he started, the temple of the King of fire Kronos- 
Herakles. 1 There was the Golden statue of Apollo and the 
£ sacred fire ’ at Delphi. 2 The Sungod, the Lydian Herakles- 
Sandan, is said to have been in the service of the Moon, 
Omphale; Iaqab, in that of Lea and Bachel. Aqab means 
fraud, tricky. He claims to become a great people, and £ all 
his brothers are given to Iaqab for servants.’ 3 The Hebrew 
people, formed from tribes or races that adored the Great 
Lights (Lichtmachte der Natur), has preserved their names and 
acts in its oldest memory and has recognized in them its own 
first ancestors, not holding them for what they originally were, 
but regarding them in an entirely different light, having subor¬ 
dinated and assimilated them even so far as completest want of 
knowledge of its newly won religious point of view. The Gods 
of their ancestors became their first fathers, human beings. 
The name of a God became the name of the national patriarch. 
With the growth and success of monotheist idea the notion of 
a God named Israel would of course disappear, but his impor¬ 
tance as a patriarch of the people Israel would be strengthened. 4 
Still, the story of Herakles (vide Iaqab) conquering Zeus is 
found in Nonnus, Dionys. x. 376, 377. Compare Genesis, xxxii. 
24-30, and Julius Popper, p. 450, who quotes ££ Hephaistos 
choleuei,” the Firegod is lame, halts! Iaqab says that he has 

1 See Julius Popper, Ursprung, 396-398. 

2 Academy, March 17th, 1888, p. 192. Seth is the Solar fire-god, like Apollo, the 
Bal Seth, or Baal Seth. Compare 1 Kings, xviii. 24. 

3 Gen. xxvii. 37. 

4 Popper, 438. Herakles is located in the sun.— de Iside, 41. 


296 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


seen the God (the Rabbins make him out Firegod *) and still 
lives! Julius Popper has (in places that it is not needful to 
reproduce here) represented how easily popular notions are 
transferred from one to another in the fancy of great masses. 
He holds that Abraham, Ischaq and Iaqab are not historical 
personal beings. 2 The difficulties between Iaqab and Osu 
(Esau) would seem to have been suggested to the Euhemerist 
Hebrew scribe by the passage in Sanchoniatlion regarding 
the contest between Hupsouranios and Ouso; but the skins 
are referred to both in Gen. xxv. 25, xxvii. 16, and in the case 
of Ouso (Esau?) in Sanchoniatlion, pp. 16, 18, ed. Orelli. 
Iaaqab the Mighty representative of the Aaqbar at Khebron is 
interchanged with Herakles, who is Melkarth 3 and Palaimon. 

The King, Elohim, worked salvation below in the centre of 
the earth. 4 Saturn (Ouranus) was met in the centre of the 
earth. Herakles was the Saviour, mighty to deliver from 
Hades; where Homer depicts him. This is Mosia, 5 Osiris, 
Osar, Osar-Sev, the Redeemer from Hades, Adonino “ our 
God” of the cmazogresis or Resurrection. 6 Compare Musios 
in the Mysteries of Phrygia. 

Moses, that is, the Logos (the Word).—Hippolytus, p. 246. 

Beat breasts and shout out the Musion (cry, hymn, wail). —Aeschylus, Persai. 

Sterna arasse kai epiboa rb Musion.—ibid. Persai, 1054. 

Because I am Kurios, thy God, the Holy Israel who saves thee.—Septuagint 
Isaiah, xliii. 3. 


The priestly scribe’s aim was political-topographical. He 
turns Ai Kab into Iakab fapjp) which means “ to take by the 

1 Popper, 446; Judges, xiii. 20, 22. See further, Popper, 369, 373, 378, 398, 444. 

2 Popper, 454, 455. 

3 W. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 382. 

4 Septuagint psalm lxxiv. 12. That was where Saturn and Osiris were at work, as, 
too, Seb and Keb. 

5 Moses. 

6 Dunlap, Sod, I. 112, 159, 160, 164. Kebo is the Setting Sun, and Ai Kabod is 
the Mourning for departed glory. Compare the names Gebal and Kabul in Syria.—1 
Kings, ix. 13. Iakab = deceit. —means to take by the heel, supplant, defraud.— 
Gen. xxv. 26. Two nations are in thy womb.—Gen. xxv. 23-26. All his brothers are 
given as servants to Iaqab.—Gen. xxvii. 37. The immoralities of the patriarchs are 
merely imaginary immoralities told with a political aim. The Arab tribes are repre¬ 
sented as illegitimate kindred resulting from left-handed marriages of the patriarchs. 
The statement that Esau is the elder branch is confirmed by Genesis, xxxvi. 31, for the 
Arabian kings are there declared to have existed before any king ever reigned over the 
Beni Israel.—Gen. xxv. 23, 31, 33; xxvi. 34. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


297 


heel ” and applies this significant meaning- to the case of 
Idumea (Edom) which the later Jews wanted, claiming- the 
hegemone of Isarel over Esau (Edom), he connects Iakab with 
the solar number 12, makes him fight with a “ Power ” all 
night, 1 and gives him the Egyptian Mourning for Adonis- 
Osiris, which lasted seven days. 2 The scribe has in his mind 
the subjugation of Edom. His dream of conquest took in Ur 
(through Abrahm), Issachar and Sechem (through the name 
Izchak, Isaac), Iezreel (through Israel), Lotan (Lot), and Edom, 
—a quasi messianic dream of Jewish power covering all the 
regions over which Abram, Isaac, Lot, Esau and the Mighty 
Jacob had ever wandered, from the border of Egypt to Dan in 
the Lebanon and the Great City Tyre on the sea-coast of Asar. 3 
These claims are beheld in Joshua and in the description of 
Solomon’s vast kingdom, which seems to have been noticed by 
the Jews alone. 

When Euhemerism turned Kadmus 4 into a cook of the king 
of Sidon it could turn the Venus and Fortuna of the Jews, the 
Asarah or Ashera, into a very old lady whom they called Sarach 
or Sarah. Her name, however, was Sarra ; 5 so that She is the 
Aphrodite of Tyre and the Euphrates as well as Ephraim, to 
whom the city lone was her sacred city. 

Small parties of the Beni Sakker still descend into the Jor¬ 
dan valley to steal. 6 Issachar (Ish Sakar) pitches tent on the 
boundary of summer and winter, for his place is appointed to 
him in the Scales at the autumn equinox, where the heliacal 
ascension of the star Libera, the neighbor of the Virgin, to¬ 
gether with Ophiuclius on the horizon helps to explain the 
myth of the rape of Dina by Sachem ben Chamor (the sou of 
the Ass), the Choi or Ophis. 7 The Lion, Ariman, 8 is now be- 

1 Azar, Azarel is Mars, the Destroyer. 

2 Gen. 1. 3, 10, 11. Compare Khnum, Ken, Kain. 

3 Joshua, xiii. 6; xix. 29. 

4 Compare “ Zaq ziua Lord of Life” (—Codex Nazoria, Norberg, II. 266) with the 
root of Zaqaq in Izchaq, Isaac. Letters could be changed, for a purpose on the part of 
a Semite scribe. These Gnostic names are not wholly remote from Genesis and its 
names. 

5 Ronsch, die “Kleine Genesis,” p. 24. Tyre’s name was Sarra; now, it is Sour. 
With the names Asar, Asirah, etc. compare the mountains of Asir in Arabia.—Dunlap, 
Sod, I. 205. 

6 J. S. Buckingham, Travels among the Arab tribes, pp. 87, 88. 

7 Choia in Chaldee, Euia, in Hebrew. 

8 Osiris, Adonis, Aidoneus, Pluto. Saturn was the father of Typhon and Nephthys. 
—de Iside, 12. 


298 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


come the Ass Typhon, and, as Yama Judge of the dead, holds 
the Scales in his hand with which the actions of men were 
weighed at the festival Owani Oton. It falls in the same 
month as the Jewish judgment-day, named Day of recollection 
(of sins). And on the astrological sphere of the Persians 1 one 
actually sees an Old Man (Saturn) with a Scales in his hand. 2 
Hermes is the Son of Bacchus. 3 This is Dionysus Zagreus. 
Hermes carries him in his arms, the Son with horns. Hermes 
is the Bain-god Iacchos who brings the dead to life. The 
frenzied Bacchants in the Omophagia, crowned with serpents, 
shouted out that Eua, on account of whom the “Wandering” 4 
immediately followed. With the increase of the Darkness 5 
begins the creation of the corporeal world. The Lamb accom¬ 
panies the resurrection in spring, the Ass 6 walks off with the 
dead when the six dark, wintry signs come on. In the month 
of the Scales, over which the astrologers placed the Yenus 
Sicca, not only the Hebrew Feast of Huts but the Babylonian 
Sakea and the Greek Skirrophoria were celebrated to the 
Moon-goddess as Goddess of Water (Aphrodite) and all femi¬ 
nine nature. 7 Artemis-Nana-Yenus was the great lunar Baby¬ 
lonian feminine Deity. Under the name Anta or Anata 8 she is 
armed as a female warrior with casque, lance, buckler and 
battle-axe. Her character is lunar, infernal and warlike. This 
must be a form of Athena with the lance, the female-part of 
Adonis of Babylon, the Androgune. Anahid, Yenus, was the 
Goddess of the pure water that inundates the earth, and her 
emblem was the dove. Everywhere, in all parts of the vast 
field of its propagation, the worship of Nana-Anat presents at 
the same time two aspects which seem, at first, contradictory. 
This duality of opposites is remarked to the same degree 
among all the feminine divinities of the Euphrato-Syrian re- 

1 Scaliger ad Manilium. 

2 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. I. 391, 392. 

3 Orpheus, Argonautika, 57. 

4 Keres holding a torch. The symbol of Dionysus, the God and the spiritm , is a 

serpent; which the Gnostics transferred to the Anointed. The Golden Serpent scan¬ 
dalised Arnobius as much, in the Mysteries of Bacchus at Alimunt, as the Brazen Ser¬ 
pent of Moses in Arabia might have astonished him. 

6 The walkers in Darkness have seen a Great Light.—Isa. ix. 2. 

6 The Ass was represented as Golden ; for Typhon is represented as Golden Bull. 
The manger of the Celestial Asses is mentioned in Nonnus, I. 459. 

7 See Nork, I. 392, 393. 

8 Anaitis, Neith. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


299 


ligions. It is what is expressed by the invocation in the fourth 
act of the Mercator of Plautus: 

Divine Astarte, of men and gods, the Force, Life, Salvation , tlie same too 
who art Destruction, Death, Extinction. 

All the modern savants that have studied the group of relig¬ 
ions prevailing in the basin of the Tigris and Euphrates, Syria, 
Phoenicia and Palestine, have proved that under names in¬ 
finitely varied, with traits which by turns make this or that 
side of the fundamental conception predominate, it is one 
single and the same feminine divinity that is adored in them. 
She personifies the universal force of mother nature, manifests 
herself in the fecundity of the earth and of humidity, in the 
reproduction of plants and animals and in the celestial bodies 
to which they attributed a beneficent action upon the cycle 
of the perpetual evolutions of life, like the Moon and the 
planet Venus. The female deities are confounded together, 
and are really reduced to but one representing the feminine 
principle of Nature, the humid, passive, and fruitful matter. 1 
Nara, the divine spirit, presided over destruction and recon¬ 
stitution. 2 

Dennis mentions Menerva-Nortia-Fortuna as Etruscan. 
Minerva is Eortuna. Minerva was represented with the polos 
O on her head. 3 Fortune was represented with the polos or 
globe O on her head. 4 Fortuna primigenia was held to be 
Mother of Iuno and Iupiter Puer (Koros). Tuche was much 
worshipped by the Syrians on the Orontes. 5 

yrXrjpovvTes rfj tvxV Kepatr/xa. —Isaiali, lxv. 11. 

A terra-cotta from Phoenicia, in the Museum of the Louvre, rep¬ 
resents Aphrodite-Astarte seated, the head covered with the 
polos, and holding the dove. 6 The Babylonian goddess with 
the polos on her head was Artemis-Nana. 7 The Eleans had a 

1 F. Lenormant, Gazette Arch. 1876, pp. 58, 59 ; Lettres Assyriol., II. 248. 

2 Jacolliot, les Fils de Dieu, 13. 

3 Pausanias, iv. 30, 6. 

4 ibid. vii. 4, 9. A Goddess with a headdress surmounted by the horns and globe. 
—Wilkinson, Modern Egypt, II. 309. 

5 Pausanias, vi. 2, 7. The Feast of DSmetSr lasted 7 days, like the Jewish Feasts. 
—Pausanias, vii. 27, 9. 

6 F. Lenormant, in the Gazette Archeologique, 1876, p. 133, note 4. 

* Sayce, 67, 68. 


300 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


gilded image of Fortuna. Tuche’s temple is near the naos of 
Aphrodite. 1 At Smyrna she was represented with the polos 
(ball) on her head. 2 As the Moon is Minerva’s emblem For¬ 
tuna is Mene, Minerva, Athena, Esita, 3 Artemis, Hestia. For¬ 
tuna is mentioned together with Artemis Phosplioros, 4 and is 
evidently the Babylonian Nana. Praxiteles made Fortuna’s 
image in white marble. She is the “ White Goddess ” of 
Spring, like Ino Leukothea, and therefore holds the child 
Plutus in her arms. She 5 is the Goddess Ma (Isis, Eua) and 
Bona Dea, 6 and, in another point of view probably the Venah. 
Hekate and Hermes gave increase to flocks, but we may sup¬ 
pose these the Chthonian Hermes and Luna of the Shades. 7 
Hermes is thus identified with Pluto and Plutus (wealth) con¬ 
sequently a male Fortune. 8 Hermes does not leave Osiris 
in Hades, since Hermes too is the Solar Power, and he in¬ 
structs Isis. Keres is thus Minerva, Atana, Fortuna, Goddess 
of seeds, increase of flocks (like Yenus) and wealth; like Eua 
in the Mysteries of Dionysus. 

Adar was the Herakles of the Babylonians and Assyrians. 
The Arabs had the god Dar and there was a large erection 
called Magdol-Adar. 9 Nork states 10 that Adarmelech is un¬ 
doubtedly identical with Ares, the Death-bringer Mars, who in 
Syria was called Azor. A king of Moab offered up his oldest 
son, his destined successor, on the wall, a sacrifice to Saturn- 
Adonis, or Dionysus Moloch, Asakal the fire that consumes or 
eats. 11 Sakel means bereavement, loss of children. If the a in 

1 Pausanias, i. 43, 6. 

2 Pausanis, iv. 30, 6. 

3 See Sate, God of Light, Ishita (Seth), Satis (Juno, Hera), Istia, Sit, Sito. 

4 Pausanias, iv. 31, 10. 

5 TuchS. 

6 P. Foucart, p. 88, note 1. 

7 Gen. xlix. 28; Deuteron. xxxiii. 13. 

8 Venus was adored as deum potentem et almum, consequently as Lunus-Luna, or 
Menes. Laevinus adored Venus as mas et femina Noctiluca, and Philochorus affirmed 
that she was Luna.—Macrobius, III. 3. In the Mysteries of Herakles and Aphrodite, 
the priests wore women’s clothes and the pristesses men’s clothing. 

9 Gen. xxxv. 21. Adar is the Dorian, Syrian and Assyrian HeraklSs. Ador is 
the Babylonian and Adiouru the cuneiform expression of the word.—Lenormant, les 
Origines, I. 47. 

10 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. I. 27. 

11 2 Kings, iii. 27. Athena donned the helmet of Aidoneus in order that Mighty 

Ares should not see her.—Homer, II. v. 845. ‘ Mars-Moloch ’ seems to have been the 

Evil One.—Dunlap, Vestiges, 298-301 ff. The Wicked One touches him not.—1 John, 
v. 18. 


ISIS IJSf PHOENICIA. 


301 


Sakel were transposed, or tlie article (lia) were prefixed, the 
Valley of Sakel might be made to read “ Valley of Askol.” 
There is, consequently, some reason to suspect that, besides 
the Mourning for Aud, children may have been sacrificed to 
Moloch in that valley and their blood sprinkled on his altars. 

Take now thy son, tliine only begotten that thou lovest, Izchak, and go 
away for you to the land of Amariah 1 and offer him there as an offering. 2 —Gen. 
xxii. 2. 

The first-births of thy sons thou shalt give to Me. 3 Goldziher 
says that sahal signifies to shine bright. 4 Replacing the li by 
a ch, according to rule, we have SacAal as a name of the Sun, 
which we will apply to the name of the brook in Numbers, xiii. 
23. Goldziher considers Isaac, the Laugher, originally the 
Sun.—Goldziher, 92-96. Askalos (a mythic founder, or name 
of the Sun) built Ascalon.—Movers, Phonizier, I. 17. The 
Mysteries of Dionysus Aisac, or Dionysus of the Sacoth or 
Succoth (the booths of Venus), were held in Arabia, and in¬ 
variably at the period of the vintage. There were several 
forms of the name Askal. 5 Nonnus gives us Aisak as chief of 
the horned centaurs. 

Sakia was the Arabian Raingod; Seb (Saturn) was in the 
Abyss of Sepli. 6 Zachel 7 (Sacliel, Phainon) is a name of the 
Arab Saturn; 8 for Zacliaq means c to laugh,’ in Hebrew. 

1 compare the Amoritename, Mt. Moriah.—Numbers, xxi. 81. 

2 This is an offering in the fireworship, like the children offered to Moloch. 

3 Exodus, xxii. 29. 

4 Goldziher, Mythol. among the Hebrews, 93. 

5 If Sachal is not the source whence the name Ischaq is derived, we have Saq ziua 
(Saq. the Shining) the Lord of Life.—Codex Nazoria, II. 266 ; also Sachar the Morning 
Light, as opposed to the Darkness of Ischaq’s sightless eyes, and SAkia (the name of 
an Arabian deity who supplied the Arabs with rain.—Universal Hist. vol. 18, p. 385); 
and Izchaq dug wells, one of which was called “ Asaq.”—Gen. xxvi. 18, 20. Izchaq is 
here directly connected with the Rainwater ! In Hebrew, izaq and zaq mean ‘ to pour 
out,’ ‘ to pour down. 1 —Ignatius Weitenauer, Seder Leshon (Hierolexicon), pp. 129, 291, 
A. D. 1759; Simonis, Lexicon Hebraicum, p. 731; Gen. xxxv. 14; Leviticus, viii. 15. 
The Hebrew tribe Dan at the sources of the Jordan remind one of Danaus and his wells. 
The Sun was considered the source of rain, and Zachar means ‘to shine.’ 

6 Deut. xxxiii. 18. 

7 As Chur becomes Hur, so Charran changed into Harran, and Zachel changed to 
Zahel in later Arabic, like Rahel and Rachel; ch softens to h in later Arabic and late 
Hebrew. So Khoreb became, at last, Horeb. Khar (Khor) meaning Sun; Kharu, 
Sun-worshippers. 

8 Compare Ludwig Ideler, Sternnamen, p. 316. Sakel and Askal have therefore a 
certain resemblance to the more modern name of Saturn, Zahel, 


302 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Sachaq also means in Hebrew £ to laugh.’ While Sachar means 
the Morning. The Dawn (Ushas) smiles , and the Sun laughs ! 
Many Semite verbs which describe joyousness originally de¬ 
noted to shine. The Hebrew sahal signifies both ‘to shine 
bright/ and ‘ to cry aloud.’ Sarach denotes ‘ to cry ’ in the 
chief representatives of Semitism; but the Arabic has also 
preserved the original sense ‘clarus, manifestus fuit.’ The 
root of the Hebrew hedad ‘ cry of joy’ is the same from which 
Hadad, the name of the Syrian God of the shining sun, can be 
derived. So also sachak ‘ to laugh aloud ’ originally expressed 
the idea of brightness, clearness. It follows that the name 
Yischak is a solar epithet. The old poet al-A‘scha says of a 
blooming meadow that it rivals the sun in laughter. 1 So too 
‘ the Lightning laughed.’ The Arabs seem to have adored the 
God of the rainy sky. 2 

He who sits in heavens shall laugh.—Psalm, ii. 4. 

Habitans in coelis Ischaq; Adoni subsannahit eos.—Ps. ii. 4. 

Zachar also means ‘ shining/ ‘ brilliant.’ • Zacha.ch 

means ‘ shining/ and Zach means nitidus, clarus ; while ziqah, 
np^h means spark, flame. But “ Zchl ” is obviously Zachal or 
Zachel, which would represent Bel Saturn. If Izchaq is Sat¬ 
urn the oath ‘ by Izchaq (Zochak, the Evil Daimon) ’ 3 of whom 
the Arabs stood in great fear (his planet, though brilliant, w'as 
the sign of misfortune) would then (Genesis, xxxi. 42, 53) be 
explained. The oath, “ wa Sate ” or “ wa Set,” would be like 
“Wa Satan.” 

Issakar is an ass of bone, lying between bundles.—Gen. xlix. 14. 

These bundles are the range of hills running north and south 
suited to grape culture. And the 12 Sons of Israel are twelve 
districts, turned by the narrative into twelve persons. 

And they set out from Sakoth 4 to cross the desert, Iachoh 
going before them in the daytime in a column of cloud, but at 

1 Goldzieher, 94, 95. 

2 Zeus Pluvius, in the tents (Sakoth, or Succoth). See Goldzieher, Mythol. of 
the Hebrews, 221, 222. But Zeus is Sun, Dionysus, and Hades. 

3 Compare Saturn as Earthgod, Zochar (the shining) as Zagreus, the male prin¬ 
ciple. See Deuteronomy, xxxiii. 13, on the Depths of Hades. 

4 tents. Tents of Asherah. Succoth. 


ISIS IN PIKE NIG I A. 


303 


night in a fire pillar, 1 as was the case in the Assyrian armies, 
whose Magi carried fire pillars in front of the army. 

The city Phaliga (Phalega) was near the confluence of the 
Khabor and the Euphrates.—Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 312. 
Hence we get a patriarch Phaleg (Peleg) with a pun on his 
name, ‘ divided .’ From the city Alabanda we derive the God 
Alabandus.—Cicero, N. D. iii. 19. Gods had once been men, 
and gave name to cities. Hence cities could be supposed to 
have founders of the same name as the city. Euhemerism was 
a double ender that could work both ways. 

It was the custom of the Chaldaeans in the time of Josephus 
to take with them the terapliim when they left home on a jour¬ 
ney. 2 Rachel (Irach-Luna) did this. 3 It is therefore a late 
custom ! Genesis pays special attention to Idumean relations. 4 
We find the town of Elat 5 or Alat (Alitta, Alilat, Yenus). Lot 
is also mentioned (and the Beni Lot) in the plain of Sedom 
not far from Mt. Seir. 6 Lht (which means he “ burned ”) is 
read 7 Lat, pronounced Lot. Lot thus represents the “ burnt 
district ” where Iahoh rained fire and brimstone upon the cities 
of the plain at the bottom of the Dead Sea. Yolcanic agency! 
The earlier name Bela was changed to Zar. What induced the 
Jewish scribe to alter it into Zoar? Bal (Bol) is the eastern 
name of Abel-Apollo (Abelios in Krete), the name of Iabal, 
Iubal (Jubal’s lyre), or Bel. 8 Zar (Zur) means fire ; according 
to Movers.—I. 338, 340. The verses Gen. xix. 19-22 were writ¬ 
ten by a scribe who introduces double meanings. After an 
objectionable story affecting the reputation of Lot’s daugh¬ 
ters, he winds up with two extra double-entendres in the names 
Ben-Omi and Mo-ab. Gen. xxxviii. 29, 30, has two puns on 
the words Perez (rupture) and Zerach (sunrise, exortus); which 
are, however, proper names. 

Reuben’s district was Araben or Rauben (Araby) beyond 

1 Exodus, xiii. 20, 21. Here is a sort of Jewish Iliad. 

2 Josephus, Ant. xviii. 2. The Mesopotamians carried their gods with them. Ac¬ 
cording to this inherited custom Rachel (Rahel) decorates the idols of herself and hus¬ 
band and takes them along.—Jos. xviii. 2. Gen. xxxi. 19, 34. 

3 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 153, 154 ff.; Gen. xxxi. 34. 

4 Gen. xxxiii. 13-16 ff.; see Amos, viii. 12. 1 Maccabees, vi. 3. 

6 Deut. ii. 8. 

6 Deut. ii. 9. 

7 arsit, incendit. Write with an H • read it A, St. Jerome gives this as the rule ; 
to write “ he,” and read it a. 

8 “Bal Deus dicitur.” Zor, in Hebrew, means “little.” 


304 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Jordan, 1 Iosiph’s land was the land of Sif (Sev, or Zuph), north¬ 
west of Jerusalem, in which the Beth El and the Great High 
Place at Gabaon were situated, while Apherema, Apharat 
(Ephrata) and Aphron supply the name of Ephraim 2 the 
“ fruitful,” from pharah . 3 

Aphron ben Zachar.—Gen. xxiii 8. 

Aphron dwelt in the midst of the Beni Chat, and Aphron the Chati re¬ 
sponded to Abralim in the hearing of the Beni Chat. 4 —Gen. xxiii. 10. 

As the noon-crescent is Issa and Isis, whose star (Canis, Dog- 
star) portended the rise of the Nile, and as the crescent was 
named Asarah, Sarah, Asira, Siro, Asherah and Ioh, perhaps 
Aphorite (see pharah ) means the fruit-giving, Vena, the Ha 
pharahdite or productive crescent Keres ; so Isis would corre¬ 
spond to Demeter and Yenus, the Fortuna of the Israel, Apliro- 
Da-w. 

Genesis, xli. 51, derives the name Manasah from nas, to 
forget. As Jacob’s land is always the main point, M-nasa 
(Manasah) is derived from NASA and means the ‘ elevated ’ re¬ 
gion, south of Magadon and TANach, that was called Mt. Car¬ 
mel. Nasa means to lift or raise up. Also across the Jordan 
Manasah’s allotment was the high ground in Gilead between 
Bostra, Astaroth, Abila and Ephron. Sechem (or Sichem) gets 
its name from sechem achad, 5 meaning part one of Ioseph’s 
fruitful territory ; 6 and this is confirmed by the Greek a, 
eAuperov, 7 meaning chosen , preferred. Near this place is a valley 
opening into a fruitful plain that is watered by a stream 


1 Compare Rabath Beni Amon.—2 Sam. xii. 26. Rabach-ah (Arabah, ArabachaA). 
—Gen. xxvi. 35. Rabachah (or Rebekah) has Arab affinities in Rebecca. Rauben and 
Rebecca. Moab (fromMaab, in the cuneiform; maab stands for maabous “granary,” 
since Selah Merrill in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Jan. 10, 1877, mentions “ the pro¬ 
ductive plains of Moab ”) which seems not to have been counted as a part of Reuben, 
possessed great natural fertility. The resources of the soil must have been immense. 

a Gen. xxiii 8. 

3 Gen. xli. 52. 

4 Compare the Kati mentioned in Gen. xxiii. 7 with Numbers, xiii. 29, where the 
Chati, Amori and Ebusi are shown to have dwelt in the mountains at the time of this 
questionable conquest. 

5 See Gen. xlviii. 22. 

6 Asab, Asav, Seb, Sev (Siva), Sabos, the Arab God named Asaph and Asaf 
(Univ. Hist, xviii. 861, and the Goddess Saiva).—Compare Io Seph, Asaph, Asaf, and 
Mt. Saf-ed. Also Supha, the trans-jordan district.—Numbers, xxi. 14. Iusuph or 
Ioseph. 

7 The Septuagint translation. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


305 


which has its source near the town. Hence the land of 
Sicliem is number one. 

Ioseph is a fruitful bough.—Gen. xlix. 22. 

Gad resembles Acliad, a name of the sun, if shortened into 
one syllable. Gad is a district (towards the sunrise) beyond 
Jordan, as we learn from the mention of ‘Kamus-Gad (in the 
Moabite Stone, line 1*), from the name Dibon-Gad, and from 
Joshua, xii. 6; xiii. 9, 17, 24; Numbers, xxxii. 3, 6 ; xxxiii. 45, 
46. Moab was written in the Assyrian inscriptions Ma-ab and 
Mo’ab, but is found once written Mab in Deuteronomy, ii. 11, 
Hebrew without points. We have also the names Moba 
(Karak Moba) and Moph-at in Jeremiah, xlviii. 21. The pun 
on the name in the Lot story shows, as does the Assyrian way 
of writing-, that Mab or Moba was the original name. The 
writing by syllables would give Ma-ab or Mo-ab. 

In Genesis, xxxviii. 29, 30, we find two puns on the two 
words Phares and Zara: compare the pun on Shemal turned 
into Islimael. 2 —Gen. xvi. 11. In Genesis, xxix. 32-35, there 
are four puns. Lah (Leah) conceives, brings forth a son 
whom she names Rao-ben (son of seeing ), for I’hoh sees (rah) 
my misery. The next son she called Semaon (a favorable 
hearing) because Iahoh heard that she was hated. When Loi, 
the third son was born, she thought her man would stick to 
her ('•ttbN m^); therefore she named her son Loi, adhesion. 
When the fourth was born, she said I will give praise to 
Iahoh. Audah means I will praise ; so she called him 
Ieudah 3 (praise). Sebulon means “ honor.”—Schrader, 149. 
An astonishing source of proper names. These absurd puns 
run on in Genesis, xxx. 6, 8, 11, etc., but it is not necessary to 
repeat all the puns in the Old Testament to instance the pe¬ 
culiarity and habit. Seth’s name is made to turn on the He¬ 
brew verb “ set ” to set, or to appoint, and Acabal is the 
Lover 4 of Kubele, the Moon, the Venus and Cupido that Ovid 
noticed on the bank of the Palestine stream. 

1 Isaac Taylor, Alphabet, I. p. 208. 

2 Shemal, a name of the Sun, here means sinister, from the left side, the Adver¬ 
sary,—the Arab Samael. Shema means “heard. v 

3 St. Jerome read n an a. Aud refers to Adonis; and Audunaios is the name of 
the month when Adon becomes Saturn. 

4 acab, to love. Laban (Lunus) the father of Kubele ? Kubele is Libanah, the 
Moon. The Moon Mother of the Gods. So is Kubele-Cybele. 

20 


306 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The motive for writing this fabulous history must have 
been familiar to Tacitus and have had its raison d’etre in the 
rapid rise of the Makkabees to power posterior to B.c. 168. 
Still, the Jewish scribes went back far enough, to Ptah and 
Athor, the two chief divinities of Memphis, 1 as prototypes of 
As and Asah (Issa) the fire-deities of Aud, Ieoudah, and Mo¬ 
loch. 

Aratus says that there are many stars in the heaven, that 
is, revolving, because they are borne round from rising to 
setting and from setting to rising unceasingly in spheroid 
form. And towards the very “ Bears,” he says that there is, 
as it were, a river’s flow, a great wonder of a monstrous 
Dragon, and this he says is what the Adversary in Job said 
to God: Walking about upon and circulating in the earth 
beneath heaven, that is, revolving and contemplating what 
have come into being; for they think that the Dragon, the 
Serpent, has been stationed in the arctic pole, looking upon 
and overlooking from the highest pole (or heaven) all things, 
in order that nothing of what is done should escape his no¬ 
tice. For when all the stars in the heaven set, this pole alone 
never sets, but coming up above the horizon observes all 
things, and, he says, nothing can escape his notice of the 
things that happen. For the head of the Dragon is placed 
towards the setting and rising of the two hemispheres. 

There is down upon the very head of the Dragon a human 
form beheld through (the) stars, which Aratus calls a wearied 
phantom and resembling one tired out; and it is called <c In 
genubus.” The Aratus therefore says that he knows not what 
is this labor and this wonder revolving in heaven ; but the 
heretics wishing to confirm their own dogmas by the history 
of the stars, waiting very carefully upon these, say that the 
“ In genubus ” is the Adam, according to God’s command, he 
says, watching the Dragon’s head and the Dragon (watching) 
his heel. 2 And, he says, on each side of “In genubus ” are 
Lyra and the Crown, and he bending his knee and stretching 
his hands out as if confessing about sin. 3 

Kepheus is near him 4 and Kassiepeia and Andromeda and 

1 Kenrick, I. 98. 

2 Genesis, iii. 15. 

3 Hippolytus, iv. 47. Miller, pp. 82, 83. 

4 Ophiuchus. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


307 


Perseus, great letters of creation for those who are able to see. 
For Keplieus, he says, is the Adam, Kassiopeia Eua, Andro¬ 
meda the sonl of each of these, Persens the Logos, winged off¬ 
spring of Dios, 1 Ketos the treacherous 2 beast. 3 Even the Lapps 
have their mythical epic 4 in which they relate how Pawin par- 
ne (the Son of the Sun) along with his brother giants used the 
Great Bear as his bow, and hunted and tamed the heavenly 
stags—Jupiter “the bright stag” and Yenus “the color¬ 
changing hind ”—in the constellation Cassiopeia. 5 

Wretched Kassiepeia through Aether goes down into the sea 

Trembling at the Nereids, and deems happy the orbit of Arktos 6 

Who is never wetted in ocean and never touches the sea.—Nonnus, xxv. 135. 

Asarach is not here the Sun of the West , but Serach the 
Morning Sun, called also Bakar in Hebrew and Balt “ light ” 
in Egyptian. 7 God (Elohim) was the intelligible, mind-per¬ 
ceived, Sun-moon, 8 Adonis. 9 Adonis in Hades is Aidoneus, 
and Rimmon is Aliriman-Areimanius. The monad is extended, 
which generates two. 10 The Moon 11 was born of the Sun. 12 The 
Maternal Cause 13 is double, having received from the Father 
matter and spirit. For the duad 14 sits by this and glitters with 
intellectual sections, to govern all things and to arrange each. 15 
She is the cause of all things. “ What is subsequent to God,” 
says Philo, “ although it is the oldest of all existing things 
beside, holding the second place, was called female, 16 as com¬ 
pared with the male principle, wdiich is the Creator of all 
things.” 17 This is the Hermetic Religion, the Hermes-philos- 

1 Jove. 

2 Ketos is the Constellation, Cicero’s pistrix, sea-monster. 

3 Hippolytus, iv. 49. Miller, p. 87. 

4 See the summary of this “ Yogul Genesis,” given by M. Adam in the Revue de 
Philologie et d’Ethnologie, L 1 (1874), pp. 9-14. 

8 Sayce, Introd. to the Science of Language, II. 198. 

6 Bear. 

7 Seal of Iar-Horus in Abbot Egypt. Museum. 

8 Metrodorus, de Sensionibus, cap. 18; Dunlap, Sod, I. p. 141. 

9 ibid. I. pp. 31, 70. 

Proclus in Euc. 27; Cory, Anc. Frag. 245. 

11 Mene-Minerva. 

12 Colebrooke, Rel. of Hindus, p. 25. 

13 Euah, Venah, Venus. Gen. iii. 20. 

14 Isis-Venah-Aisah.—Gen. ii. 23. Allah-Sin. 

16 Proclus in Plat. 376. 

18 See “Woman,” Aisah, in Gen. ii. 23. 

17 Philo, On Fugitives, p. 311. 


303 


THE OIIEBERS OF HEBRON . 


ophy, the doctrine of the Eastern world from which Homer 
drew. 

The Wisdom which is Man and Woman.—Hermes, i. 30. 

Minerva, whom they call Intelligence pervading all things.—Athenagoras, 
pro Christianis, 24. 

Minerva is the Intelligence, the Mens divina, permeating 
material things, Casta ilia et edita sine matre Dea. 1 Very 
often they called Isis Athena ; and they called Isis Sophia. 2 

The Wisdom, the Mother, through whom the all was made.—Philo, quod 
deter. 16. 

And in Venah every life is included.—Kabbala Denudata. 3 

The female Primal Principle that arranges the universe in order.—Plutarch, 
de El apud Delphos, 8. 

The Kabbalist Sophia 4 is the Homeric-Greek Athena; which 
carries back the Hermes-doctrines in the Levant to a period 
earlier than Homer. 

Philo says of the first cause : My nature is to be, not to be 
named! 

I did not show to them my name.—Exodus, vi. 3. Septuagint. 

Abstract existence (t2> ov) is not to be named, so that the ministering Powers 
do not tell us the Lord’s name. — Philo, Mutatio nominum, 2. 

The holy mystic account about the unbegotten and his Powers ought to be 
concealed.—Philo, de Sacr. Abelis et Caini, 15. 

Divine affairs are told to men with a little more concealment. 5 6 To cover up 
and hide hidden mysteries in ordinary words under the pretext of a certain his¬ 
tory and statements of visible things! Therefore an account of the visible 
creation is introduced and the making and fiction of a first man. . . . But in 
a wonderful way the account of even the battles was put together and the 
described diversity of those, now conquerors, now conquered, by which cer¬ 
tain unspeakable sacraments are declared to these who understand how to in¬ 
vestigate sayings of this sort. But also the law of truth and of the Prophets 
is inwoven with the Scripture of the Law through the admirable instruction of 
wisdom, which divine things, by a certain art of wisdom, as if a certain vest¬ 
ment and covering of spiritual meanings, were each covered up : and this is 
what we have called the corpus (the body) of Scripture, so that even through 

1 Origen, II. p. 498; contra Cels. vi. Pallas Mounogenes. 

2 Plut. de Iside, 2. 

3 Apparatus in librum Zohar, p. 391. See Gen. iii. 20. 

4 God’s Daughter, Sophia, is, too, male and father.—Philo, Fugitives, p. 311, 

Helena’s image was in the form of Minerva.—Hippolytus, p. 256. The Valentinians 
too denominated “a certain Wisdom” Prunica.—Origen, contra Cels. vi. vol. II. p. 
497. 


6 Origen, de Principiis, IV. 467. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


309 


this that we have called the clothing of the writing, woven by the art of wis¬ 
dom, many conld construct and progress who could not do so by the mere words. 
But since, if all had kept the succession and order of this clothing, that is, of 
this history of the Law, holding the connected continuation of the conception, 
we surely should not believe that anything was shut up inside in the Sacred 
Scriptures except what was indicated by the front appearance (the literal ex¬ 
pression), on this account the Divine Wisdom arranged certain obstacles 
... by which to bar the way and passage of this vulgar understanding and 
to recall us, put off and excluded, to the beginning of another way, that thus 
it might open the immense breadth of a certain higher and loftier path of Di¬ 
vine knowledge through the entrance of a narrower track. But also it behoves 
us to know this, because, since it is the main object of the Holy Spirit to guard 
the consecutiveness of the Spiritual Meaning concerning what ought to be done, 
or what has already been done, as if indeed there was no question about those 
things that have been done according to history, it composed in one language 
of narration, concealing always the hidden meaning ! 1 

All which hidden and concealed things are arranged in the histories of the 
Sacred Scripture, because also the Kingdom of the Heavens is like a treasure 
hidden in a field. 2 

Tlieopompus was afflicted with loss of mind because he con¬ 
cerned himself too much about divine things, wishing to di¬ 
vulge them to men in general . 3 The priests saw clearly that, if 
they did not make it appear that there was a mystery about 
religion which the public did not comprehend, society would 
soon do without the clergy and their living would be taken 
from them. 

But writing to the Galatians and upbraiding in words certain who seemed to 
him to read the Law and not understand it, for the reason that they did not 
know that there was ALLEGORY IN THE SCRIPTURES 4 he with a certain repre¬ 
hension thus speaks : Tell me, ye who wish to be under a law, have you not 
heard the Law ? For it is written that Abraham had two sons one by a slave 
girl and another by a free woman. But the one born of a slave was born after 
the flesh, but the son of the free girl according to the Covenant, which things 
are allegorical. 5 

Which things are spoken so as to imply something other than what is said. 
For these are two testaments, one indeed from Mt. Sina, bearing children into 
serfdom ; that is, Hagar. For the Sina is a mountain in the Arabia and corre¬ 
sponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is a slave 6 together with her children. 
But the Jerusalem on high is free ; which is our mother.—Galat. iv. 23-27. 

1 ibid., IV. p. 470. 

2 ibid., IV. p. 472. 

3 Josephus, Ant. xii. 2, p. 307. 

4 Plato and the Stoics had used allegorical interpretation to explain the Greek my¬ 
thology.— Nicolas, 132, 130. Compare, Dunlap, Sod. I. 175; Plato, Timteus, 78. 

6 Origen, de Princip. IV. p. 469. 

6 to the Romans, probably. 


310 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The true Mussulman must never express a doubt when 
told of divine inspiration. 1 From Asia the Christians derived 
the notion. The priests of Bra’hma, Vishnu, Siva, Osiris, 
Adonis, Bel, Mithra and Dionysus Ia’hoh found it for their in¬ 
terest to take the lead in what concerns the Gods and to as¬ 
sert the existence of a hidden wisdom to the knowledge of 
which they had attained. Pausanias says : Of the Greeks, 
those who have been considered wise told the words of wis¬ 
dom 2 3 formerly by enigmas and not in a direct way; and the 
things said about the Kronos I conjectured to be a certain wis¬ 
dom of the Greeks. Of course, in regard to what concerns to 
Secov 8 we will employ what is usually said. 4 

The evidence collected in this chapter shows that a Hidden 
Wisdom was recognized in the time of Herodotus, that the 
kabbalah contained it, and that its influence is visible in the 
Old Testament, in the New Testament, and precedes the date 
of the writings known under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, 
which were regarded as very ancient until this view offended 
modern partisans of the Church. How could the Hebrews 
alone of all the races of the orient deny an esoteric meaning of 
their sacred records'? The Egyptians, Greeks, Hindus,’Per¬ 
sians and others loved the enigmatic style in their temple 
scriptures, all antiquity knew the double-meaning language 
of the oracles. 5 Therefore a book that had its origin imme¬ 
diately through divine inspiration could least of all dispense 
with this stamp of supernal origin. 6 

Jewish mysticism arose under a priest caste, the same as in 
Babylon, India, Egypt. Quintus Curtius makes the following 
statement: 

About the first watch, the failing moon hid the first brightness of her orb: 
then she stained all her light with the color of blood spread over it, and great 
religious misgiving 7 came upon those that felt anxious at the very risk of so 
great a crisis, and thereby a panic was produced. They declared that they were 
being dragged to remotest lands against the will of the Gods ! Now the affair 
came almost to a mutiny, when Alexander ordered Egyptian Priests, whom he 

1 Vambery, Travels in Central Asia, p. 51. 

2 Aoyovs, doctrines. 

3 the deity— neuter gender. 

4 Pausanias, VIII. 8. 3. 

5 1 Samuel, ix. 8, 9. 

6 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, II. 352. Art. Kabbala. 

7 Plutarch, vita Pelopidas, 34. 


ISIS IN’ PIKENIGIA. 


311 


believed most acquainted with heaven and the stars, to deliver their opinion. But 
they, who well knew that the heavenly bodies go through stated changes and that 
the moon is eclipsed either when she passes the earth or is hidden by the sun, 
do not declare the cause, although they knew it.—Quintus Curtius, iv. cap. 10. 

We find Egyptian and Hebrew “ sacred scribes ” in Genesis, 
xli. 24. 1 The oriental chacham or “ wise man ” endeavoring to 
stamp out the first feeble sparks of intellectual advancement 
and to crush the infant efforts of thought struggling to be free 
is a strong but not untrue type of rabbinism as it really is. 2 

Before the period when Aries and Libra 3 became the signs of 
the vernal and autumn equinoxes Taurus and Scorpio were con¬ 
temporaneous with the equinoxes. The Bull then began the 
year with Isis-Vena. The two opposites were constantly rising 
above or descending below the horizon like the scales attached 
to the extremities of a balance. Typhon, the Adversary, rep¬ 
resented the winter season (in Persian and Egyptian theory), 
the season of the decrease of light. He is that Old Serpent 
that was primitively located in Scorpio. Owing to the preces¬ 
sion of the equinoxes, the sign of the Bam came into the posi¬ 
tion previously occupied by Taurus, the star of the Serpent 
stood opposite to Aries, just as the Scorpion had been the 
opponent to the Taurus. The entrance of the sun into the 
Scorpion brings the rainy season in the last of October and 
the beginning of November. Just when the early rising of 
Scorpio takes place on the horizon the Pleiades and Hyads, 
sacred to Bacchus and Osiris, descend to the world below. 
Here is the sketch of a system known to the entire ancient world 
before the time of Homer and referred to in Macrobius. 4 This 
system seems largely the foundation of astronomical myths. 

Egyptian chronology is based on the complete series of the 
epochs from Bytes-Menes to Hadrian-Antonin through three 
full Sothis-periods, equal to 4,380 years. 5 

And in Binah (Venah) every life is included.—Kabbala Denudata. 6 

1 Josephus, Ant. ii. chap. 5. The Scribes corresponded to the Magi; each had 
three orders.—Ernest de Bunsen, Keys of St. Peter, p. 211; Matthew, xxiii. 2 ff. 

2 Israelite Indeed, vi. 71. 

3 Libra was called the “ yoke ” ; which, by its shape, indicates a kind of balance ; 
on each of its ends hung the loop whereby Taurus was yoked to Scorpio. 

4 Macrobius, I. xii. 11. 

6 Prof. Dr. Jos. Lauth, Strasburg, 1877. 

6 Rosenroth, Apparatus, in librum Sohar, p. 391. MulSta the Ourania.—Gerhard, 
p. 397. 


312 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Minerva is the fontal Intelligence and Life. Her emblem is 
the moon, and the moon is called nature’s self-seen image . 1 
They call the Moon “ Mother of the world ” and think her nat¬ 
ure male-female nature, being filled by the Sun and She again 
sending forth into the air generative elements and sprinkling 
them down . 2 

The Venali proceeds out of the limits of the primal Wisdom. 3 

Just hear Venus sung by the women of Byblus.—Nonnus, xxix. 851. 

Venus the Original Mother of the race !—Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas, 
140. 

The Venali thou shalt name Mother.—The Sohar, III. 290. 

Euah is the Mother of every living creature . 4 

And in Venali every life is included. 5 

It ver, et Venus!—Lukretius, v. 736. 


The Yenus of Lebanon is supposed to be meant by the “ image 
of jealousy” in the portico of the Temple . 6 “ Jacentem Yen- 
erem a tergo,” says Scacchi, in describing a lamp with a reclin¬ 
ing Yenus on it . 7 The sacred scribe could not write the word 
Benah (Yenus), because it is the name used in the quotations 
above ; and he regarded Yenus as “jealous” of Proserpina or 
Persephone, in respect of Adonis. All this points to the lat¬ 
est period, when the canon was arranged by the scribes of 
the Temple. Macrobius, Lucian and St. Jerome mention the 
Adonis worship as still existing after Christ in the Phoenician 
religion: 

Veneris Architidis et Adonis maxima olim veneratio viguit, quam nunc 
Phoenices tenent.—Macrob. Sat. I. 21. 

Like the Phoenicians, the Jews held on to the slab on which 
the Yenus of Arki was represented cast down, supported on 
one hand extended, in grief for the loss of Him that is Her 


1 Taylor, Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, 74, 87 ; Procl. in Tim. 260; Apuleius, 
Met. xi. 

2 Plutarch, de Iside, 42, 43. 

3 The 32 Ways of Wisdom, 5. p. 1. 

4 Gen. iii. 20; Lucretius, lib. II. 2. 4. 

6 Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata ; Apparatus in librum Sohar, p. 391. 

6 Ezekiel, viii. 3, 5; Lenormant, Gazette Archeologique, 1875. 97-102; il mito di 
Adone-Tammuz, 25, 26. 

7 Fr. F. Scacchus, Sacr. Elaeochrism. Murothecia, p. 27. Amstelodami, 1701. 


ISIS JN PHOENICIA. 


313 


own, 1 descended to Proserpine. She is the picture of “Jeal¬ 
ousy for what She has possessed.” Macrobius, in the fourth 
century after Christ, says the Phoenicians ivorship Her still! 

Attes first taught the Mysteries of Hhea. The Phrygians, 
Ludians and Samotlirakians celebrated them. 2 And he told 
about the eunuchs in the Temple. 3 Dionysus instituted the 
eunuchs, like Adonis. 

Let not the eunuch say : Lo, I am a dry stick, for thus says Ia’holi to the 
eunuchs who keep my sabbaths and choose that in which I delight and keep my 
covenaut. And I will give to them in my temple and within my walls a place 
and name better than sons and daughters, an eternal name I will give to him, 
which shall not be cut off.—Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4. 

The Syrians, according to Herodotus, II. 104, were along the 
Thermodon and Parthenios rivers. These eunuch priests, 
reaching from Syria to Ludia and Phrygia, show the Syrian 
influence in the region around Troy. The sons of Sem were 
Ludians, Arameans, Elamites, Assyrians, 4 etc. Aramaic was 
the dialect of the Semitic highlands and was once widely dif¬ 
fused over Syria and Mesopotamia, belongs to the northern di¬ 
vision of the Semitic, and is now represented by a few Neo- 
Syriac dialects in the neighborhood of Lake Lrumiyah. It 
was the lingua franca of trade from the eighth century b.c., 
was spoken at Carchemis 5 on the Euphrates, and the Jews 
finally made it their own. 6 Since the greater part of the Jews 
resided in Babylon their chronology would naturally be based 
on the Babylonian numbers. Oppert says that for Genesis 7 
there is no chronology. Successions of dates are given in 
another land with exactly the same fundamental figures, among 
another people and in reference to other events. But when 
these fundamental numbers are applied in two lands in two 
different ways, then we are in a position to assume an artificial 
calculation among both nations and to lay down the proposi- 


1 Ezekiel, viii. 3. 5. 

2 Lucian, de Syria Dea, 15. See Dunlap, Sod, I. pp. 31, 70. This eunuchismus led 
to the views of the Iessaeans, as Matthew, xix. 12, shows. 

3 about the Galli. — Lucian, 15. So the Dionysus-tonsure of the Phoenician 
kerechim. Keipw. 

4 Chaldee 1 Chron. i. 17. 

6 now Jerablus. 

6 Sayce, Science of Language, II. 171. 

7 See Smith and also Delitzsch, on the Chaldaean Genesis. 


314 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tion that just in the absence of all true chronology they have 
sought to supply its place by a fictitious one. The people 
which has the same chronology in common with that of Gen¬ 
esis is the Chaldaeans, and the computation of time which the 
fragments of Berosus have handed down to us is in reality that 
of the first book of the Pentateuch, from the first chapter to 
the last, from the Creation to the death of Joseph. Where the 
Jews reckoned an hour the Chaldaeans assume 10,000 years. 
The Bible day is counted equal to 240,000 Chaldaean years. 1 
The Jews counted 10 Patriarchs, and the Babylonians their ten 
kings, before the flood. The figures in both cases are fabulous. 
As the Jews in substance had the basis of the Babylonian 
chronology it is fair to assume that Jewish philosophy repre¬ 
sents Chaldaean wisdom and the Bible religion the Babylonian, 
in the more important essentials, with some things revised and 
struck out. The essentials of the Adonis-faith remained, and 
some of the usages of that cultus. The Jews got the names of 
their months, the doctrine of the divine Powers, the ceremonies 
of the Adonis-religion, even the Talmud itself, in great part, 
from Babylon. 

“ All the books of the Apocrypha are comparatively modern. 
There is none of them, on the most favorable computation, 
which can be supposed to be older than the latest 3 r ears of the 
Persian empire. They belong, therefore, to the age when the 
last great religious movement of the Old Testament under 
Ezra had passed away—when prophesy had died out, 2 and the 
nation had settled down to live under the Law, looking for 
guidance in religion not to a continuance of new revelation but 
to the written Word and to the interpretations of the Scribes.” 3 
“ It is often taken for granted that the list of Old Testament 
books was quite fixed in Palestine at the time of our Lord, and 
that the Bible acknowledged by Jesus was precisely identical 
with our own. But it must be remembered that this is only an 
inference back from the list of Josephus published at the very 
end of the first century. Before this date we have no cata- 

1 Oppert, in the Konigliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, pp. 202, 203. A day 
of Brahma is a thousand times a thousand years. The Mandaeans have a preference 
for the sacred numbers 300 and 480,000 years, which points to their Chaldaean and 
Nabathean ancestry. 

2 The doctrine of spirit and of prophecy still obtained in Numbers, xi. 20. 

8 W. Robertson Smith, The Old Test, in Jewish Church, 12 lectures, p. 28. New 
York. 


ISIS IN PHOENICIA. 


315 


logue of the sacred books.” 1 “ The Scribes chose for us the 
Hebrew text we have now got.” 2 “ No single copy, therefore, 
however excellent, was likely to remain long in good readable 
condition throughout. And we have seen that collation of 
several copies, by which defects might have been supplied, 
was. practised to but a small extent. Often indeed it must 
have been difficult to get copies to collate, and once at least 
the whole number of Bibles existing in Palestine was reduced 
to very narrow limits.” For Antiochus Epiphanes (b.c. 168) 
caused all manuscripts of the Law, and seemingly of the other 
sacred books, to be torn up and burnt, and made it a capital 
offence to consent to or approve of the Law. 3 It is not stated 
wliat sort of sacred hooks they did possess ! And we should not, 
in that age, expect to meet with perfect veracity in respect to 
theological concerns either in Makkabees or in Josephus himself. 
Mr. Smith says: 4 “ There is not a particle of evidence that 
there was a uniform Palestinian text in the sense in which our 
present Hebrew Bibles are uniform—or, in other words, to the 
exclusion even of such variations and corruptions as are found 
in MSS. of the New Testament—before the first century of 
our era. Nay, as we have seen, the author of the Book of Ju¬ 
bilees, a Palestinian author of the first century, used a Hebrew 
Bible which often agreed with the Septuagint or the Samaritan 
recension against the Massoretic text.” 5 “ When critics main¬ 

tain that some Old Testament writings, traditionally ascribed 
to a single hand, are really of composite origin, and that many 
of the Hebrew books have gone through successive redactions, 
—or, in other words, have been edited and reedited in different 
ages, receiving some addition or modification at the hand of 
each editor,—it is often supposed that these are mere theories 
devised to account for facts which may be susceptible of a very 
different explanation. It is thought incredible that inspired 
books should have been subjected to such treatment; and fol¬ 
lowing the Newtonian rule that every hypothesis must have a 


1 ibid. p. 27. 

2 ibid. 17. 

3 ibid. 18 ; 1 Makkabees, i. 56, 57; Josephus, Ant. xii. 5: #avgero Se el nov ptfAos 
evpeOelr) iepa xal voixo<;, kclL nap ’ ot? evpeQetr) Kal ovtol «caxoi fccuews ancaWvvTO. These expressions 
‘ sacred scroll and (the) law ’ are general expressions, and do not of necessity mean the 
Pentateuch ; especially if it was written after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. 

4 Lectures, p. 21. 

6 ibid. p. 21. see p. 16. 


316 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


basis in demonstrable fact, conservative theologians refuse to 
accept the critical theories till external evidence is produced 
that editors and compilers actually dealt with parts of the 
Bible in the way which critics assume. Here it is that the 
Septuagint comes in to justify the critics and provide external 
evidence of the sort of thing which to the conservative school 
seems so incredible. The variations of the Greek and Hebrew 
text reveal to us a time when the functions of copyist and 
editor shaded into one another by imperceptible degrees. 
They not only prove that Old Testament books were subject¬ 
ed to such processes of successive editing as critics maintain, 
but that the work of redaction went on to so late a date that edi¬ 
torial changes are found in the present Hebrew text which 
did not exist in the manuscripts of the Greek translators.” 1 

1 ibid. p. 22. Psalm xix. 4 is an instance. It contradicts the Arabic, Septuagint 
and Vulgate texts and Numbers, xxv. 4. 


CHAPTER SIX. 


THE CROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


“ra [xvo'T’fipia ir avra Kal Ttaaav rfy yuu<nu. 


In the whole of Asia, in Egypt, Jerusalem, Phoenicia, Babylon, 
India, even down as late as the iihilosophy of Simon Magus 
we find a dualism, consisting, in the so-called Hidden Wis¬ 
dom, of a Male Deity and His Sacti or feminine Deity. Osiris 
and Isis, Bel and Mulitta, Adon and Yena, Adam and Heuali 
(Septuagint Eua), Brahma and Sarasvati, Apollo and Athena, 
Asur and Tanais, Zeus and Hera. We must suppose that this 
dualism idea was invented in each separate country, or, what 
appears more probable, that it was invented in one land first, 
and then distributed to the priests of other nations. With 
their appreciation of the sun and moon as the abodes of 
Divine Powers the priests of the different peoples would not 
have had any great difficulty in attaining to the conception 
of an Adon and Yena (or Yenus), an Ash (Fire or Adam) and 
Ashah (Aisah, Issa, or Isis), a Bel and Beltis. At any rate, 
they went further and propounded the doctrine of a Herma- 
thene or Primal Father 1 in whom these two dualist prineipia 
subside into one primordial First Cause. This was a quasi 
mathematical inference, in part derived from the unit, partly 
sought in the notion of causation, that everything must have 
had a cause, and therefore the first cause must have been 
Creator of heaven and earth and all that in them is, human 
souls especially, and angels of the stars. So far this is all 
logical. But one sol and one luna are not basis enough for 
myriads of solar systems of which astronomers tell. They 
answer very well for one of the solar systems, but how about 
the others ? Here we come upon the limitations to which Jew 

1 The ArsenothSlus Dunamis (the Malefemale Power.—Gen. ii. 23).—Simon 
Magus; Hippolytus, vi. 18. And He was One, for having Her in Himself He was 
alone. But he was not called Father before She called Him so.—Hipp. vi. 18. 


31S 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and Gentile are both subjected. Nature has provided for us 
all a limited knowledge and a limited being; and the specula¬ 
tions of the ancient ‘ three score and ten years ’ are worth no 
more than those of the modern three score and ten, probably 
less; since science has had time to increase for the modern’s 
benefit. 

“The Wisdom of Salamah was beyond the wisdom of all Beni Kadem.” 

“ Gnosis is the result of science, and science the gift of God.”—Hermes, x. 9. 

The mystic tradition (Kabalah) came from Mesopotamia. 1 
The Kabalists held the book Shi’ur (Measure of stature) to be 
of the first century, and the ideas contained therein to be pre- 
cliristian. In Ephesians, iv. 13, this very phrase, Measure of 
the stature, already occurs. 2 Dath Elion (knowledge of the 
Most High) is plainly gnosis. Numbers, xxiv. 16, reads wa-ida 
dath Elion ( £ and I know the gnosis of the Most High ’). My 
heart has seen much of chochmah (Wisdom) and dath (science, 
gnosis).—Eccles. i. 16. Maimonides 3 says that in this passage 
rah is used of intellectual perception. It is SEEing by gnostic 
insight, vision. The Jewish scriptures subindicated something 
hidden. 4 Josephus says that Moses “ physiologises,” that is, 
wrote philosophy. 5 Megastlienes relates that “ what has been 
said by the ancients about nature is said also by the philoso¬ 
phers outside of Greece: some things among the Hindus by 
the Brahmans, others by those called in Syria Jews.” 6 Plato 
mentions “the eternal existence uncreate,” 7 and Plato’s first 
cause is the “ everlasting, unborn, having no genesis,” 8 the ton 
aei zonta of Pherekydes Syrius 544 before Christ, and the 
Hebrew “ I am what I am.” 

This was before soul bearing a human sliape. Next, looking around, that 
saw nothing but himself ; and he first said “ I AM I.” Therefore his name was 
1. He wished another ; and instantly he became such as is man and woman in 
mutual embrace. He caused this, his own self, to fall in twain : and thus 
became a husband and a wife.—The Vrihadaranyaca. 9 

1 Milman, Hist. Chr. ed. Harper, 1844, pp. 43, 200, 201, 277, 311; Gen. vi. 3. 

2 Dr. S. M. Schiller-Szinessy, in the “Expositor,” Nov. 1886. p. 333. 

3 Guide to the Perplexed, ch. iv. 1; v. 1. by Friedlander, pp. 41, 42, 44. 

4 Origen, c. Celsum, vi. p. 495. 

8 Joseph. Ant. I. 2. 

8 Megasthenes, p. 137. Schwanbeck. 

7 Dunlap, Spirit-Hist., 313. 

3 Plato, Tim., 17. 

9 Satapatha brahmana, 14. Colebrooke, p. 37. 


THE CROSSCROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


319 


This is the Kabbalist story of Khadam and Huah, the 
Adam Hermaphroditus or Hermathene. The Hindu primal 
life gave being to time and its divisions, to the stars and 
planets. So says also Genesis, i. 14 f. The Hindu God “ hav¬ 
ing created this universe, was absorbed in the spirit, changing 
the time of energy for the time of repose; ” 1 or, as Genesis 
phrases it, “ Elohim rested.” 

One Circle going round all the circles, which was said to be the Univer¬ 
sal Life named Leviathan : whom Jewish Scriptures subindicating something 
occult say was created by the God in mockery.—Origen, xi. 495. Contra Cel- 
sum, vi. 

He created that empty space within which heaven and earth spiritual and 
corporeal were to he located.—Ivabbala Denudata, II. 165. 

In the beginning, 2 the will of the King was carving forms in highest purity, 
light of power going out, the centre of the concealed that are concealed, from 
the head of Ain Soph.—The Sohar, I. 1. 

In the Kingdom of the heavens, the King will say : Inherit the 
Kingdom prepared for you.—Matthew, xxv. 1, 31, 34. Accord¬ 
ing to Irenaeus, I., the primal Father was invisible, everlasting 
and unborn, in silence and in much quiet (Besting), in bound¬ 
less Ages of time. Here we see the Kabbala and Gnosis in 
Genesis, ii. 2. 

Then there was neither non-being nor being ; no world, no air, nor anything 
above it; nothing anywhere in the hap of any one, enveloping or enveloped. 
Death was not, nor at that time immortality, nor distinction of day and night, 
but tiiat suspired without exhalation, alone, with spontaneity contained in 
him. Beside him was no thing which since has been. 3 —A late hymn of the 
Rigveda. 

O Thou that dost inhabit the shining folds of heaven,Zeu, 4 save us!—Eu¬ 
ripides, Phoenissae, 84, 85. 

The God, the Source of the Oldest Logos. 5 —Philo, Quod det., 22. 

For what was not expected God found a passage.—Euripides, Medeia, 1415. 

1 Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 181. 

2 Brasith bara Alhim eth hashemaim wa-eth haarez.—Genesis, i. 1. The opinion 
of the Kabbalists was followed by most of the Rabbins, who followed the Kabbalists 
and the author of the Zohar, fol. CV. col. 4, editio Cremonensis. The greatest part of 
the Kabbalist chachamim agree that the ineffable tetragrammaton (Ihoh) was explained 
through the “ sacked names.”—Schickardi, Jus Regium Hebraeorum, p. 19; R. Abra¬ 
ham Seba, in Zeror hammor. 

3 Lassen, I. 915. 

4 Zio = fulgor.—Codex Nazoraeus. 

5 Hebrews, viii. 1; Mark, xvi. 19. King of Heaven, Holy Dia.—Euripides, Iphi- 
geneia in Tauris, 749. Semnos Deus. 


320 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


God tlie Supreme Cause and Logos does not move like the 
planets, but remains immovable. 1 The Logos is the Oriental 
Son of God, 2 and the sun, says Philo, is the emblem of the 
Logos. 3 The sun is Hermes and it has been shown above that 
Hermes is the Word, the Logos. Since the Homeric Theos 
(Odyssey, iv. 236, 237; v. 4) reappears in John, i. 1, the idea of 
One Supreme God was familiar to Greeks as well as to the 
Jewish Prophets. 

Magister format omnia.—Proverbs, xxvi. 10. 

The Good was identical with the One ; according to Plato.— 
Grote, Plato, I. 217, 218. God only is Good.—Mark, x. 18. The 
Sun is the offspring of the Good.—Julian, Oratio, iv. The 
Mind-perceived Sun raises up the souls to the Intelligible 
World! This was Chaldaean doctrine.—Movers, I. 551-553. 
The Karpokratians 4 denied the resurrection of the body. He 
(Karpokrates in Egypt) led a Gnostic sect in the time of Ha¬ 
drian. As to Simon Magus, his gnosticism looks neither bet¬ 
ter nor worse than the gnosis of a. d. 115-125, unless one be¬ 
lieves what Justin and Irenaeus say of him, and then the rule 
applies falsus in uno falsus in omnibus. 5 

Beyond all tlie animals of the earth the man is two-fold, being mortal by 
the body, but immortal in the essential man (the image of the Father) ; . . . 
being male-female and sprung from a hermaphrodite Father. This is the Hidden 
Mystery even to this day. For the nature mixed with man brought forth a 
marvel most wonderful. For he having the nature of the harmony of the 7, of 
which I spoke to you, (the nature) of fire and spirit, the nature did not wait, but 
bore right off 7 men, male-female and high in the heavens, according to the nat¬ 
ures of the 7 Procurators (Planets. Rulers of destiny). The Genesis of these 7 
was as follows : For the air is female, and water is able to impregnate. And 
from fire it took maturity, and from the aether it took the breath of life (spirit). 

1 Philo Judaeus, Quaestio, 42. 

2 Gen. i. 3 ; John, i. 4, 5 ; v. 19 f.; vi. 54 ; viii. 12 : Hermes, passim. 

3 Philo, de Somniis, 15,16. 

4 Eusebius apparently puts Karpokrates under Hadrian, who died in 138. 

5 Whether Simon Magus and Menander really claimed to be the logos (the first 
gnostic Power) the Great Power of God, is not easy to determine. On one side we have 
one set of Gnostics, on the other their virulent opponents. And as to Simon’s magic, 
Acts offers no proof of it, and Simon evidently thought that in the transmission of the 
pneuma by laying on of hands, there must have been some trick.—Acts, viii. 18-20. 
Acts opens to view the most remarkable religious excitement ever known among the 
ignorant and excitable (both Greeks and Jews) east of the Aegean Sea. The gnosis ex¬ 
pressed in the Sohar is a sufficient endorsement of all that has been said of the folly 
and extravagance of the oriental imagination. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


321 


And nature brought forth the bodies in the image of the Man (Adam). And the 
Man became a soul 1 and mind from life and light,—from life a soul, but from 
light a mind. And so all parts of the perceptible world continued up to the end 
of the Period of “ Beginnings ” and “ Generations.” The period having been 
completed, the conjunction of all was dissolved by the will of God. For all the 
male-female 2 creatures were dissolved in twain, together with man, and became 
part male and the rest female. And the God at once said by His Holy Logos : 
Increase in increase, and multiply in multitude, all created things!—Hermes, 
I. 15-18. 

The primal God was called double-gendered and of two nat¬ 
ures, by the Orphic theologians ; and in the lOtli hymn Nature 
is invoked as Father, Mother, Feeder, and Nurse, of all 
things. 3 

Hermaproditus is God. 

5 de vovs 6 Qebs appei/o&ri\vs fab teal (pus uTrdpx^i. —Hermes, Poimander, 

1. 9. 

Adonis is hermathene and hermaphrodite, like Adam Kad- 
mon. 4 

I invoke the First born, hermaphrodite, great, aether-wandering, 
Egg-born, decorated with Golden-wings, 

Bull-faced, the procreator of the Blessed Gods and mortal men, 

Renowned Seed, many-orgied Erikapaeus, 

Not named, occult.—Orphic Hymn. 

This is the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbala,—the Son of Aric 
Anpin, the Long Face of the Church in the olden time. He 
corresponds to Brahma, the Son, and to Serapis. Hence the 
psalm xc. 1, 2, accepts the two principles united in one first 
cause ; and, adopting the inferences that arise from this unit 
of the oriental philosophy, this source of all life that is now 
enclosed within a material body, says : 

Adoni, Thou wast for us a place of abode in generation, and in generation. 
Before the mountains were born and the earth was formed and the circle (of 
it) ; and from eternity to eternity thou art El.—Psalm, xc. 1, 2. 

1 Genesis, ii. 7, has this same idea. 

2 Male-female created he them, in his own image.—Gen. i. 27. Plato was acquainted 
with this Hermetic Hidden Wisdom since he refers to it in the Symposium. 

God therefore, as the ancient account has it, possesses both the Beginning and End 
and Middle of all things.—Plato, Leg. iv. 7. 

For Hermes is the Logos, who being Hermeneus (Interpreter) and Creator of what 
have been and at the same time are and will be.—Hippolytus, 144. 

3 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, I. p. 86. 

4 Dunlap, Sod, I. 31. 

21 


322 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Homer held that the earth is a “ circle ” surrounded by 
Oceanus, and Proverbs, viii. 27, has the same idea. 1 There 
can be no doubt that the Gnosis and the Kabalah in some 
traditional points are as near to IIomeEs time as the word eraz 
(earth in Hebrew) is near to €pa£e (meaning' to earth, in 
Homer). Eraze is good Hebrew; the e corresponds to n in 
Hebrew. 2 

Praxinoa, come here. Observe first tlie embroideries. 

Fine, and how beautiful! You will say robes 3 of divinities! 

Divine Athanaia! what workers labored on them! 

What painters painted these accurate pictures ! 

How real the}’- stand, and how true they move about. 

They are living, not woven in! Man is truly a wise thing— 

But how admirable He is lying down upon silver couches 

Throwing out the first down from his cheeks 

The thrice-beloved Adon, who is loved too in Acheron . . . 

Hush Praxinoa—a very skillful songstress, the daughter of 
The Argive (woman), is going to sing the Adonis : 

“ Queen who has loved Golg5s and Idalion too 
And high Erux, 4 Aphrodita, sporting on Chruso, 

How Hours soft of foot brought in the twelfth month 5 6 
The Adonis to thee from everlasting Acheron. 

Beside him lie the fruits of the season, which the tops of a 

Tree produce, and by him tender plants kept in silver little baskets 

And golden caskets of Syrian unguents. 

And food such as women make up in dishes, 

Mixing all sorts of flowers with white wheaten flour, 

And such as from sweet honey, and those made in moist oil, 

All feathered and reptile (forms) here are by liim. e 
And verdant pavilions heavy with soft dill 

Have been constructed ; and moreover boy Eroses are hovering above 
Like young nightingales, making trial of their wings that have grown, 

Flit about on a tree from bough to bough.” 

O the ebony,—O the gold,—O the eagles of white ivory 
Carrying to Zeus the Son of Saturn the cupbearer Boy, 

And purple rugs above more soft than sleep. 

The Milatis will say and he that is shepherd in Samos : 

1 chog means a circle.—Isa. xl. 22 ; Job, xxvi. 10. 

2 this suffix indicating “ towards,” to a place.—Gen. xviii. 2, HVTX. 

3 Of wool, fastened on the shoulders by a buckle or brooch ; worn by Dorian 
women. 

4 Golgus and Idalion were in Kupros (Cyprus). Erux was a promontory in Sicily, 
with a grove and the altar of Venus in the centre. Chruso may, perhaps, be a town of 
Troas. 

5 February. 

6 So, Genesis, vii. 14. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


323 


“ A couch has been prepared for the Lord, at the same time, the Beautiful.” 
Kupris has the oue, hut the rosy-armed Adonis the other. 

His kiss does not prick, yet his lips are red all around. 

Now then, Good bye, Kupris, having her own husband ! — 

But at dawn, with the dew, we in crowds will bear him 
Out to the waves foaming on the beach— 

Having loosened the hair and baring the bosom to the lower parts 
The breasts being uncovered, we will begin the Song of Woe. 

Thou comest, O dear Adonis, both here and unto Acheron. 

Farewell, O Lord Beloved, and go to those who rejoice. 1 


The Babylonian Son of God is the Monad from the one, 
Adonis, Adam, Mitlira, Apollo. No one has ever seen God: 
the Only-begotten God in the bosom of the Father has in¬ 
terpreted. 2 3 This is the God of the “ Powers 55 3 according to 
Philo Judaeus. 

The Gnosis of the first both Lord and Mind-perceived 4 whom the female 
God 5 invites us to seek near Her, since He both is and coexists with Her. 6 The 
Temple’s name also announces plainly both Gnosis and Knowledge of rod 
out os (the one existence), for it is called Iseion, as belonging to those about to 
know “to on” (the essence of the first cause), if with wisdom and liolily we 
should enter in to the Mysteries of the female God.—Plutarch, de Iside, 2. 

Philo’s peculiar teaching leads him to derive Iseion from To-^/xt 
and ’IctSl (the verb to know), but the root is Asat, Issa and Isis. 
To one who used the allegorical method all kinds of explana¬ 
tions were permitted. Still it was bold to translate the name 
of the shrine of Isis by a Greek verb meaning to know. Philo 
knew Isis and Greek too. 

The Older Horus is the eidolon and phantasma of the Kosmos that is to be. 
—de Iside, 54. 

1 those in Acheron (Hades). He descended into Hades. The third day he rose 
from the dead, and ascended to heaven, with the souls of the righteous led up by him 
through the clefts in the earth by which the spirits rise. Theokritus, the author of 
this idyl xv. lived in Egypt 270 before Christ. Kallimachus, B.C. 269-240, in his hymn 
to Demeter, mentions the uninitiated women and the Mysteries of DemSter. Ptolemy 
Philadelphus had introduced the Eleusinian festival from Athens into Alexandria. 

2 John, i. 18. Codex Sinaitic. 

3 Septuagint 1 Kings, xvii. 1 ; Matthew, iv. 11 ; xiv. 2. 

4 what only Mind can perceive. 

5 The Sakti, Isis, Eua, Wisdom, “ Minerva whom they think to be Isis also.”— 
Plutarch, de Iside, 9. See Herodotus, II. 59. 

c So Simon Magus held regarding the boundless fire from which the Male Mind 
springs containing within him the Ennoia female. 


324 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


This is the Kabbalah doctrine such as it is found in the 
Apokalypse, xxi. 10. Everything- on earth has its prototype 
in heaven,—even as the New Jerusalem. 

Horus is this eartlily kosmos neither freed from destruction nor from birth. 1 
—de Iside, 43, 56. 

Horus, then, is the Soul and Spirit of the world. 

O Brahma, dear Son, I give to thee my grace and the power to create the 
world. 2 

At once sprung from the down-moving Elements the logos of 
the GOD into the pure workshop of Nature, and was united to 
the Demiurgus Mind, for it was consubstantial. 3 And the ir¬ 
rational the down-moving Elements were abandoned to be 
only Matter. But the Demiurgic Mind together with the 
logos, he, embracing the Wheels 4 and turning them round 
with an impulsion, made his own works revolve and permitted 
them to revolve from undefined beginning to endless end; for 
they begin ever where they stop. And the revolution of 
these, exactly as the Mind wills, produced from the down- 
moving elements irrational animals. For he gave not the 
logos; but the air brought forth birds and the water fish ; 
and the earth and the w r ater were separated one from the other 
according as the Mind willed, and the earth brought forth 
from itself what it could, four-footed animals, reptiles, beasts, 
wild and tame. But the Mind, 5 Father of all, being life and 
light, procreated man like himself; having the image of the 
Father. 6 

Being male-female, sprung from a male-female Father, and sleepless, he is 
ruled by One who never sleeps. 7 

And after these things my mind says : For I too myself love the logos. But 
the Poimander said : This is the mystery hidden down to this day. For Nat¬ 
ure in union with the man brought forth a certain miracle most wonderful. 8 

The primal man of the Jewish Kabbala is male-female. 9 

1 genesis. 

2 Majer, Mytholog. Lex. I. 248. Daumer, Urgeschichte, 91. 

3 “ homoousian.” 

4 Orbits. These are the Wheels of Ezekiel’s vision, taken from Hermes. 

6 Zeus-Belus, Logos, Jupiter. 

6 Hermes Trismeg. I. 11, 12. 

7 ibid. I. 15. 

8 ibid. I. 16. 

9 Sod, II. p. xix. xx; Movers, I. 544. 


THE CROSSCROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


325 


From that which is the First Cause, not the object of sense, existing every¬ 
where in substance, not existing to our perception, without beginning or end, 
was produced the divine man. 

He framed the heaven above and the earth beneath. He assigned to all 
creatures distinct names.—A Hindu Cosmogony. 

And whatever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof. 
—Gen. ii. 19. 

Then went forth the “ workman ” to his work and was formed as “ man and 
woman.”—The Soliar, Idra Suta, viii. 1. 

Having divided his own substance, the mighty power became half male, 
half female.—A Hindu Cosmogony. 1 

And Ia’lioli Alahirti built the rib (the moon-crescent) which He took from the 
Adam (mas et foemina) into “ Woman ” (female life). She was taken out of as 
(Life), therefore shall she be called Aisaii (Isis, Issa, female Life).—Gen. ii. 22. 

The spirit (purusha) totally pervades the earth. From him sprung Viraj 
(the man, the Adam). Viraj divides his own substance into male and female." 
It is plain that this is the Hindu Kabbalah, the hidden wisdom of Hermes and 
the book Genesis. But to leave no doubt upon the identity of the Jewish and 
Egyptian hidden wisdom there are the telling extracts from the book of Kings : 

They brought out the Asarah from Ia’hoh’s temple : two little Apises and 
an Asirah (the Isis Heifer).—2 Kings, xxiii. G ; xvii. 16. 

These were the emblems of the Chochmali and Venah, Adonis and Venus. 

The Kabalah (tradition 3 ) dates back beyond the Christian 
era and forms part of the precliristian gnosis. Munk carries it 
back to the time of the Babylonian Exile. At a period later 
than the Exile the Kabalah was mainly occupied with the 
Maase Beresith 4 and the Maase Merkabah, which have some 
relations to the Book of Genesis and Ezekiel’s Vision. In the 
Maase Bereshith 5 we have to do with Chadam or Adam, as 
with Adam Kadmon in the Kabalah, while his Ishah or Isis is 
his sacti or female potence. Job, too, gives us the Masculo- 
feminine Logos, the Chachamah (Cliochmah) and the Venah : 
and the Soliar says : 

All that the Ancient, blessed be His name, has created can exist only through 
a male and a female.—Soliar, part III. p. 290 a. See Idra Suta, § 218, Gfrorer, 
I. 299. 

Man, as emanation, was both man and woman, as well on the 
side of the Father as on the side of the Mother. When Elo- 

1 Dunlap, Spirit-Hist. 181. 

2 Sud, I. 148. 

3 Matthew, xv. 2, 3. 

4 Mose “ work.” 

5 the work Genesis. 


326 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


him spoke : Let there be light, it was light on the side of the 
Father and it was light on the side of the Mother. And this 
is the two-fold Man. 1 The reasoners on the Euphrates and the 
Nile had been taught that the moon receives light from the 
sun ; Stoics and Peripatetics could find God in the sun and 
full-moon. 2 This is Amon and Neith. 3 Here we have the 
Mind that is energising before energy, the Mind that conducts 
the world of fire, 4 the world of the mysteries, the world of 
the Ghebers! 

At the time of the Oldest Mishna-teachers there existed a 
secret doctrine esteemed by all. 5 Gfrorer says that the Clemen¬ 
tine Homilies (date a.d. about 175-225) are a treasure house of 
“ hidden wisdom,”—a sort of Greek Sohar. 6 The Clementine 
Homilies reckon but six or seven circles of emanation from the 
unmanifested God ; while the Sohar enumerates ten sephiroth 
or spheres of emanation. 7 The Bereshith Eabbah to Genesis 
i. 2, states that by ten qualities of God the world was created. 
Even Celsus (in the second century) was acquainted with a 
figure of ten circles separate one from another, and bound to¬ 
gether by one circle which was called the Soul of all things. 8 
And in the pirke afoth cap. v. 1, the oldest part of the Mishna, 
it is said : Through ten words (things) the world has been cre¬ 
ated. 9 Origen says that the God is named with- ten names by 
the Hebrews. These ten names point to a ten-fold action of 
the Creator. 10 Gfrorer carries back the doctrine of emanation 
in circles to the time of Jonathan ben Usiel before Christ; 
relying on the Chaldee translation of the word ophan (wheel) 
by galgala (circle or sphere). The idea of a holy Jerusalem 

1 Extracts from the Sohar, Ansziige aus dem Sohar, in Dunlap, Sod, II. 72. 

2 Sod, I. 141; Philo, De profugis, 458; Augustin, contra Faust, c. xx. ; Metrodo- 
rus, de Sensionibus, c. 18. 

3 Minerva ; the male Virgin, Ioel! Ioh. 

4 Damaskius, de Principiis. 

5 Ioel, Midrash hakabal.,45; 2 Esdras, xiv. 6, 26; psalm xxv. 14; lv. 14; Idra 
Rabba initium: Sod ha-Kodesh liriaio. See also Luke, viii. 10, 17; 1 Cor. ii. 6. 10, 
13 ; Matthew, xiii. 35. 

6 Gfrorer, Jahrhundert des Heils, I. 295, 297. 

7 ibid. 298. 

8 Origen II. 539; Gfrorer, ibid. 1.283, 284, 298. Compare the Hebrew Ahiah, the 
“I AM,” with the 10 Babylonian, and the 10 Hebrew, “powers,” “essences,” or In¬ 
telligible Alahim (Noetoi) who precede the Flood as Gods, Alahim, kings or patri¬ 
archs. 

9 Gfrorer, II. 24. 

10 Gfrorer, I. 299 ; II. 24. 


THE GROSS , GROWN AND SCEPTRE . 


327 


coming down out of heaven 1 is itself a part of the ancient 
mysticism, according to which “ whatever is on the earth that 
too is in heaven, and there is nothing so small in the world 
that does not correspond to another similar to it in heaven.” 2 

Jerusalem which now is is in bondage, with her children ; but the Jeru¬ 
salem which is above, is free.—Galatians, iv. 25, 26. 

The Holy Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.—Rev. xxi. 10. 

Another instance is found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, viii. 
1, where the highpriest in heaven corresponds to the Jewish 
highpriest. This principle of the kabalah is plainly uttered 
in the words: The priests serve according to the model and 
sketch of the heavenly; . . . See that thou make all things 
in the type exhibited to thee upon the mountain. 3 The 
same dogma is repeated in Hebrews, ix. 23, 34. 4 Finally the 
Babylonian Talmud, tract Chagigah 12 b, says : Heaven is 
called zebul, where Jerusalem and a temple and altar have 
been built, where Michael, Great Prince, stands and offers 
sacrifice. 5 

Thou didst tell me to build a temple on thy holy mount in imitation of the 
holy tabernacle 6 which thou madest from the beginning.—Sophia Salom, ix. 8. 

I will not conceal mysteries from you.—Sophia Sal. vi. 24. 

All mysteries of wisdom will pour out.—Enoch, li. 8. 

These two works are prior to the New Testament. Gfrorer 7 
states that the words sod gadol in the mystical books always 
introduce a secret doctrine; and these words translated into 
Greek (musterion mega) occur in the Epistle to the Ephe¬ 
sians, 8 where one, writing in the name of Paul, makes Gen. ii. 
24 refer to Christ and the Church instead of to the Male and 
Female Wisdom 9 in creation. The Sohar is written in the 
same strain; so that we must regard the later Paul of “ Ephe- 


1 Rev. xxi. 10. 

2 Gfrorer, J. des Heils, II. 29, 26; Sohar to Genesis, 91. 

3 Hebrews, viii 5. 

4 Gfrorer, J ahrhundert des Heils, II. 29, 30. 

5 Ibid. 30. Comp. Heb. viii. 1. 

8 It was the Kabbalist idea that everything on earth had its prototype in heaven.— 
Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. lxix.; Hebrews, viii. 5. 

7 Gfrorer, Jahrhundert des Heils, II. 54, 55. 

8 Ephesians, v. 32 ff. 

9 Or Life. 


328 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


sians ” as a Kabbalist. 1 The intimate connection shown by 
Gfrorer to exist between the Jewisli mysticism in the Sohar 
and that in the Old and New Testaments favors the antiquity 3 
of the numerous passages by him cited out of the Sohar ; for 
these exactly coincide in meaning with writings of the first 
century. Job, xxviii. 20, divides the Wisdom into Male and 
Female ; and the Sohar says: This all-embracing Wisdom, 
when it issues and shines from the Most Sacred Ancient, 
shines only under the status of male and female. Sapientia 
est pater, Intelligentia (est) mater. 3 And the Wisdom of 
Hermes, Proverbs and Sophia Salomon fully agree with this. 
So too Simon Magus said the Boundless Power is Fire. The 
Male Power is Mind, the Female Power Thought, Wisdom. 

The targum of Onkelos to Genesis, xlix. 27, mentions “ the 
Sliechinah.” 4 The Shecliinali contains all the Sephiroth. The 
Shechinah is the Messias, the Messias is the Tree of Life, and 
the Tree of Life is the 10 sephiroth. The Messias 5 goes out 

1 The contrast between “the things of earth” and “the things of heaven” in 
John, iii. 12 is quite gnostic, intimating intuition of divine things. 

2 Gfrorer, I. 258, 320, 321, 334, 337, 339, 345, 348, 349, 350; II. 5, 10, 12, 53, 126, 
133, 147, 232, 261, 419. The Mystical book Bahir (Splendor) belongs to the 12th cen¬ 
tury, and the completed Sohar to the end of the 13th. It is a collection of the fruits of 
earlier and later mystical writings (most of them now lost), and preserves to us a com¬ 
plete image of the Jewish secret doctrine. It contains a prophecy that about 1330 the 
Messias will come.—Gfrorer, Jahrhundert d. Heils, I. 63, 64. 

3 Gfrorer, I. 299 ; Idra Suta, § 218 ; so Simon Magus, regarding Nous and Ennoia. 

4 Gfrorer, I. 55. Onkelos dates 20 to 30 before Christ. Jonathan ben Usiel used 
the expression Sidri Bereshith (Books or Courses of the Creation), -which may mean 
Maaseh Bereshith (the Ivabbala). The Ebionites held to the mystic lore, and the Es- 
senes had their secret books and hidden doctrine. According to Philo, they considered 
it impossible for the human soul to comprehend “ the inherited laws ” except by inspi¬ 
ration from God. Moreover, Josephus, XII. 2, 3, says that the Law is philosophical, 
and must not be made known to profane mouths.—Gfrorer, I. 248-264. J. ben Usiel, 
to 2 Sam. xxiii. 5, to Isaiah, xl. 21. 

5 We find in the Sohar, I. 1, and in Matthew, xxv. 34 the expression King. This 
represents the “Crown” of the Kabalah and the “ King” of the Gospels, King Mes¬ 
siah. “ For according to our doctrine body is not spirit, as fire is not that body which 
is said to be the God by him (apud eum) who says : Our God is a Consuming Fire ; for 
all these things are spoken figurative^, in order that that Intelligible Nature may be 
indicated by means of names corporeal and customary to us.—Origen, c. Celsum, vi. p. 
504. So Hippolytus. But Kronos lived in his castle of flame, and Iahoh placed his 
tent in the sun, which was regarded as fire.—Ps. xix. in Greek, Arab, Latin. 

One is the King of Light in his kingdom, nor is there any who is higher than he, 
none higher than he, none who reflects (retulerit) his similitude, none who lifting his 
eyes has beheld the Crown that is on his head.—Codex Nazoria, I. 11, ed. Norberg. In 
whose name dost thou baptise ? John answers, In the Name which was revealed to 
me, the Name of Mana Semira.—Ibid. I. 22. Then shall the King of Light (Mano) 


THE CROSSCROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


329 


from the Garden of Adin 1 from ken zippor,* and is the Shek- 
inah Angel. The Redeemer Angel is the Sliekinah. 3 The 
Light of the Messias. 4 That Light is the Sliekinah, compared 
with which human souls are as little lamps to the bright glare 
of the torch. 3 

Franck shows that already in the Mislma 6 a secret science 
is mentioned under the name Merkabali. 7 Franck rightly re¬ 
marked that the prohibition to teach the Merkabali has no 
reference to the mere text of Ezekiel, because the holy script¬ 
ure was accessible to all and all could read it, nay, were com¬ 
manded to do so. 8 The name “ Maseli Merkabah ” was given 
only to an especially deep, mysterious conception of Ezekiel’s 
vision. 9 The Talmud (Chagiga 13. a) says: The heads of the 
sentences are not delivered except to a father of the Beth Din, 
and to him whose discretion is known. The Mislma (Chagiga, 
11 b) says : They de not discuss cases of incest before three, 
and the “ Maseli Bereshith ” not before two, and the “ Merca- 

say.—Matthew, xxv. The unshorn locks of the Nazers typified Apollo’s Rays, the un¬ 
shorn locks, glory and strength of the Sun, the Logos. The Regal Varuna of pure 
vigor in the baseless (sky) sustains on high a heap of light; the Rays are pointed down¬ 
ward while their base is above. May they become concentrated in us as the sources of 
existence.—Rig Veda, Wilson, I. 62. At Naga in Egypt is a figure sitting frontways, 
a Crown of rays over ‘the floating hair, the left arm raised at a right angle, and the 
fore and middle finger of the hand stretching upwards as is represented in the old By¬ 
zantine figures of Christ. The right hand holds a long staff resting on the ground as 
John the Baptist usually holds it.—Lepsius, Letters, p. 210. Preaching the word of 
life they descended into the Jordan, and, baptising themselves, received the pure sign. 
Each was marked with the sign of life, praising the name of the King of Light.—Co¬ 
dex Nazoria, III. 249. Arise, O my soul, depart from this world, thy King Most Great 
comes.—Ibid, 299. 

1 Sohar, II. 3. col. 3. Adin is Eden. 

2 Nest of light! The glory that I had with thee before the world was.—John, 
xvii. 5. 

2 Sohar, II. fol. 48, 122, 123. 

4 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. ix.; Pesikta Rabbathi, fol. 62. col. 1; Nork, lxxiv., 
lxxv., xxii.; Meuschen, 736. 

5 Tikkune Sohar, fol. 6, col. 4. 

fi Chagiga, 11 b. 

7 D. H. Ioel, Medrash hazohar, 19. The Essenes adored the Life in the sun. 
Sarapis is the Sun of the universe. Mithra’s votaries were marked on the forehead 
with the sign. Nothing has transpired of the Essene Mysteries in the writings of 
Josephus and Philo ; but it is more than probable that the books, more recent, of the 
Kabalists retrace in great part the mystical and metaphysical doctrines of the Essenes. 
—Munk, Palestine, p. 519. 

8 Gfrorer shows passages that prohibit the reading of Ezekiel’s first chapter. 

9 Ioel, 22 ; 2 Esdras, xix. 46. The truth is that Ezekiel’s Vision forms part of the 
Old Kabbala. 



330 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


bah ” not before one, except if he be a “ Wise man ” (chacliam). 
The Mishna is at least as ancient as R. Jehuda who compiled 
it. He died a.d. 190. The Talmud (Sanhedrin, fol. 67. p. 2) says 
that Rabba created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zerah. He 
spoke to him ; but, when the man did not reply, he said : Thou 
art created by magical power ! Rav Chanina and Ray Ausaiali 
studied the Kabbalist book Iezirah, and then created a three 
years old calf, and ate it. It is (Talmud, Succa, fol. 28. a) said 
that R. Iochanan ben Sakkai studied both great and little. 
The Talmud explains this as follows: Under great, the science 
of the Merkabah is to be understood, by little the disputa¬ 
tions of Abaii and Raba are meant, who flourished about 336. 1 
R. Nechunia ben ha-Kana in his book, Iggereth hassodoth, 
mentions the divine mysteries of the names of four, twelve, 
and forty-two letters. 2 

The Divine Wisdom is a tree of the knowledge of good and 
evil and a tree of life. Adam, Metatron or Herakles Sar hapli- 
anim represents the good; but Samael rides on the Serpent 
representing the bad side. Adam is the Good; Samael-Satan 
the Evil one. The Son, Gabriel, Herakles, is a paraclete or 
Mediator (like Mithra, Metatron or Michael the Saviour Angel) 
before the Father of the world to obtain forgiveness of sins. 
And since he set his tabernacle in the sun, his Wisdom was 
planted towards the east, and of two sexes; for “there are 
some verbal symbols of things appreciable only by the intel¬ 
lect, and the mystical meaning which is concealed beneath 
them must be investigated in accordance with the rules of 
Allegory.” “ There is an allegorical meaning concealed under¬ 
neath the express language of scripture.” The Essenes, like 
the other Jews, understood that in the holy volume many pre¬ 
cepts are delivered allegorically and in enigmas. 3 Wisdom is 
also called Sarah. 4 ‘ God called the Intelligence Adam.' 

The Apokalypse, xiii. 18 and the Kabbalist book Iezirah, 
chapter 1, exhibit the mystic gematria the numeral language. 5 

1 Ioel, 39, 41. 

2 Galatinus de Arcanis, p. 75. Compare IoSl, pp. 31, 34 ; also 1 Cor. ii. 7 ; Rom. 
xvi. 25 ; Matth. xi. 25. 

3 Philo Jud. Quaest et Solut. 7, 36, 53; On the World, 7; Vita Mosis, 14; On 
those offering sacrif. 5 ; On Special Laws, 7; Virtuous also free, 12; Ps. xix. 4, Sept. 
& Vulgate. 

4 Philo, Cherubim, § 4. p. 74. Minerva, Venah. 

5 See D. H. Ioel, Medrash hakabala, p. 44 ; Jeremiah, li. 1; xxv. 26. Ovid men- 


THE GROSS , GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


331 


The Iezirah, i. 8; iii. 2, mentions a profound mystery. 1 The 
Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, c. 7 2 mentions that R. Jehosliua 
ben Chananiah, who lived towards the end of the first century, 
performed miracles by means of the Kabbalist book Iezirah ; 
which book the Babylonian Talmud also mentions. 3 At the 
time of the Oldest Mishna-teachers 4 there existed a Secret 
Doctrine esteemed by all. 5 

The sod (mystery) of Ia’hoh is for those that fear him. 8 —Ps. xxv. 14. 

The Talmud 7 states that no one was permitted to write any of 
the Merkaba; but it was delivered orally. 8 

The Sohar contains long disused systems and doctrines. It 
also repeats descriptions from the Book of Rasiel. 9 The reader 
must make a distinction between the age of the Older Kaba- 
lah and the time of the Book Sohar. Therefore it may be well 
to state that Tholuck admits the antiquity of the doctrines 
taught in the Sohar. Discernendum esse inter libri confec- 
tionen et doctrinae elementa quae continet. Nimirum liaec 
certe ex remotiori possunt esse tradita antiquitate: A distinc¬ 
tion must be drawn between the date of the book itself and the 
elements of doctrine contained in it. Doubtless these can cer¬ 
tainly be handed down from a more remote antiquity. 10 Rabbi 
D. H. Ioel says: Even in the case that the author of the work 
Sohar did not live prior to the thirteenth century, yet the fun¬ 
damental principles of his doctrine (in great part at least) are 
borrowed from far older Jewish mystical sources whether writ¬ 
ten or verbal traditions. 11 The word kbl which had previously 
carried along the chain of tradition suddenly ceases in the 16th 

tions Venus (the Binah, Eua, Eve, Isis) with the little Eros on the shore of the 
Euphrates ; but Rev. xii. 1, 4, 5, 14, puts the Woman (the Ishah, Isis) with her infant 
Horus in the Desert. The Euphrates is near to the Desert. 

1 Gelinek, transl. of Franck, p. 110. 

2 completed between A. D. 250 and 300. 

3 Gelinek, German transl. of Franck, 55, 56, 57. 

4 The Tan aim. 

5 Io6l, Medrash hakabal. 45; 2 Esdras, xiv. 6, 26; Psalm, xxv. 14; lv. 14; Idra 
Rabbah, initium. 

6 See Luke, viii. 10, 17; 1 Cor. ii. 6, 10, 13; Matthew, xiii. 35. 

7 Talm. Chagiga, title Ain Dorsin. 

8 Galatinus, de Arcanis, p. 21. 

9 Graetz, Gesch. d. Juden, vii. 77, 239. 

10 Tholuck, de Ortu Cabbalae, p. 25. 

11 Ioel, p. 73. Franck, Kabbala, I. cap. 3; Landauer, L. B. des Orients, 1845, 
numbers 13 and 15. 


332 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Mislma of the first chapter in Abot, and is replaced by the 
formula: Eabban Gamaliel aumar: Says Eabban Gamaliel. 
Later (Mishna, 4) begins again the formula: Eabban Iuchanan 
ben Sakai kabal mi Hilel ve Shammai: E. Iochanan ben Sakkai 
received from Hillel and Shammai. 1 E. Iochanan ben Sakkai 
was the immediate pupil of Hilel the Old, the uncle of Gama¬ 
liel ; and, like other older Tanaim, speaks with wonder and awe 
of the Merkaba. 2 Judaism has produced the Kabbalah out of 
itself, aided by the Jewish traditions out of the oldest times. 3 
It was the work of several centuries and generations of Kab- 
balists. 4 After quoting Jacob b. Zebi of Emsden 5 against 
parts of the Sohar, Graetz states that Jabez 6 considered the 
basis of the Kabbalah most ancient: der Kern oder der Sohar 
im engern Sinne sei uralt. Bachja ben Asher in his commen¬ 
tary dated 1291 has two quotations from the Sohar which 
Graetz unhesitatingly ascribes to the marginal glosses of a 
copyist, on the ground that if two passages were really quoted 
more would have been. 7 According to Graetz, the originator 
of the modern Kabbala is either the author of the Sepher 
hakabbala, Abraham ben David, about 1161, or his son Isaac 
the Blind, who lived from 1190 to 1210. Landauer and Graetz 
state that the Sohar (part Eaia Mehimna) puts the study of the 
Talmud very low, treating it with contempt. Other such an- 
titalmudic attacks appear in the Sohar. The Mishna is de¬ 
clared to have been the real death of Moses and the hard rock 
that he struck upon. “ Until now,” that is, until the Sohar’s 
appearance, “no one knew what was the grave of Moses.” 8 

Concerning the time when the Kabbalah was written down, 
a very solid treatise, in'!in ni!0"lp upon the high antiquity 

of the Kabbalah, has appeared in 1855 by David Luria. Its 
object is to show that the Sohar really has Simon ben Jocliai 
for its author. While he fails to prove this, he shows, out of 
the EGA. of the Geonim 1802, conclusively that the Geonim 
had already before them many passages, taken out of old writ- 

1 Ioel, p. 346. 

2 Ioel, 345, 346 ; Talmud, Chagiga, 14 b. 

3 Io€l, 388. 

4 Gelinek, 94; Ioel, 73. 

3 in 1763. 

6 the aforesaid J. b. Zebi. 

7 Non sequitur. 

8 Graetz, Geschichte d. Juden, vol. vii. 505, 506. 


THE CROSSCROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


333 


ings, which can be found in the Sohar; so that the higher an¬ 
tiquity of the contents of this book, which some are disposed to 
ascribe to the 13th century, must be considered proved, even 
if the work that bears this name contains later additions. 
Landauer’s criticism on the Sohar can at most establish the 
conviction that the compilers of the work have cut it out with 
the scissors. 1 

The entire conception and form of the Sohar shows, how¬ 
ever, a plurality of authors of the separate pieces which make 
up the collection, and one passage even speaks of two authors 
from the city (Avila) and seven from the kingdom (Leon). As¬ 
suming this last, however, there is no evidence going to show 
an invention of the work with the intent to publish new ideas 
and doctrines. By far the most important part of the Sohar 
consists of primitive doctrines of the oriental school. 2 It is un¬ 
important to know whether it was Abulfia, or some learned 
contemporary writer in Avila 3 named Moseh b. Schem Tob de 
Leon, or a combination of many (as seems to us most prob¬ 
able). The fact that the Sohar in Adereth’s time 4 had its 
present shape is to be noted; but the suspicion of a falsifica¬ 
tion is wholly unfounded. The dating it back to Simon ben 
Xocliai and his school is only an artful mode of acquiring for 
the book the appearance of antiquity. 5 According to the So¬ 
har the primal existence 6 is in itself wholly inconceivable, 
concealed, 7 without quality. The first revelation of Him is 
when rays issue from Him.—Aidra Suta, § 46. The Most 
Sacred Ancient is the Highest Light, concealed in all occupa¬ 
tions, and is not found, rays excepted, which are extended and 
unveiled. The Highest Head is the Senior Sanctissimus, 
hidden in all occupations, Head of all heads, a Head that is 
not a head, nor knows nor is perceived what is in that Head, 
because it is not comprehended, neither by wisdom nor by in¬ 
tellect.—Idra Suta, §§ 46, 62. He is called Ain, non ens ; also 
Ain Soph, because he is the Unlimited. Through 10 circles 
all things are made, by Emanation in the 10 circles. He formed 

1 Note to Jost, II. 291. 

3 Jost, III. 77 ; quotes, II. 291. 

3 as Jellinek, particularly in his Moses b. Schem Tob de Leon, seeks to show. 

4 Adereth lived at Barcelona about 1285, or later. 

6 Jost, III. 78. 

6 das Urwesen. 

7 See the Name Amon, meaning the Concealed.—De Iside, 9. 


334 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


out under the form of Male and Female. This Wisdom is ex¬ 
tended, and is found, that it is Male and Female.—Idra Suta, 
§ 218. Gfrorer, Wisdom is Father, and Intelligence is Mother 
(or Woman*).—ib. 218. 

The later rabbinical writings have their source in older 
lost sources of the period before Christ 2 and in verbal tradi¬ 
tion. Hence also can the rabbinical writings of later centu¬ 
ries have a value for Christian scholars, because the Jewish 
way of thinking in the apostolic age still appears in them. 
The picture which the Jews formed of the future Messiah was 
fitted to Jesus by his followers, so that the Christian, dogma- 
tik is still the Jewish and both parties have fought by the 
thousand years only over the individual that they decorated 
with these attributes. The primitive elements of the Chris¬ 
tian doctrines are found in the writings of the rabbins. All the 
passages from the Old Testament called messianic by the 
Christian Church previously passed for such among the Jewish 
Scribes . 3 

Gfrorer says that the Clementine Homilies are a treasure 
house of Hebrew hidden wisdom—a sort of Greek Sohar. 4 
The Clementine Homilies, true to Genesis, reckon but six or 
seven circles of emanation from the unmanifested God, while 
the Sohar enumerates ten Sephiroth or spheres of emanation. 5 
The Beresith Babba to Genesis i. 2 states that by ten qualities 
of God the world was created. In the second century, accord¬ 
ing to Origen, II. p. 539, even Celsus was acquainted with a 
figure of ten circles separate one from another and bound to¬ 
gether by one circle which was called the soul of all things ; 6 
and in the Pirke Afoth, cap. v. 1, the oldest part of the Mishna, 
it is said: Through ten words 7 the world has been created. 8 
Origen says that the God is named with ten names by the 
Hebrews. These ten names point to a ten-fold action of the 

1 Gen. ii. 23; Proverbs, viii. 1, 22, 23, 30; Job, xxviii. 20, 23; Dunlap, Sod, II. 68, 
80, 99-106. 

2 The first cause, being merely existence , has no relation to any thing, but his 
“ Powers ” have. And the fellow of his ‘ 1 Powers ” is his “Creative Power ” which is 
called God.—Philo, III. 161, § 4. Compare psalm xlv. 6, 7 ; ii. 12. 

3 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen und Parallelen, p. viii. 

4 Gfrorer, Jahrhundert des Heils, I. 295, 297. 

6 ibid. 298. 

«ibid. 283, 284, 298. 

7 things. 

8 GfrOrer, II. 24. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


335 


Creator. Gfrorer carries back the doctrine of emanation in 
circles to the time of Jonathan ben Usiel, before Christ, rely¬ 
ing* on the Chaldee translation of the word ophan (wheel) by 
g*alg*ala (circle or sphere). Jerusalem coming* down out of 
heaven 1 is itself a part of the ancient mysticism; according 
to which “ whatever is on the earth that too is in heaven, and 
there is nothing so small in the world that does not correspond 
to another similar to it in heaven.” 2 Another instance is in 
Hebrews viii. 1, where the highpriest in heaven corresponds 
to the Jewish highpriest. This principle of the Kabalah is 
plainly uttered in the words: The priests serve according to 
the model and sketch of the heavenly, . . . see that thou 

make all things in the type exhibited to thee 3 on the moun¬ 
tain. 4 The same dogma is repeated in Hebrews, ix. 23, 24. 5 
And, finally, the Babylonian Talmud 6 says : Heaven is called 
Zebul, where Jerusalem and a temple and altar have been 
built, where Michael, great Prince, stands and offers sacrifice. 7 

The dogmas of the New Testament offer many resemblances 
to the system of the Kabbalah. 8 In the Kabbalah, the Holy 
Ghost is the heart of the Son. 9 The Kabbala was said to have 
been handed down by a secret Tradition from the earliest ages, 10 
and we have before mentioned the chain of Tradition which 
handed down the secret science 11 to the time of Proclus a.d. 435. 
As part of the Tradition, the oldest doctrines of the Kabbala ex¬ 
isted in 131 before Christ; 12 and these special doctrines appear 
to be still older. 

Concerning the mysteries it is not proper to speak in detail to the uninitiated. 
—Diodor. Sic. III. 196. 

The Great Cause of all things is accustomed to reveal his secrets to some in 
a more conspicuous and visible manner, to others more sparely.—Philo, Noah’s 
planting, vi. 

1 Rev. xxi. 10. 

2 Sohar to Genesis, 91; Gfrorer, II. 26, 29. 

3 to Moses. 

4 Hebrews, viii. 5. 

5 Gfrorer, II. 29, 30. 

6 Chagigah, 12 b. 

7 Gfrorer, II. 30. Comp. Hebrews, viii. 1. 

8 F. R. S. Munk, Palestine, 567 ; see Matthew, ii. 4. 

» Adam.—Matthew, iii. 16,17; Luke, iii. 38 ; i. 35 ; Gen. ii. 7. Adam who is a type 
of him who is to come !—Romans, v. 14. 

10 Home, Intr. I. 161. 

n CasBel’s Kusari, p. 7. note 2. quotes Proclus. 

12 Munk, 512, 519; Gelinek’s Franck, 40-44, 57. 


336 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The whole spirit and language of the Apocalypse strongly 
leans towards that of the Kabbala. 1 So, too, Matthew, xi. 27: 

Neither does any man know the Father, save the Son and he to whom the 
Son shall reveal Him.—Mattli. xi. 27. Woe, if I shall reveal,—Woe, if I shall 
not reveal.—Soliar III. fol. 53. col. 4. Aidra Rabba, line 10. 


A secret mystical science existed at the time when the New 
Testament was written. 2 It forms part of the Traditions men¬ 
tioned in the Gospels, existed in some shape long before Philo 
wrote, and the mystic Gematria or science of numbers appears 
in Jeremiah, li. 1 and in Bevelations, xiii. 18, not far from a.d. 
130: 

Here is Choclimat^ (Wisdom) .* . . number 666 (Latein).—Rev. xiii. 18. 
Pescliito. 

The word Kabbalah means “ tradition,” and the gnosis (of 
which it forms part) precedes the Christian scriptures. The 
gnosis is certainly older than Christianity, 3 as has been shown 
already, and is distinctly named gnosis in the New Testament. 4 
Simeon ben Iochai, who is said to have collected the traditions 
of the Kabbalah, lived about the end of the first century. 3 
The Talmud mentions it in a way to show that its study w'as 
no longer in its infancj 7 . 6 “ Many things in the New Testa- 

1 Nork, Rabbin Quellen, p. ii. ; Rev. xiii. 18 ; xvii. 5. I saw a Well of Righteous¬ 
ness which was inexhaustible; round about it were many Wells of Wisdom and thirsty 
drank from them and were full of Wisdom, and had their dwellings with the justified 
and holy and elect. And at that hour was that Son of man named before the Lord of 
souls, and his name was named in the presence of the head of the days. And before 
the sun and the signs (of the zodiac) were created, ere the stars of heaven were made, 
was his name named before the Lord of souls. He will be a staff'to the Just and the 
Saints to support themselves upon and not fall, and he will be the Light of the peoples 
and the hope of those who are sad in heart. Therefore was he chosen and Concealed be¬ 
fore Him ; and the Wisdom of the Lord of souls has revealed him to the saints and the 
Just.—Enoch, xlviii. 

2 Gelinek, 65, 44 ff.; Rev. xix. 13; Coloss. iii. 3; iv. 3 ; Soliar, II. fol. 3. col. 3; 
Colossians, i. 15, 16, 26; John, iii. 12; Romans, v. 14; Munk, Palestine, 511, 519. The 
eighth day contained some mystery, proclaimed in this way by God, more than the 
seventh day.—Justin cum Trypho, p. 47. 

3 Nork, Rcal-Worterbuch, II. 95; Harlesz, Egyptian Myst. 7, 11; Hermes Tris- 
megistus, books ii. iii. xiv. 

4 l Timothy, vi. 20, 21. 

5 Gelinek, p. 48. 

6 ibid. 54, 51, 47, 39: see Ioel, 366, 367. The author of the Sohar had already be¬ 
fore him earlier Kabbalist scriptures which he cites, as Hechaloth, Bahir, etc.—Nork, 

pp. iv. v. ; Kusari, III. 65. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


337 


ment are Kabbalist.” 1 “ The Sacred Logos brings forward 
many of the Mysteries 2 3 which it is not proper for any un¬ 
initiated person to hear.” :J That mode of teaching which the 
Sohar uses was employed previously by the Jews. Iesus and 
the apostles, says Nork, accommodated themselves to this 
usage. 4 The author of the book Zeror hameor did not borrow 
“ the mystery of Adam 5 is the mystery of the Messiah ” from 
Romans, v. 14, nor did Paul supply the author of Thisbi with 
the idea that “ the soul of Adam will inhabit Messiah’s body.” 
The parallel between Adam and the Messiah had been made 
before the Paulinist period. 6 

The King is the King Sun in the sun, the Divine Wisdom 
and Word, mentioned in Matthew, xxv., the inner Light of all 
lights. 7 He is Adon Ai, the Kabbalist Angel Metatron, the 
Angel of the Garment of Light. The Father is Concealed ! 8 

I asked one of the angels who went with me and showed me all the hidden 
things concerning that Son of (the) Man. And he answered and said to me : 
With him dwells the righteousness 9 and he reveals all the treasures of that 
which is CONCEALED ; for the Lord of souls has chosen him. And this Son of 
(the) Man will stir up the kings and the mighty from their seats, and the pow¬ 
erful from their thrones and loose the bridles of the strong and grind in pieces 
the teeth of sinners. And he will thrust out the kings from their thrones and 
kingdoms. And in those days 10 the prayer of the just and the blood of the 
righteous mounts up from the earth before the Lord of souls. In those days 
the Saints who dwell above in the heavens, united with one voice, will entreat 
and pray and praise and thank and extol the name of the Lord of souls on ac¬ 
count of the blood of the righteous 11 that was shed and the prayer of the justi¬ 
fied that it may not be in vain before the Lord of souls, that for them the Judg¬ 
ment may be consummated and they not have to suffer ever. And in those 
days I saw the Head of the days as He seated himself on the throne of his 


1 Schoettgen, Hor. Heb. II. 807; Munk, Palestine, p. 520, a; Nork, Rabbin. 
Quellen, pp. v. lxix. lxx. 

2 arrheta. 

3 Philo, on Dreams, I. § 33. 

4 Nork, v.; Schottgen. 

5 Secundus locus tetragrammati in Adam Kadmon est.—A. Cohen Irira, Sor ha- 
shemaim, p. 144. Adam was created with two faces.—The Sohar, I. fol. 4. col. 2. 
Sulzbach ed. The Hermathene. 

6 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. lxx. 

7 Idra Suta, ix. Rosenroth Kabbala Denudata; Dunlap, Sod, II. 72, 75. 

8 According to Matthew, vi. G; Mark, xiii. 32; Henoch, xlviii. 6. 

9 Malachi, iv. 2. 

10 Ezekiel, xxxviii. 2, 16; xxxix. 18. 

11 Rev. xix. 2. 

22 


338 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


glory and the Books of the living were opened before him. 1 —Henoch, xlvi. 
xlvii. 

The King in his beauty mine eyes shall see !—Isaiah, xxxiii. 17. 

This the Gabriel, the Lord of the Mysteries, the King, the 
most concealed of Divine Powers. “ The sacred and mystic 
account concerning the uncreated one and His ‘ Powers ’ ought 
to be kept secret.” 2 

Mors in Adamo, vita in Christo !—Origen c. Celsum, vi. 

Death in Adam, life in the Messiah! 


This presupposes the kabbalist doctrine that the soul of Adam 
by metempsychosis would reappear in the bodies of David and 
the Messiah. 3 Romans, v. 14, is therefore Kabbalist. 

Clemens Alexandrinus 4 mentions the Jewish mystics. The 
Jewish Kabbalists 5 held that great mysteries were contained in 
the Old Testament. 6 The world is not in stability except by 
mystery ; and if in matters of the world mystery is necessary, 
then also in the matter of the most recondite mysteries of the 
Ancient of Ancient of days (Ain Soph) which have' not yet been 
mentioned even to the angels on high. 7 Mark, xiii. 32, has the 
same idea ; but it was originally Jewish before it was Chris¬ 
tian : for there was “ a wall of separation 8 between Christian 
and Jewish literature until the thirteenth century.” These 
mysteries belong to the Old Mysteries of Osiris and Isis, Bel 
and Mylitta, from which comes the Gnosis or mystic science. 

The name of the temple too, announces clearly both Gnosis and Knowledge 
of the Life. For it is called Iseion ; as if “about to know 9 10 the Life” we 
should come with reason, and liolily, to the Sacra of the female God 10 (Wisdom). 
Merkury, that is, the Logos bearing witness, and showing that nature deliv¬ 
ers up the world having shaped it after that which only the mind is able to 

1 This is an Apokalypse. Compare Bev. xx. 12. 

2 Philo Judaeus, p. 94. SS. Abelis et Cain, 15. 

3 Munk, Palestine, 521. 

4 Clem. Strom. I. 23. 

5 Kabbala means “ tradition.” 

6 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. lxv. 

7 Sohar, III. fol. 53. col. 4. Idra Rabba Kadisha. 

Of that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, neither the Son 
but the FATHER.—Mark, xiii. 32. 

8 Renan, pp. xii. 82. 

9 from IsSmi “to know.” Properly, Iseion comes from Isah (Isis); Ishah. 

10 Plutarch, Iside, 2. 


THE CROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


339 


perceive. 1 For the reason alone perceives the Unrevealed, because itself is also 
unrevealed; if thou hast power with the eyes of the Spirit, then it becomes 
manifest. 2 

The Angel, His Wisdom, they recognise as Himself.—Philo, de Somniis, 

xli. 

The logos is Hermes.—Hippolytus, I. 118. The Logos is the Christos.— 
John, i. 

Eden is tlie supernal Wisdom 3 tlie Logos. The Wisdom of 
the divine essence is called “Edem .” 4 Thus Adan (Adonis) 
becomes (in pronunciation) Eden, and Adam “ Edem ; ” so that 
on the two authorities just cited, Adan (Adon) is the same 
persona that Adam is ; as might have been conjectured. In 
the “ 32 Ways of Wisdom” the Eternal Wisdom is described 
as the Garden of Eden. 5 From this Garden the Messia’h 
goes out. 6 Eden’s River issues from God’s “ Wisdom ” and is 
the Logos or “ Word.” 7 The King is the Divine Wisdom and 
“ Word,” like Hermes the Word of Zeus. The “Hidden Wis¬ 
dom ” of the Jews is Hermetic ! 

The Elected One will in those days sit on his throne and all mysteries of 
Wisdom will stream forth from the thoughts of his mouth.—Enoch, li. 

The Angel, His Wisdom, they recognise as Himself ; just as those, who 
cannot see the Sun Himself look upon the Sun-like radiance 8 as Elios !—Philo, 
de Somniis, 41. 9 

This is the religion of Apollo, the Logos-Wisdom! In 
what are called the Books of Hermes it is told about the 
sacred names. 10 The Nazarene “ hidden wisdom ” is Hermetic 
philosophy. Some writers will have it that because Plotinus 
borrowed largely from the Oriental Philosophy therefore the 

1 Ibid, 54. 

2 Hermes, viii. 8. 

3 Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata ; Idra Suta, viii. 

4 Philo, de Somniis, II. 37. Adem, Athmen, Atman, Odem, mean breath, spirit, 
blood, life. Atman is the Allseele, the Soul of the universe, Adam! 

5 Meyer’s Jezira, p. 3 ; the 16th Way. 

6 Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 1; Ausziige aus dem Sohar, p. 30; Sohar, II. fol. 3. col. 3. 

7 Philo, Allegories, I. § 19, p. 35; Ezekiel, xxviii. 3. 

8 Compare the Sheklnah. 

9 The Greek original reads: “For just as those unable to behold Helios Himself 
look upon the sun-like radiance as Helios and regard the alterations round about the 
Moon as her very self, so also they recognise the Image of the God, His Angel Logos, 
as Himself.”—Philo, p. 408. “In the soul, then, Mind and Logos , the Prince and 
Lord of all that is best, is Osiris.”—Plutarch, de Iside, 49. 

10 Plutarch, de Iside, 61. 


340 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Books of Hermes Trismegistus are copied from Plotinus. 
Non sequitur ! Why not from tlie Book of Wisdom, cited by 
Aristoboulos as early as 145 before Christ % 1 Some of the 
Books of Hermes were known to Plato, some belong to the 
school of Philo, were known to Plutarch 2 and to Justin Martyr. 3 
The Jewish secret science , referred to in Numbers, xii. 8, 

Having learned these things as well from the Sacred Books which (Moses) 
left behind as wonderful monuments of his wisdom, as also from certain of the 
nation’s presbyters. For always they interwove what is said 4 with the passages 
read; and therefore I thought to give the details of his life more accurately 
than others.—Philo, Vita Mosis, I. 1. 

The lawgiver conveys darkly some things with propriety ; and others he 
speaks gravely, in such a way as to imply something other than what is said ; 
but what is best spoken straight out, this he declares definitely.—Josephus, 
Ant. preface. 

was chiefly busied with the “ Creation,” and with the nature 
of God. 5 The common Pharisee view held to the words of 
Genesis; but even in the Talmud the mystical doctrine 
glimmers through in many ways,—a clear proof of its being 
wide-spread. 6 

The revelation of the mystery which was kept secret since the world began. 

. . . From the foundations of the world the occult things of God are seen 
by the intellect, being understood by the things which are made.—Homans, i. 
20 ; xvi. 25. 

In the beginning, the will of the King was carving forms in highest purity, 
light of power going out the centre of the concealed, that are concealed . 1 
—Sohar, I. 1. The King of rulers . . . inhabiting unapproachable light, whom 
no man has seen or can see!—1 Tim. vi. 16. 

The Gnosis of the Mystery of God, both Father and Christ, in which are 
hidden all the treasures of the Sophia and the gnosis,—the mystery that has 
been concealed from ages and generations.—Colossians, i. 26. 

The Kabbalist Longface Aricli Anpin is the primal Deity. 
Night and Heaven reigned, and before them Erikapaios. 8 

1 Vacherot, I. 134. 

2 Donaldson, Hist. Greek Lit. II. 187. 

8 Justin Log. Par, pros Hellenas, p. 31. ed. 1551. 

4 The Hagada. 

6 Genesis and the Merkaba. 

6 Gfrorer, Jahrhundert d. Heils, II. 1. 

1 The Messias was supposed to be kept concealed with God until the end of the 
world and the Judgment.—Mackay, II. 322. By the word Amoun something hidden 
and concealed is indicated.—De Iside, 9; quotes Manetho the Sebennite. It must have 
been the identification of Amun with the Logos that was hidden. 

8 Cory, Ancient Fragments, 299 ; Dunlap, Vestiges, 185. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


341 


Metis, 1 Plianes, Erikapaios 2 all three are the one power and 
strength of the Only God. 3 By his power all things were pro¬ 
duced, both the incorporeal archai, the sun and moon, earth, 
sea and all things in them visible and invisible. 4 The doc¬ 
trine of the Egyptians concerning the Principia inculcates the 
origin of all things from the One with different gradations 5 to 
the many; which again are held to be under the supreme 
government of the One. And God produced matter out of the 
material (part) of his divided nature which, being vivific, the 
Demiurg (the Fire angel Gabriel) took it and made from it 
the harmonious imperturbable spheres. 6 Before all things that 
actually exist and before the entire “ Ideal forms ” there is One 
God remaining immovable in the solitude of his unity, prior 
to the first God and King. 7 

One is King of Light 8 in his kingdom, nor any who is higher than he, no 
one who has reflected back his image, no one who, lifting his eyes, has seen the 
Crown 9 which is on his head, die is the Supreme King of light : from his head 
the Crown has not fallen. 10 

The sparklings of his Crown permeate through every place, and flashes of 
splendor, light and glory break forth from his face and among the folia of his 
Crown. 11 

In the beginning the King was carving forms in highest purity, light of power 
going out, the centre of the concealed that are concealed, from the head of Ain 
Soph. The vapor in the body sticks in a circle, not white, not black, not red, 
not green, and no color at all.—The Sohar, I. i. Sulzbach ed. 

Sliould’st thou fall into temptation, take care not to impart the least thing of 
the belief of Emanation ; for this is a great MYSTERY in the mouth of the Kab- 
balists.—Der Stein der Weisen. 1 ’ 2 

The Tanaim, R. Akiba, R. Simon ben Iochai, R. lose, R. 
Eliezer and R. Iehoshua lived in the end of the first cent- 

1 Metis the first Genetor ; and all-delightful Eros.—Orpheus; Cory, 297. Eros was 
of both genders.—Dunlap, Vestiges, 169, 170. Metis, called Phanes. Protogonos. 

2 Female and Father is the Mighty God (Erikapaius).—Cory, 299. Erikapaios is 
the Arich Anpin of the Kabbala, who is male and female. 

3 The same is true of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva. 

4 Cory, 299. 

5 The Egyptians considered Athena (the Divine Wisdom) and Hephaistos (the 
Vital Fire, Ptah) to be hermaphrodite, like Eros. 

6 Hermetic Fragment.—Cory, 285. 

7 Dunlap, Vestiges, 179. 

s Adonai. 

9 The Crown is the first Sephira, the “ Crown ” of the Kabbala. 

19 Codex Hazaraeus, I. 11. 

» ibid. I. 9. 

12 Quoted in Gelinek, p. 78. 


342 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


ury. 1 Simon ben Iocliai himself tells us that he had predeces¬ 
sors. 2 The book Iezirah, not very far removed from the time 
of Christ, 3 speaks of the “ Ten Sephiroth,” and names four of 
them : the Cliochmah, the Yenah, the Keter and the Isod ; but 
it is not certain that Matthew, vi. 13, names three more of them, 
the Kingdom, Power and Glory: while Philo speaks of 5 
Powers or attributes of God. In the Iezirah, we find three 
in the world: Eire, Water and Spirit . . . three in the soul: 
Fire, Water and Spirit. 4 

For Three bear witness, tlie Spirit, the Water and the Blood, and these 
Three unto the One.—1 John, v. 8. 

Ten Sephiroth without what ? One, the Spirit of the God of lives, blessed 
and blessed again be His Name who lives to eternity: Voice and Spirit and 
Word, this is the Holy Ghost !—The Iezirah, i. 9, 10. 

In all combinations of mysticism the number three appears as 
an essential pattern. 5 The Sohar 6 states that the Thought, 
Wisdom, Yoice and Word are One. 7 

By the intervention of the “ Father ” and the “ Mother ” the 
“ Spirit ” of the Ancient of the Ancient descends upon the 
“ Short Face.” 8 One “Spirit ” goes forth to the “ Short Face.” 
And one is the spirit of Life. And the spirit goes forth from 
the shut up brain, and at some time will rest upon the King 
Messiah. 9 And the spirit goes out from the hidden brain, and 


1 Ioel, p. 42. 

2 Gelinek, 96, 97 ; Sohar, Aidra Rabba, ad initium. 

3 from B.C. 100 to a.d. 50. 

4 Iezirah, iii. 4. 

5 Gelinek, 113. 

6 Sohar, I. 246, b. 

7 Gelinek, p. 139. Compare John, i. 1. After Herr Franck has shown the high 
antiquity of that Secret doctrine (the Kabalah) and placed it at the end of the first 
century of our era, he adds (p. 48) : This is now exactly the time in which the Tanaim, 
R. Akiba, R. Simon ben Iochai, R. lose, R. Elieser and R. Jehoshua lived.—Rabbi D. 
H. Ioel, Medrash hasohar, p. 42. Thus the Sohar’s ideas that are taken from Simeon 
ben Iochai must far antedate the 4 Evangel according to the Hebrews ’ and every other 
Christian evangel; so that the statement in Munk’s Palestine, p. 520, that some of the 
Apokryphal Books of the Old Testament as well as the Evangels, the Acts of the 
Apostles and the Talmud offer numerous traces of the Kabalah, is confirmed. 

We should also observe that the Rabbi Akiba here mentioned died at the time of 
Bar Cocheba’s rebellion, a.d. 133-136. It is impossible to trace any gospel back to 
that date. We find no satisfactory evidence in the passage in the Talmud, Tract. Sab¬ 
bath, fol. 116. 

8 Sod, II. 70 ; Kabbala Denudata. 

® Idra Rabba, x. 177-179. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


343 


through that spirit they will know Wisdom in the time of 
Messia the King. 1 

Adam, wlio is a type of him that was to come.—Romans, v. 14. 

The baptized Header immediately ascended from the water ; and lo, the 
heavens were opened, and he saw God’s SPIRIT descending like a dove, coming 
upon him.—Matthew, iii. 16. 

Christos, the Power and the Wisdom of God.—1 Cor. i. 23, 24. 

Adam (Brahma) the Son of God.—Luke, iii. 38. 

But the Father indeed Himself dwells in the supreme and principal light 
which Paulus elsewhere calls inaccessible ; but the Son is in this second and 
visible light ; and since he is himself two fold 2 as the apostle knows him, say¬ 
ing that Christ is God’s Power and God’s Wisdom, his Power indeed we believe 
dwells in the sun, but his Wisdom in the moon : and also we confess that this 
whole circumambient air is the seat and abode of the Holy Spirit which is the 
third majesty, from whose powers and pneumatic profusion the earth, too, con¬ 
ceiving bore suffering Iesus who is life and light of men, who was suspended 
from the tree.—Augustin, contra Faust, c. xx. 


Wisdom in the moon is the Binah, Vena, Intelligence, the 
Breath of Life, the Mother of the Gods, the Mother of all that 
live. Adam and his rib (Isis in the moon-crescent) are the 
hermaphrodite Wisdom of Ia’hoh and Iacchos, for “ some 
say that Hermaphroditus is God.” 3 Amon in Egypt was her¬ 
maphrodite and Neitli was so also. Before Amon’s altar the 
priests kept a lamp always burning, 4 as on the altar at Jeru- 
salem. 5 

an 

I, Amon, was with Him.—Proverbs, viii. 30. 

He Himself alwa} T s took part in the Sophia 6 as in his own Breath of life ; 7 
the Sophia 8 is united to God like a soul, but is extended from him like a hand 
which creates the world : therefore it was produced, One Man ; and from him 
issued also the Female. And, being One in the birth, is a duad. For in exten¬ 
sion and contraction the monad is thought to be duad. So that to One God, 


1 The Idra Suta, § v. 

2 geminus ut eum apostolus novit. Simon Magus regarded the Nous (or Logos) the 
Mind as of two genders. 

3 Diodorus Sic., IV. 215. 

4 Sharpe, I. 331. 

5 Leviticus, vi. 13 ; 1 Sam., iii. 3. 

6 The Sophia is the logos proforikos in the luna-world. The moon is born from 
the Sun.—Colebrooke, Essays, 25, 96. Isis is the Wisdom or Intelligence.—Proverbs, 
viii. 1, 21, 23, 30. 

7 pneuma. 

8 They also mentioned Minerva as the First Ennoia (Conception of the Divine 
Mind).—Justin Martyr, ed. 1551. p. 161. 


344 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


as to Parents, I do rightly giving the entire honor.—Clementine Homilies, 
xvi. 12. 1 

God, having made Intellect first, called it Adam. 2 —Philo, Quaestio, i. 53. 

Tlie Naaseni worshipped a dual power whom they called 
Adamas, addressing him as man and also as Father and Mother, 
and singing all sorts of hymns to him . 3 They too adored their 
“spirit” and their Son of man. 

Preconceiving the generative man in whom is, they say, the male and the 
female sex, he afterwards works off the form, the Adam.—Philo, Legal Alle¬ 
gories, II. 4. 

In Babylon there was an idol with two heads, one a man’s head, 
the other a woman’s, and it had the alSola of both the sexes . 4 
In the Jewish Kabbalah we find that Iach (Iah) severs into I 
and AH (I— ah ); which ah is the same as feminine ousia , 5 being 
the Asali, Ishah, Isis, the Woman-life, the Spirit as the Holy 
Mother of al , 

I A O 



THE CROSS AND THE SCEPTRE 

The King 6 

THE KETER 

great ousiris, greater phre, to phos 7 pur 8 phlox , 9 greater 
greater Iar (Horus with the Lion-head, Michael with the Lion- 

1 Gerhard Ulhorn, p. 173. 

2 Enos is interpreted “ man,” and is received as meaning the Intellect (??).—Philo, 
Quaest., 79. 

3 Hippolytus, v. 7. 

4 Dulaure, 70 ; quotes Alex. Polyhistor, in Chaldaiis apud Syncell., p. 29. 

5 i\ aiSia ovcrLa, the everlasting essence.—Plato. Tim. 37 E. 

6 The bringing to light of the gnosis of the glory of the God in the face of ISsous 
the King. Keter is the Crown. The gnosis in the Mysteries preceded the argumenta¬ 
tion of Moses and Simon Magus. 

7 bak; light. 

8 the seminal fire. 

8 Siva, the Conflagration : the Destroyer and Regenerater. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


345 


head, Ariel, the Lion of Judah, the King) who includes the ten 
spheroth 1 in himself. This is the Kabbalist MAN, 2 to whom 
is the power 3 and the glory 4 and the kingdom 5 for ever and 
ever ad oulom. 

Ain Sof (Without End). 

The Ten Sephiroth 

1 Crown 

2 Chochmah 

(Venah) 3 Binah (the Benah) 

4 Grace 

5 Judgment 

6 Beauty 

7 Triumph 

8 Glory 

9 Basis 

10 Kingdom 

The first three sephiroth are of intellectual and metaphysical 
nature. They express* the absolute identity of being and 
thinking; and form what the modern kabbalists have named 
the Intelligible World, Oulom Moshkel. 

The next three sephiroth are of a moral character. The 
last make up the realm of power. 

Inform them also concerning the celestial Crown which is placed in its own 
habitation of the Supreme Life.—Codex Nazaraeus, II. 305. 

If Justin Martyr admits that the Gnostics were called Chris¬ 
tians and were teachers of the new revelation long before he 
was, if the Kabalah recognized the Logos as Malka Messiah 
in the first century, if Daniel acknowledged the Messiah at 
least a hundred years before the Christian Era and Matthew 
xxv. 1, 5, 34, 40, one hundred and fifty years after the ‘ Birth 

1 the 10 circles. 

2 Mithra’s emblem was the lion.—Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 175, 178. Mithra- 
Mettron (Metatron), the Logos and Anointed King, the Massiacha. Metatron is the 
identical Shechinah, and the Shechinah is called Iahoh’s Metatron, because it is the 
Crown of the ten Sephiroth. 6 

3 geburah. 

4 hod. 

6 malkuth. ' 

* Tikune Sohar, 73 b.; in Gfrorer, I. 121. 


346 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of Clirist * identifies the Christos with the “ King ” mentioned 
in the Kabalah before, we must admit that in two hundred and 
fifty years a vast body of Messianists must have been collected 
in the regions lying between the Persian Gulf and Ephesus. 
These were Arabian, Babylonian, Syrian, Jewish, and Samari¬ 
tan gnostics, one at least of whom, like Daniel, preached the 
Great Power, the Power of the God and the Wisdom of the 
God. Compare Philo Judaeus, Simon Magus, and Simeon 
ben Iochai. 

For, lo, Iahoh will come in fire (ash).—Isa. lxvi. 15. The 
Stoic philosophers dogmatised that the God himself is re¬ 
solved into fire and the Sibyl and Hystaspis affirmed the dis¬ 
solution of perishable things by fire.—Justin, p. 142. Since 
Apsethos a Libyan was burned for claiming divinity for him¬ 
self, HippolytuS Says xal ovSev 6 /xayo<s 7Tttdos rt TrapaTrXrjcrLOv 
’Ai^edo) : If the comparison is correct and the Magos has suf¬ 
fered a passion like to Apsethus let us endeavor to reteacli 
the parrots of Simon that Christos was not Simon the ‘ Stand¬ 
ing, Stood, Will Stand.’ There has been a considerable 
amount of stuff said against Simon Magus that is now proved 
incorrect, and it might be interesting to know the truth about 
him. That he claimed that there were 4 powers ’ of God may 
readily be believed and when he claimed that there was a Great 
Power it was quite in accordance with the Gnostic notions of 
his time. But Acts does not say that Simon himself claimed 
to call himself any more than two. [xtyav, ‘ some one great ’ and 
that Simon believed and was baptised! Here Simon would 
seem to have been converted! What then was the reason why 
he was singled out for a considerable display of hostility on 
the part of Irenaeus and the Christians ? Irenaeus, Hippoly- 
tus, Acts, and Clementine Homilies treat him as a Great 
Leader of Gnostic Heresies. The author of Antiqua Mater 
shows that the story of Irenaeus that there was a statue of 
Simon Magus on an island in the Tiber is all wrong because 
the statue was a statue of Semo Sanctus and not Simon. 
Then he shows from Justin Martyr that early in the second 
century the Gnostics shared the name of Christians and were 
teachers of the new Revelation long before him. 1 Then he 
regards the romance of Simon Magus and his Ennoia or In¬ 
tuition as an allegory. The Intuition is, he considers, the 

1 Apol. I. 26. Also Origen, contra Celsum. 5. 


THE GROSS, GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


347 


soul, an emanation of Deity, confined to earth and to a mortal 
form. Justin blunders over Semo Sancus and the whole ac¬ 
count of Simon Magus the author of Antiqua Mater regards as 
a manifest myth, in which general ideas, as usual, are repre¬ 
sented in a personal and dramatic manner. Justin, he says, 
saw in Simon Magus and his disciple Menander, both of 
Samaria, a land of mixed Jewish and heathen population, a 
rival to the Christ. 1 —Antiqua Mater, p. 214; cf. Harnack, 178 f. 

Simon Magus says that the Infinite Power is fire; and 
Genesis, i. 2, ii. 23, Deut. iv. 12, 15, Exodus, iii. 4, Matthew, 
iii. 11, and the Egyptian and Phoenician-Kanaanite religions 
rather support him. The Hindu effectually does. Out of the 
speech (logos) issues fire. Simon says it is not single, but 
that the nature of fire is double; and of that double he calls 
one part something hidden, the other manifest, and that the 
(things) concealed are hidden in the manifested of the fire, and 
that the manifested (parts) of the fire have their birth from 
(or by) the hidden. This is what Aristotle calls power and 
energy, or Plato designates as mind-perceived and visible or 
perceived by the senses. And the manifest part of the fire 
holds all things in himself that one could perceive or pass 
over by oversight, of things seen. Of all the things that 
really are, perceived by senses or mind-perceived, which he 
calls hidden and manifest, the Supercelestial Fire is the treas¬ 
ure-house, like the great tree that Nabouchodonosor saw in a 
dream, from which all flesh was nourished. He thinks the 
manifest part of the fire is the stem, the branches, the leaves, 
the bark surrounding it outside. All these parts of the Great 
Tree set on fire from the all-consuming flame of the Fire dis¬ 
appear. But the fruit of the tree if it should be fully shaped 

1 On the Synkretism of Jewish, Babylonian, Persian, Syrian. Hellenic religions out 
of which the Universal and Absolute Religion arose, compare Harnack, ITS f. About 
the Gnostics in general our earliest informant is Irenasus, a determined opponent of the 
Hellenic spirit; especially of that polytheism or relative monotheism which under new 
names the Gnostics were bringing back. They represented the religious revolution 
as a war of gods: the god of the Jews or Demiurge (Creator) being lowered in rank 
and distinguished from the supreme and true or “good” God. The secret spring of 
this innovation the author of Antiqua Mater traces to Hellenic jealousy of the Jews 
and their Law and Prophets, and to an objection to its impositions whether circum¬ 
cision or the ascetic regulations for the proselytes of the Gate; To establish a rival 
theology, to claim a new knowledge of the Supreme as their own, to invent a new 
category of mediatorial beings or Aeons, all this was to supersede the Old Testament 
and to claim the spiritual empire for the Greeks.—Antiqua Mater, 216. 


348 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and receive its own form, is placed in a storehouse, not in 
the fire. For the fruit is born to be stored up, but the chaff 
to be put in the fire, which has been generated, not for its own 
sake, but for the fruit. 1 

Then Simon applies this to Scripture : For the house of the 
Israel is the vine of the Lord Sabaoth, and man the beloved 
germ of the Iouda. And if man is the beloved new-shoot of 
the Iouda it has been shown that the tree is nothing else than 
man. But the scripture has spoken enough of his secretion 
and dissolution, and for instruction what has been said is 
enough for those fully formed. For all flesh is grass, and all 
glory of the flesh as the flower of grass. The grass has been 
destroyed and its flower has fallen, but the word of the Lord 
remains forever. But the word is the Word and Logos that 
has been generated in (the) mouth of the Lord, and elsewhere 
is no place of genesis. 

The Fire being such, according to Simon, there were of all the Aeons, two 
branches from one root, Mind and Ennoia (Mother of all things). 

The Angels governing the world badly because they 
wanted to govern, he said that he came to restore things, 
metamorphosed and made like to the rulers and powers and 
angels, so that he appeared as man, not being a man, and 
seemed to suffer, not having suffered, but appearing to the 
Jews as Son, but in Samareia as Father, and in the other 
nations as Holy Spirit, and that he endured to be called by 
whatever name the men may wish to call him. 2 

At Rome he meets with the Apostolos, and Peter resisted 
him much deceiving many by magic arts. At last being near 
being confuted by delaying too long, he said that if he were 
buried alive he would rise on the third day. Having ordered 
a pit to be dug by the disciples, he directed the earth filled in. 
They did as they were directed, but he has been missing till 
now, for he was not the Christos. 3 

If neither Peter nor Paul ever saw Rome, or if the author 

1 See Matthew, iii. 10, 12. 

2 Hippolytus, vi. 19. 

3 ibid. vi. 20. The stories of Irenseus and Hippolytus are simply improbable ; ex¬ 
cept that it is barely possible that Simon and Menander were charged with claiming to 
be Salvators, Saviors ; and the few lines Irenaeus gives to Menander, Kerinthus and the 
Ebionites, exhibit a one-sided unconscientious partisanship, undesirous to inform the 
public on the subjects about which or against which he is writing. 


THE GROSSGROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


349 


of ‘ Supernatual Religion ’ is correct in deciding that none of 
our four gospels is earlier than a.d. 150, then it is plain that 
Hippolytus wrote, like Irenaeus, as partisan and not as his¬ 
torian. Then the whole story in Irenaeus and Hippolytus is 
a myth, except the account of the ambitious Angels, perhaps, 
which Irenaeus charges Menander and Saturninus with hold¬ 
ing as a dogma, seven wandering stars performing the govern¬ 
ment on high.—Clemens Al., Strom., vi. 813. 

The characteristic power of Nature is its formative power. 
This Simon Magus 1 did not hesitate to ascribe to Unlimited 
Fire, f] airepavros SuVa/xis, to Tvvp, of a duplex-nature (like Eloh im), 
having the two genders male and female ; 2 and the Spirit goes 
out from the Seventh Power; for the three days before the Sun 
and Moon were made subindicate Mind (Nous) and Epinoia 
(Intelligence, Sophia, Sapientia 3 ) and the Seventh Power that 
is unlimited. And these three Powers precede all the others 
that are born. And when they say : t£ Before all the aions 
He generates me,” this is said concerning the Seventh Power, 
he says. And about this Seventh Power Moses speaks when 
he says: The Spirit was borne over the water. That is, he 
says, the Spirit containing all things in itself, the image of 
the unlimited power. Regarding which Simon says : Image 
from an immortal form, sole arranging all things.—Hippoly¬ 
tus, vi. 9, 14. It may be remarked here that Genesis hesi¬ 
tates to employ the phraseology of the Kabalah, Ayin, the 
‘ No-Thing,’ but rather prefers the Chaldsean and Egyptian ex¬ 
pressions, Unknown Darkness.—Gen. i. 2 : “ Darkness w T as on 

the faces of Tahom.” If Genesis had used the kabalist lan¬ 
guage, Ayin, it would have betrayed the source of its informa- 

1 Simon was charged by the Christians with using magic art, but, as in the evan¬ 
gel of Mcodemus the Jews accuse Jesus before Pilate of being a magician (Supern. Rel. 
I. 324), we can afford to lay these charges to the account of mutual rivalry and partisan 
feeling. In such cases the ancients sometimes lied. Such accusations of magic were 
supposed by the Jews, doubtless in the 2nd century, to have been correct.—ibid. 325. 
It is certain that on the supposition that Pilate may have made an official report of 
events so important in their estimation, Christian writers, with greater zeal than con¬ 
science, composed fictitious reports in his name in the supposed interest of their re¬ 
ligion, and there was in that day little or no critical sense to detect and discredit such 
forgeries.—ib. 327. No evidence of any official report! 

2 T^e Wisdom, the Daughter of God, is also Male and Father.—Philo, de profugis, 
p. 458. 

3 The Wisdom is the Daughter of God, and Simon Magus testifies to the existence 
of the Hidden Wisdom (of the Gnosis) in the Kabalah, both in and before his time.— 
Proverbs, viii. 1, 23, 27, 30. 


350 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tion; and the Court of the Higlipriest was too diplomatic for 
that. Although there is kabalah in Ezekiel, i., and gnosis else¬ 
where, it would be going tolerably far back to have openly 
charged Moses with kabalist ideas and expressions. It was 
different in the time of Simon, for the kabalah was well known 
in the 2nd century, at a period just prior to the writing of Her- 
mas, who held that the Holy Spirit of God is the divine power 
which first of all worked in the person (corpus) of Christ.—Hil- 
genfeld, 167 ; Matthew, iii. 11, 12, 16 ; iv. 1. The God, he says, 
planted the vineyard, that is, created the people and gave it 
to his Son; and the Son established the angels over them to 
guard them. He showed them the paths of life, giving them 
the Law which he took from his Father. Hermas, Sim. v. 6, 
says: echeis kai tautes tes Paraboles ten epilusin. See if 
Matthew xxi. 33, 38, 41, has not a similar parable.—Mark, xii. 
6, 9. The question then arises which of the two treatises is 
the earlier. Hermas mentions bishops, presbyters and dia- 
cons; but then he does not mention Peter nor John, nor the 
name of any apostle. He knows none of the names. Before 
any gospel, except the general ‘good tidings’ that was 
preached by Budhist and Eastern Saints, there were saints, 
missionaries and apostles noway related to the subsequent 
Christian dispensation ; so that if Hermas and the Apokalypse 
do not know the name of a single Apostle mentioned in the 
Gospels, they are probably of earlier date than the Four Gos¬ 
pels. It is not a case of the mere word “apostles,” for the 
Didache shows that there were enough of them about. The 
point is, did Hermas and the author of the Apokalypse know 
Peter, as the Gospel of Matthew does. If they do not know 
him they are reliable; but they testify to a period when the 
spurious works, that do mention Peter, did not exist. Her¬ 
mas was written about the middle of the second century, or a 
little earlier.—Supernat. Belig. I. 257. 

Vast numbers of spurious writings, moreover, bearing the 
names of Apostles and their followers, and claiming more or 
less direct apostolic authority were in circulation in the early 
Church: Gospels according to Peter, to Thomas, to James, to 
Judas, according to the Apostles, or according to the Twelve, 
to Barnabas, to Matthias, to Nicodemus, Ac., and ecclesiastical 
writers bear abundant testimony to the early and rapid growth 
of apocryphal literature.—Supernatural Bel. I. 292, 293. 


THE CROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


351 


Justin refers to a mythical ‘ ActaPilati.’ Scholten conjectures 
that Justin merely referred to documents which tradition sup¬ 
posed to have been written, but of which he himself had no 
personal knowledge.—Supernat. Religion, I. 327, 328. 

It is not difficult to believe that Justin Martyr’s first 
Apology was the genuine work of a Christian, 1 but that it was 
written at an early period of Christianism, that is, according 
to a prior Gospel almost identical with the Gospel according 
to Matthew, seems barely possible. 2 It testifies to the comple¬ 
tion of the transjordan system (partly Essene, partly Ebionite, 
partly Kabalist, partly Messianic, and essentially the long- 
practised work of the Eastern Saints 3 and wandering apostles) 
which had become perfectly organised when Matthew’s Gos¬ 
pel was issued. The title and superscription are at first sight 
suspicious ; for it may be doubted if such a communication 
was ever intended prior to a.d. 140 to have been addressed or 
presented to a Roman Emperor.—Supern. Rel. I. 326. It is 
open to the objection that it is the first work in which the 
mistake of seeking to identify Simon Magus with Semo Sanc- 
tus is found. Again Justin, pp. 137, 139 uses the word agnoia, 
and Lucian quizzes it. Again the Memoirs he uses may have 
been apocryphal evangelia.—Supernat. Rel. I. 312, 314-316, 
321, 324, 412. 

And the evil demons were not satisfied before the Manifestation of the Chris¬ 
tos with saying that the before mentioned sons were born to the Zeus, but after 
he had been manifested and born among men ; and after they learned that he 
was prophesied by the Prophets and knew that he was believed and looked for 
in every people, again, as we before showed, they put forward others, Simon 
to be sure and Menander from Samareia, who also having performed magian 
miracles deceived many, and yet hold them deceived.—Justin Martyr, pp. 
157, 158. Apol. I. 

It is easy to see that this is an argument, and a late one, pro 
Christianis. “ We have been denounced as Christians, but it 

1 He speaks particularly of the demons and eternal punishment. 

2 There was an existing Christian Ecclesia when Matthew, xvi. 18 was written. 
And the writers of the Memoirs tell all about our Saviour Iesous Christos.—Justin, 
Apol. I. 33. 

3 All through the Jordan country and the desert were wandering pastors, itinerant 
prophets or koraim.—Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. xiv. xxxii. xxxiii. 34 ; Isaiah, xxix. 19 ; xl. 
3. The Sabians baptized. Baptism was one of the observances in the worship of 
Adonis in Mesopotamia and Arabia. Those initiated in the Mysteries of Mithra were 
baptized.—Dunlap, Sod, I. 139; Movers, I. 391; Matth. iii. 6, 11,13. 


352 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


is not just that the good is hated.”— p. 137. There is nothing 
in the first part of it showing that it was an address to Adrian, 
or Hadrian. The superscription may have been put to it in 
order to give it the appearance of being of an earlier date than 
it really was. Here it is : 

To the Autokrat Titus Ailianos Adrianos, Antoninos Pins august Kaisar, and 
Ouerissimus son philosopher, and Loukios philosopher, by nature son of Kaisar, 
and adopted of Eusebes, friend of learning, and sacred colleague, and to the 
entire people of the Romans, in behalf of the men from every nation unjustly 
hated and abused ; Ioustinos son of Priskos the Bakcheios, one from Flavia 
Neapolis of Suria Palaistine, I have made address and petition of them.—p. 135. 

The Septuagint, like the Targums, moved on in the direc¬ 
tion of Christianism! Like Matthew, Justin always quotes 
from the Septuagint Version. 1 The mere fact that Justin men¬ 
tions ‘ evangelia ’ without giving the name of any one of them 
is no evidence that his writings are not of later date than some 
of the Canonical evangels.—See Sup. Rel. I. 308, 309-311. 
The use of the word ‘ agnoia,’ if it proves anything, shows 
that the writer may have been living about the time of Lucian, 
and prior to Irenaeus. His mention of Simon Magus, Me¬ 
nander, Markion, shows that the writer of Justin’s 1st Apology 
must have been late ; since Markion’s period of great success 
lasted 2 from a.d. 154 to 180. Moreover, the author of the 1st 
Apology, p. 145, says that “ Markion is even now still teach¬ 
ing.” Since Hadrian died in a.d. 138 and Markion rose to 
fame in about a.d. 154-166 it was nearly impossible for Justin 
to address his first Apology to Hadrian (dead in 138) and 
speak of Markion as c now still teaching ’ in 154-166. Hadrian 
died before Markion reached Rome or began to study with 
Kerdo (about 141 or later). Moreover Hadrian is not men¬ 
tioned in the aforesaid Apology until the last page,—which 
may have been added later by some partisan. In fact, Adrian’s 
name is only named in the 2nd, 4th, and 6th lines from the 
close, just before the writer gives Adrian’s decree concerning 
the Christians. Justin’s ‘ memoirs 3 of the Apostles ’ varied 

1 Supernat. Rel. I. 294. Justin’s account is still more inconsistent with history 
than Luke’s.—ib. I. 307, 308. 

2 Irenaeus, III. iv. p. 243, ed. mdclxxv. : Markion invaluit sub Aniketo. He came 
after Kerdo, who came to Rome in the episcopate of Huginus (Hyginus) the eighth 
bishop, in 137-141.—Irenaeus, III. iv. 242. 

3 If Justin tells the truth about those Memoirs (apomnemoneumata) then there must 
have been an earlier period of Christianism about which we can know but little ; but 


THE CROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


353 


persistently and materially from the canonical Gospels.—Sup- 
ernat. Relig. I. 302. The Canonical Gospels derive the De¬ 
scent from David through Joseph ; but Justin’s sources derive 
it through Mary. See ib. I. 306. Justin quotes the Apocry¬ 
phal Evangelia (Supern. Eel. I. 403, 407, 411, 412). It is true 
that ‘ Supernatural Religion,’ I. p. 285, concludes that the 
date of Justin’s Eirst Apologia is about a.d 147; but the 
text of Irenaeus, III. iv. pp. 242, 243, says ; Cerdon autem 
qui ante Marcionem, et hie sub Hygino, qui fuit Octavus 
Episcopus, . . . Marcion autem illi succedens invaluit sub 
Aniceto decimum locum episcopatus continente. Therefore, 
although Markion may have been “ at one time secretly teach¬ 
ing, at another, making public profession,” yet he grew in re¬ 
pute in the time of Aniketos who held office as tenth Bishop. 
Smith’s Dictionary, III. p. 819, dates Justin’s 1st Apology a.d. 
150. The words of Justin, pp. 145, 158, Markion a certain 
Pontican, who even now is still teaching (o? /cat vvv 4'™ Vm 
ScSdcTKwv) and ‘ k<u vvv SiSaa-Kei ’ settle the point that the later 
teaching of Markion is meant: because Markion became 
more successful in the time of Anicetus who was Bishop of 
Rome from a.d. 154-166, twelve years. Consequently the date 
of Justin’s First Apology must fall between 154 and 166. 
Therefore the appeal to Hadrian, if really made in a.d. 138-9, 
the time when Hadrian died, must have been made sixteen 
years at least before Markion had gained his reputation, and 
at a time when the Emperor was dying. It would look, then, 
as if ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ had dated Markion’s First Apol¬ 
ogy too early by seven years. Markion came to Rome and 
continued to teach for some twenty years.—Supernat. Re¬ 
ligion, II. 80. That is one reason why the superscription 
wears a doubtful aspect. Markion is said to have recognized 
as his sources of Christian doctrine, besides tradition, a single 
Gospel and ten Pauline Epistles. But as his own Gospel can¬ 
not be found, nor reconstructed out of his bitter antagonists, 
Tertullian and Epiphanius (both of whom are, from a quasi 
proximity in time, a sort of argument, in connection with 
Irenaeus III. iv. p. 243, for the later date for Markion’s active 

this is clear that Matthew had some motive for writing that Peter was the Rock on 
which the Ebionite Ecclesia was founded. So that this verse must be an interpolation, 
or else something went before of which we are not informed.—Hermas, Parabola, ix. 1, 
uses the very word Ecclesia. 

23 


354 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


career), and as some have opposed the idea that Markion con¬ 
structed his own Gospel in part out of the Canonical Luke, 
we might admit in Markion a knowledge of the Paulinist writ¬ 
ings ; without, at this stage of the argument, admitting that 
Markion knew any canonical evangel at all. The singularity 
of a selection of Luke instead of Matthew is in itself striking, 
for Matthew is more markedly identified, in some respects, 
with Essene-Ebionite aphorisms than Luke is, and Markion is 
nothing if not first, last, and altogether an Encratite. Like 
Saturninus, he detested marriage. The virginal birth in Luke 
would have suited him no better than the proposition con¬ 
tained in Matthew, iii. 16, 17. The real question is, if these 
two Gospels were not produced until after a.d. 150, 1 whether 
Markion is not, in that case, a confirmation of the fact; for if 
Rabbi Akiba and the Jews in 134-135 expected a Messiah (in 
Barcocheba) they were not yet prepared to admit that one had 
come in a.d. 30, and the ground was not yet prepared for the 
acceptance of a canonical Gospel! They were looking for an¬ 
other ! — Matth. xi. 3. Matthew’s Gospel might as well have 
discussed the attributes of the Healer on Mt. Sinai, as amid 
the turmoil and excitement that prevailed in Judaea, on the 
Jordan, and in Edom too, from 65 to 136. Hence the arrival 
of the Great Ascetic in Rome between 139 and 142, or perhaps 
later, may be fraught with historical significance. But if 
Markion, relying on the fall of the Jews and the Angel of 
Jerusalem (see Irenaeus, I. xxii. xxiii.), considered this an 
evidence that the Angel of Jerusalem was not the Highest 
Deity, what prevented his concocting a description of the 
descent of the Saviour ‘ Mithra Iesoua ’ or Malka Messiaclia 
in human appearance merely, 2 to the Galilaean city Kaper- 
naum, that might serve as a suggestion to the canonical 
writers ? When Markion was, there was no canon of author¬ 
ised New Test. Scriptures.—Supernat. Rel. II. 81. According 
to St. Luke others had set to work writing gospels, why not 
Markion also ? Of course he wrote from the ascetic point of 
view, as Matthew and the Essenes and Ebionites would have 

1 as ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ supposes. Advenisse Christum ad destructionem 
Iudaeorum Dei, et ad salutem credentium ei. —Saturninus, in Iren. I. xxii. 

2 Doketic Gnosis. “ But the Saviour Saturninus demonstrated (to be) unborn, and 
incorporal and without form, but a man apparently, as you would suppose.”—Irenaeus, 
I. xxii. This is gnostic, and the Apocryphal Evangels were gnostic also.—Sup. Rel. 
I. 403, 411. 


THE GROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE. 


355 


done, and Saturninns did. Those Seven Angels were consid¬ 
ered bad Angels in the Liber Adami or Codex Nazoria. Sa¬ 
turninns considered them bad in a.d. 125. Is there any reason 
why Markion should not have shared his opinion ? Justin in 
his 1st Apologia, p. 158, mentions Simon (the Magus), Menan¬ 
der, and Markion. Why does he leave out Saturninus who 
comes next in order ? He was himself late. But he mentions 
Markion, however, the legitimate successor of such opinions 
as those of Saturninus, particularly that the Saviour came 
without a body! Did the writer of Apologia I. decline to 
strengthen Markion’s case ? Now the connection that we have 
here substantiated between Markion and Saturninus, and which 
Justin does not deny, Irenaeus by his way of writing would 
never lead one to suspect. But, then, he was a missionary to 
the Gauls! The question still returns, Did Markion’s ideas in 
any way contribute to induce the production of the Gospel 
according to Matthew ? It was certainly first written in 
Greek. Markion’s high personal character and elevated views 
produced a powerful effect on his time, and his opinions were 
so widely adopted that in the time of Epiphanius his follow¬ 
ers 1 were said to be found throughout the whole world. 2 An¬ 
ticipating the results of modern criticism, Markion denies the 
applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies. 3 
The mere fact that the Paulinist 4 does not follow Matthew, i. 
18, 20, nor Luke, i. 35, speaks strongly for the priority of some 
Paulinist. 

The whole course of Markion’s proceedings implies that he 
put no great faith in canonical Gospels, if he altered them. If 
Markion’s Gospel was a more original and authentic work than 
Luke’s (Supern. Eel. II. 108, 134) we may have to admit an 
earlier status of Christianism among the Oriental Greeks and 
preceding the canonic Gospels, a Christianism in which Sa¬ 
turninus and Kerinthus together with the Kabbalist Jews 
might abide, and into which Messianists could enter, with 
Philo as a teacher. Compare Supernat. Belig., II. 118, lines, 
12, 17, 18, 19, 20; 120, line 11; 123, 125. Markion held Paul 

1 Encratites, Markion had no need to tinker Luke. See Supernat. Rel. II. 109, 

110 . 

2 Supern. Rel. II. 80. 

3 ib. II. 106. There is a complete severance between the Law and the Gospel.—p. 

106. 


4 1. Cor. xii. 3; Gal. iv. 4. 


356 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


to be tbe only true Apostle!—ib. 121. Therefore Peter and 
James must have been (if he ever heard of them) inventions in 
his eyes, possibly some of the members of the body of Saints 
and general apostles, or else imaginary conceptions, got up 
for theological purposes or local prejudices, or business. 
Markion’s text contains many readings which are manifestly 
superior to, and more original than, the form in which the 
passages stand in the third Gospel. We are indebted to 
Markion for the correct version of the Lord’s prayer. The 
true reading was, instead of £ Hallowed be thy name,’ “ Let 
thy Holy Spirit come upon us.”—Luke, xi. 13: Sup. Eelig. II. 
126. The correctness of Markion’s Gospel as an original text 
versus the Synoptics is further verified.—ib. II. 130, 131. 
Markion’s Gospel began thus : In the 15th year of the reign of 
Tiberius Caesar Iesoua 1 came down to Kapernaum a city of 
Galilee. Luke, iv. 23, without any previous mention of Kefr 
Naum, says: 

No doubt you will say to me this parable: Physician, Heal thyself; what¬ 
ever we have heard taking place at the Kapharnaum, do here too in thy native 
place! 

In Matthew, iv. 13 also the Iesoua is described as beginning 
to preach at Kapharnaum in the mountains of Zaboulon and 
Nephthaleim. Assuming that Markion’s copy is older than 
Luke’s or Matthew’s, it is easy to see why all three agree in 
making Kapharnaum the beginning of the Iesoua’s preach¬ 
ing. In that case, Markion would have set the example for 
the others to improve upon, using however an earlier text, a 
Paulinist copy. He came down to Kapharnaum.—Luke, iv. 
31. Luke evidently was embarrassed by taking from previous 
sources, for he makes Iesoua, in the synagogue at Nazareth, 
refer to works done at Kapernaum before any mention has 
been made of his having preached or worked wonders there to 
account for his alluding to the subject. Markion’s Gospel 
represented Iesoua as first appearing in Capernaum, then 
going to Nazareth and addressing the people with the natural 
reference to the previous events at Capernaum. That Luke 
happens to be the only one of our canonical Gospels which 
has the words with which Markion’s Gospel commences, is no 
proof whatever that those words were original in that work, 

1 The Syrian for the Greek Igsous. 


THE GROSS , GROWN AND SGEPTRE. 


357 


and not found in several of the many gospels preceding Luke’s. 
“ It seems indeed a bold thing to affirm that Marcion’s Gos¬ 
pel, whose existence is authenticated long before we have any 
evidence of Luke’s, must have been derived from the latter.”— 
Supern. Eel., II. 134. It is more simple and natural to sup¬ 
pose that the system was formed upon the Gospel as Markion 
found it, than that the Gospel was afterwards fitted to the sys¬ 
tem.—ib. 138. Although Markion obviously did not accept 
any of the Gospels which have become canonical, it does not 
by any means follow that he knew anything of these particular 
Gospels. As yet we have not met with any evidence even of 
their existence at a much later period.—ib. II. 145. We must 
not forget the date of Markion’s celebrity, given us by Iren- 
seus, 154-166, 12 years. There is no evidence of the existence 
of any of the canonical Gospels at a later period than 166. 
Irenseus knows them all about 174 or 175, apparently. “ The 
fact is, however, that the numerous Gospels current in the 
early Church cannot have been, and our synoptic Gospels most 
certainly are not, independent works, but are based upon ear¬ 
lier evangelical writings no longer extant, 1 and have borrowed 
from each other. The Gospels did not originate full fledged 
as we now have them, but are the result of many revisions of 
previously existing materials.” Almost all critics are agreed 
that the Synoptics are dependent on each other and on older 
forms of the Gospel.—Supernat. Eel. I. 397. It is also evident 
that the doctrine of self-denial, the prominent theory of the 
East (which is the legitimate result of the antithesis of Spirit 
and Matter), had penetrated the inmost convictions of this 
great Ascetic, and that he met it in every evangel that existed 
between Pontus and the Jordan. Death 2 3 could teach him that 
‘ the flesh profiteth nothing! ’ 

Justin Martyr not only quotes from the Apocryphal Evan- 
gelia (as above mentioned), but Eusebius, H. E. iii. 27, says of 
the Ebionites, using only the ‘ Evangel according to the He¬ 
brews,’ they make small account of the others; and the author of 
Supernatural Religion, I. p. 423,427,428, says that Justin’s quo¬ 
tations, where they resemble passages in the canonical Gospels, 


1 We might infer from Justin, Dialogue, 35, 51, 1st Cor. xi. 18-19 (Sup. Rel. 413, 

414) that the Paulinist preceded Justin. The sources in Asia and Syria from which 
the Paulinist drew materials for his Hellenist Epistles may have preceded Justin. 

3 “ corpus enim natura corruptible existit.”—Iren. I. xxiii. 


358 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


are evidently taken from the Evangel according to the He¬ 
brews. 1 It was among the earliest Christian communities 
generally believed to be the original of the Greek Gospel of 
Matthew. Irenaeus states that the Ebionites used solely the 
‘ Gospel according to Matthew.’—Iren. I. xxvi. Sup. Eel. I. 423, 
424, 425. Justin, Apol. I. 50, states that after the Crucifixion 
even his friends all forsook him and denied him. Matthew, 
xxvi. 56, says £ they all forsook him and fled.’ Luke, Mark, and 
John represent the disciples as being together after the Cruci¬ 
fixion. Justin makes no mention of the angels at the sepul¬ 
chre.—S. E. I. 332. There is one way of freeing Markion from 
the accusation of having known of some canonical Gospel; we 
can assume that he used the word Iesoua in its literal mean¬ 
ing only, the Saviour ; and this agrees with his teaching. The 
word Capernaum looks as if Markion had read Matthew and 
Luke. But they may have taken the word from him if they 
published after 154. His views, as far as we can get at them, 
appear not dependent upon Gospel accounts. He may not have 
needed to borrow. Matthew, xxvi. 29, and John, ii. 3, 9, are 
contra Markion; therefore not extreme ascetics, as Markion 
was. Per contra, see Matth. xix. 12. 

There are some differences between the later Mosaic Juda¬ 
ism at the period 100 before our era and the theology of the 
neighboring nations; but the resemblances are still greater. 
It must be remembered that a vast scribal performance had 
taken place which intervened between the Jewish past and the 
Judaism of the Old Testament. This scripture placed the 
Jewish religion on a literary basis, which systematised the re¬ 
ligion. The system worked a change ; for no great scribe 
movement of that kind could have been without a motive, and 
the motive must have been to operate a change of some sort 
in the previous condition. All through the Hebrew Bible, in 
one place and another, here and there, a kind of Messianic 
feeling crops out at intervals. Consequently, according to the 
evidences that we have placed side by side, the Hebrews, 
Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Greeks often appear closer re¬ 
lated in point of religious theories before the time of Alex¬ 
ander the Great than they do in b.c. 100 to a.d. 50. At the 
time of the Christian era Persian influence was very great in 
Judaea and Jerusalem ; and Persia, too, looked for a sort of a 
i See S. R. I. 299, 300, 302, 320-324, 379, 412, 414, 419, 420. 


THE CROSS, CROWN AND SCEPTRE . 


359 


Messiah. The like parallel can be drawn between Judaism 
posterior to the Pentateuch and the Diasporan Christianism, 
as developed by the New Testament and the papacy at Eome. 
A change of some sort was worked in its exterior, just as late 
Judaism, after Christ, was systematised by the Talmud. The 
policy or polity of the Church is altered; even the older doc¬ 
trines are not entirely crushed out. The Mourning for the 
Adon (the dead Sun) is not entirely suppressed in Ezekiel. 
But the effort for its suppression showed its continued ex¬ 
istence. Just so, if we take to pieces the chapters of Moses 
and the Prophets we arrive at the earlier form of Jewish re¬ 
ligious suppositions, which is intimately connected with the 
views described in the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Phoenicians, 
Syrians, Greeks, Babylonians, and vividly drawn in descrip¬ 
tions by the Greek dramatists. Early Judaism was recon¬ 
stituted under a pseudo-Moses. So Messianism was reformed 
under Greek influences and under the Bishops of Borne. 
Borne’s political control embraced the East and the West. 
The Boman See reformed Christianism on a corresponding¬ 
ly vast scale, as the Pauline Epistles and Matthew, xvi. 18, 
xxviii. 19, exhibit. 


CHAPTER SEVEN. 


BEFOEE ANTIOCH. 

“ Open to me the places that are closed.” 

The Therapeutae were gnostic Nazarenes, and consequently 
were able to see, 1 and were before our era.—Joel, ii. 28 ; Philo, 
Therap., 1; Luke, i. 22. Without any physical perceptions 
whatever, the soul was supposed able to look upon and see 
anything it pleased in heaven above. The assumption of a 
soul’s mental perception (Intuition) dispensed with bodily or 
cerebral vision. This doctrine opened the way for a large 
amount of well-meant humbug. Iao is the mystical name of 
the Sungod.—Movers, I. 539 ff. Iao is Adonis and Ab Ram, 
Pater excelsus or Ramas the Most High God (Hesychius).— 
Movers, I. 542. Adonis is also Dionysus. 2 Adonis the Most 
High God is followed in a theogony by his Son Ouranos, the 
Epigeios (Terrestrial Adam) united with Earth, whom, as usual 
formerly, Saturn follows ; from which it follows that He was 
considered the Primal Being (Urwesen) corresponding to the 
Old Bel with .the Taautha, who here is Berut the Yenus of the 
Lebanon.—Movers, I. 544. Among the Yalentinians (Gnostics) 
the Aion teleios (complete, perfect) can only pass for a copy of 
the Babylonian-Phoenician Primordial Being (—Movers, 545) 
the Buthos proarche, propator.—Irenaeus, I. i. 1. With this 
Aion, compare the Ancient of Days in Daniel, vii. 8, 14. . So 
that Daniel seems to be exhibited as a thorough gnostic, a 
leader of Messianist gnostics. Irenaeus could have known 

1 The Epopt needed no eyes to see; no brain to think; psychical perception 
sufficed. 

2 The change to the Christian religion seems to have been helped on by the ideas 
previously taught in the Mysteries, and more or less taken up by the Jews and others. 
The Dionysus Mysteries were a concurrent factor in producing that mental status that 
predisposed minds towards the Resurrection theory and Christian sentiment. The 
hand of man appears in the succession of ideas. The Old Testament was as much a 
literary work as the “Revise” is. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH . 


361 


that the gnostics preceded Christianism, and therefore were not 
based upon it in any way. Justin Martyr, Dialogue, p. 74, 
speaks of the Father and Maker of all things. Justin, 78, 79, 
83, mentions the Maker of the heaven, who fastened it firmly, 
and, as the Maker of all things, made hard the earth and what 
is in it. The Babylonian and Jewish Kabalah preceded the 
Christianism of the gospels. The gnosis was Hindu, Persian, 
Babylonian, and included the Egyptian gnosis as exemplified 
in the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the Jewish gnosis, and 
whatever of these was infused into individual Sabians, Nazoria 
and Ebionim. The Babylonian Most High God was the Euler 
of the world, Bel-Saturn the Kosmokrator. He was the God 
of Life ; and the life of the flesh is the blood thereof. In 
Chaldaea Saturn was supposed to be located in his castle of 
fire. 1 In Arabia, Dionysus was Fire-god, Sun-god, and Life- 
god Iachi (Iacche) and Iacchos. Movers, I. 548, reads Ialioli 
(Iachoh softened from the aspirate ch) “ he makes to live.” 
The “ Adon lives.” Lydus de Mensibus, iv. 38, 74, (speaking 
of Dionysus) says that the Chaldaeans call the God Iao, in¬ 
stead of the Intelligible (Mind-perceived) Light, in the Phoe¬ 
nician language, and He is many times called Sabaoth as the 
One who is over the Seven Orbits, that is, the Creator. The 
Phoenicians regarded the sunlight as a spiritual power which 
issued out of the Light-principle, the Most High God Bel- 
Saturn, and extended over the Seven Orbits. 2 In the Chal- 
daean theosophy this Intelligible Light is an efflux emanating 
from the Intelligible World, the Intelligent Life, the Light- 
Aether, out of which the souls emanate, and to which they 
come back again, purified from the dross of the senses (flesh); 
they are borne aloft (carried up) by the Mediator, who is called 
Bel-Mithra, Zeus (compare Abel Ziua the Shining, Gabriel), 
that is, Zeus-Belus, or Intelligible Sun, Logos, Onlybegotten, 3 

1 Compare Psalm, 1. 3; Judges, xiii. 20, 22; Poimander, I. 9; Hermes Trism., 
I. 9, 13. 

3 Movers, I. 546-555. 

3 According to Irenaeus, III. 257, the Nicolaitans (besides some views of a Mar- 
kionite description) held that the Christos, who continued impassible and did not 
suffer, flying back again into his own Pleroma, is the beginning indeed of the Only- 
begotten; but that the Logos is the true son of the Onlybegotten. This is, ap¬ 
parently, some later variety of the Babylonian theory among the Ebionites in the 
2nd century of our era. It is gnosis any way, and posterior to the period when 
the Jews (2 Kings, xvii. 17; xxiii. 5, 8, 12) burned incense to the Stars, like the 
Arabs prior to Islam.—Baethgen, p. 112. It is just possible that the theory (in the 


362 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and, just like Pliilo’s Logos, whose theology is certainly bor¬ 
rowed from the Clialdaean, is only the other form of Bel- 
Saturn, on which account therefore the ideas Bel-Iao, Bel- 
Mithra, Bel-Saturn and his copy (photograph) Sol-Belus run 
together (in einander ubergelien). Now that this is Judaism, 
we have the evidence in Damaskius: “ He made oath tender¬ 
ing 1 (calling as witness) the Bays of the Helios and the Hebrew 
God ”: 2 “ the Secret Initiation into the Sacred Mysteries 
which the Clialdaean celebrated about the God with Seven 
Bays, raising up the souls through Him.” 3 These Mysteries 
were well known to the ancient divines, the blessed theurgists, 
as the Emperor Julian calls them. This God Sabaoth was 
father of the worlds, father of the Aeons (Times), Creator of 
the Gods, and was called King.—Synesius. 4 The Sabian Deity 
is the Spirit of the Spheres of heaven.—Chwolsohn, II. 451-3 ; 
Numb. viii. 2. The ‘ Evangel according to the Hebrews ’ was 
written in the Clialdaean and Syrian language, but in Hebrew 
letters. 5 It was, then, Clialdaean in form, origin, and doctrine. 
—Bev. iv. 5. 

Targum of Onkelos) concerning the Memra might have suggested personae divinae an¬ 
terior to the Logos, as the Babylonian Bel-Mithra, who is the Onlybegotten of the 
Older Bel. Out of Babylon the Israelites brought the first germs of the Kabbala.— 
Ermann, 24. The Tanaim appeared (according to Franck, p. 38) in the 3d century 
b.c. See Dunlap, Sod, II. 65, 70, 76, 88, 92; Franck, 65, 249; Hermetic Books. The 
Ancient has formed all by reason of a Male (Kurios) and a Female (the Kuria).—The 
Sohar, III. 290 a; Gen. ii. 22; Job, xxviii. 20, 21. Job here mentions the Chochmah 
(Wisdom) of the Kurios (Christos) and the Vinah (Vena) of the Kabbalah. The divine 
spirit is the most dominant essence of the soul.—Philo, Quis Heres, 11. 

1 nporeivoiv = “stretching out,” pointing to, “ shewing at a distance,” hence, invok¬ 
ing, “ tendering as pledge.” To a Sabian speak of the number 7, says De Sacy.—Chwol¬ 
sohn, II. 626. Codex Nazoria, III. 155 has the 7 Stellars, with the Spirit and Messiah. 

2 Photius, Bibl. p. 339; Movers, 552. See too Ezekiel, viii. 14, 16, Numbers, 
xxv. 4; psalm, xix. 4, Septuagint, Vulgate, versions. Iao is the Sim in the different 
seasons, closely related to Adonis and Dionysus as autumnal God. See Movers, 554. 
Bel-Iao is Mithra.—Movers, 553. Bel was both Saturn and Sol.—Movers, I. 185. Was 
not Seb (the Egyptian Saturn, Seb, Sev, Dionysus-Sabi, or Sabos) worshipped in Beer 
Sabah, and Asaph (an Arab Deity) in Saphir (Air Asaph, Ir Shemes) ? Jacob’s Well, 
was it not the Well of Keb (Ai Kab, or Ai Keb) ? Jacob being the Gabariel or Herakles 
of the Aaaqabaara of Chebron. The centre of temple-worship was changed from 
Hebron to Jerusalem.—psalm, ii. 6 ; xliii. 5. Before that, ‘ all things were born from 
Saturn and Venus.’ “Venus cum luna in domibus et finibus Saturni.”—Clem. Recog¬ 
nitions, c. 19.—Uhlhorn, p. 51. 

3 Julian, Orat. in Matrem, p. 172. Here we have the Clialdaean God of the Resur¬ 
rection of souls.—Numb, xxiii. 1; Rev. i. 13, 16 ; xi. 11; xix. 13. 

4 Dunlap, Sod, II. 30 ; Spirit-Hist. 312. 

5 The Nazarenes continued to use it even in St. Jerome’3 time. —Hieronymus adv. 
Pelagian. III. 2; Dunlap, Sod, II. 44, 45. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


363 


The Euphrates and the Jordan have always been the centre 
of the Sabian Baptists. To a Sabian speak of the number 
Seven. See 2 Kings, xxiii. 5, where incense was burned in 
the temples on the High Places of Iudah to Bal, to the Sun, 
the Moon, and the Pive Planets, the Chaldaean Seven Rays 
of the God. 1 Eor many centuries this Seven-rayed Chaldaean 
Sabaoth continued to possess the minds of both Babylonia 
and Iudea, as we learn both from the Codex Nazoria and 
from the Apokalypse, i. 13, 16, ii. 1, v. 6, also from Julian 
(Orat. v. on the Mother of the Gods, p. 172) concerning Iao the 
Seven-rayed God of the Chaldaeans, the Saviour who lifted up 
the soul to the realms on high. 2 The Nazoria were on the 
east side of the Jordan, as the New Testament relates, and as 
Jeremiah, ix. 26, apparently indicates, when he refers to the 
uncircumcised Sabians dwelling in Ammon, Moab, Idumea 
and the remotest corners of the Desert. Now we find the 
Nazoria after the Christian era living in Nabathaea, Idumea, 
all along on the east side of the Jordan, and continuing as far 
north as Edessa, Nisibis, Harran, Antioch, and Galatia ; so 
that when one century before our era Isaiah, xxix. 19, says 
that ‘the Ebioni of Adoma 3 shall rejoice,’ we are placed 
among the Poor, the Essenes and Nazoria ; for Epiphanius 
tells us that the Nazorenes were before Christ, and knew not 
Christ: and what is said of the Nazoria in the Desert is 
equally true of the Ebionites, for they lived together and the 
two names are names of the Transjordan and Nabathaean As¬ 
cetics . 4 These were their distinguishing designations, when, 
under the Baptism of John, the command came to ‘ Go out 
from the Great Desert.’ If these Nazoria had not gone out to 
Antioch where they first learned to be called Christians, we 
might to-day have to look in vain for the pope of Rome and 
the Church of England. The Codex Nazoria, like the Gospel 
of Matthew when describing the origin of the Nazoraian sect, 
supports itself upon the Baptism of John. 5 All that live in 
the Desert are uncircumcised, says Jeremiah, ix. 26. So that 

1 See Rev. iv. 5; v. 6. 

2 Movers, Phonizier, I. 550, 551 ; Lydus, de mens. IV. 38, 74, 98; Cedrenus, I. p. 
296 ; Jerem. viii. 1, 2, vii. 9, ix. 14. 

3 Edom. The Lebanon is mentioned two verses earlier.—Isa. xxix. 17. Compare 
also Galatians, i. 17, 21, 22. 

4 Compare Galat. ii. 10. 

6 Matthew, iii. 6, 13. The Mitkra baptism. 


364 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


here was a radical difference between the Jews proper and the 
Sabians or Arabian Nazorians that was certain to manifest it¬ 
self at Antioch. 1 Just as Matthew carries the Iesua back to 
the Baptism of John at the Jordan, just so Galatians, i. 17 
carries Paul of Tarsus in Kilikia 2 straight back to the Ara¬ 
bian 3 Nazorians for confirmation of doctrine. Standing firmly 
on these data, we are authorised to look beyond the Jordan 
for Chaldaean sources of Judaism, Messianism and Christian- 
ism. Moving from the east of the Jordan to the parts around 
Sidon, Edessa, and into Kilikia and Galatia, Antioch, a city 
filled abundantly with Jews, became the natural focus of the 
Ebionim and Nazorenes in the 2nd century of our era. 

Remember always that the doctrine of the existence of a 
divine Saviour (such as Osiris, the Spiritus, Malach Iesua or 
Horus) in the sun must have preceded the idea of locating 
such a Saviour in the human form divine. The Apokalypse 
and Justin Martyr’s works are simply late. They both have 
the logos doctrine applied to Iesu. Justin, however, has a 
considerable share of the framework of Matthew’s narrative, 
which the Book of Revelation has not, and he says that a 
John wrote the Apokalypse. The author of £ Supernatural 
Religion ’ claims that our Four Gospels are later than a.d. 150. 
Christianism, therefore, must somewhat antedate the Apoka¬ 
lypse. The question is if it antedates Kerinthus. Here we 
have to weigh the testimony of Irenaeus. The least preju¬ 
dice, or substitution of the word Iesu for Salvator, on his part 
might spoil his testimony and have a tendency to pervert his¬ 
tory. 

The Primal Father produced the Intelligible Sun. There 
were two Bels, the first, Saturn ; the second, the Sun. The 
main social facts at the beginning of the Christian Era were 
the Babylonian doctrine of the Father and Son, 4 the Adonis 

1 Gal. ii. 3, 11, 12, 16, 21; iii. 2, 18, 28. Galatians indicates quite a late stage of 
the Nazorian religion. 

2 Gal. i. 21. 

3 Rev. xii. 1, 6, carries the Woman and her Son (in the sun) back into the Naza- 
rene Desert. The book is late. Mentions the Saints and the churches of Asia Minor. 
Phileremos men gar >? theia Sophia.—Philo, Quis Heres, 25. 

4 Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 182. The Primal Father of all has an Onlybegotten Son, 
who is himself again and in the Trinity takes the first place : he is the Creator Bel, the 
Revealed Saturn, the mystical Heptaktis or Iao of the Chaldean Philosophy. In the 
Chaldean Oracles of the two Julians, the two Bels, the Older and the Younger, divested 
of their mythic personality, were hymned as the Old and New eternal Time. Ac- 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


365 


religion in Judea, Chaldea and Syria, the Dionysus worship in 
Arabia, Syria, Greece, Egypt, the Messianism in Jerusalem’s 
scriptures and the myth of Osiris Sauveur in Egypt: in the 
facts of the moral, intellectual and political condition of con¬ 
temporaneous society in the East there was, in consideration 
of the belief in miracles and a very lively propagandism by 
the aid of wandering pastors, a possibility of such a myth as 
the Messias-myth taking hold of the Greeks of Asia, some of 
the Jews, and not a few Egyptians. 

Those walking in Darkness behold a Light Great!—Isaiah, ix. 2. 

The Great Mother Tanat, face of Bal.—Carthaginian Inscription. 

Arise, shine, for thy Light is come !—Isaiah, lx. 1. 

I Ia’hoh, thy Saviour and Redeemer.—Isaiah, xlix. 26. 

The kingdom of the heavens is at hand !—Matthew, iv. 17. 

We find the form Adon Tanat! The very being of the Deity itself appears 
in Tanat.—Baethgen, p. 56. 

And Hera 1 made him live again ; and of Luaios 2 with outstretched locks 

To the long eyes such youthful lustre measured out, 

If ever earthly womb so great a form produced.—Nonnus, xxxv. 328. 

The Great Beneficent King, 3 Osiris, is born !—de Iside, 12. 

That Father issues from the Most Sacred Ancient! And the Wisdom (Logos) 
will be discovered out of Ayin.—The Sohar, Idra Suta, vii. § 208. 

The Messiah is the Son of the Blessed One.—Mark, xiv. ,62 ; Dan. vii. 13, 
14; viii. 15, 16. 

He that acknowledges the Son has the Father also.—I. John, ii. 23. 

Above all, we must remember that the heavy hand that had 
crushed Jerusalem had in some degree deprived the Pharisees 
of power. If Jerusalem had not been destroyed, who among 
the Jews would have ventured to write that the Pharisees, the 
proudest sect and the most powerful, were a generation of 
vipers? 4 To take the religion of the Initiated 5 out of their 
hands, to combine it with Persian and Essene doctrines, to 
connect it with a man, and to preach it to the uninitiated and 
the poor, this was to originate a Christianity. 6 Was there a 

cording to Julian, Emperor, the Supreme Goodness brought, forth out of itself the 
Intelligible Sun, the ideal prototype of the sun.—Movers, Phonizier, 265; Dunlap, 
Vestiges, p. 182; Mark, xiv. 61. 

1 From Ar (lunar Fire, the Ashah). 

2 Compare 1 Sam. xxv. 29. Redeemer; from Luo, to loose, unbind, release. 
Luaios freed from the bonds of Hades and Death. 

3 the “King.”—Matthew, xxv. 34. 

4 Matthew, iii. 7. 

6 The peasant girl, at that very time, continued to sing the Adonis-AoidS. 

6 Paul taught that ISsous was the Power and Wisdom of God.—1 Cor. i. 24. Justin 


366 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


sect of the Nazoria called Iessaeans (as Epiphanius says) ? 
Matthew says many things to confirm Epiphanius in this 
particular. Matthew, x., describes them as Essaeans ; Matthew, 
xix. 12, calls them eunuchs (for the Essaians were celibate 
coenobites), and xxii. 30 declares that in the resurrection and 
among the Angels in heaven there is no marriage ! This is as 
Essene as anything Saturninus or Markion could supply. 
What clinches the matter is the embarrassment of Epiphanius, 
who tries to cover up his tracks by deriving the word ‘ Iessaeans ’ 
from Iesse (father of Daud), and the effort of Matthew, ii. 23 
to find the word Nazoria (Nazorene) in the ‘ necer ’ of Isaiah 
xi. 1. The word Asaia (physician) is the root of the word 
Iessaia (healers), and the words zar and nazar are the root of 
Nazoria (Nazarenes) meaning self-denial, abstinence. Compare 
Acts, xxvii. 21, which mentions Saint Paul’s abstinence. These 
embarrassments of Matthew and Epiphanius (leading to false 
derivations) are proofs of a desire to hide and cover up some¬ 
thing. 

Gnosis, the scientia boni et mali, was in Budhism, in Brah¬ 
manism, and among the Indian Iatrikoi before Christ; it was 
known to the authors of the Book of Genesis, Deuteronomy, 
the first Book of Samuel and Isaiah xlvii. 10 : even the word 
gnosis appears in the Septuagint in the meaning which the 
Gnostics attached to it. Plutarch uses the expression tov be 
■yivwcTKeiv ra wra, the knowing the primal entities ; which proves the 
existence of the gnosis in the beginning of the first century, at 
least before the treatise De Iside et Osiride was written ; while 
the Gospels and the writings often ascribed to Paul 1 attest the 
presence of the gnosis in the first and second centuries. The 
opposition of good and evil, of spirit and matter, belong to 
the Persian, Babylonian, Jewish 2 and Egyptian gnosis. The 
Jewish Kabbalah is the gnosis, and Munk carries it back to 
the time of the Exile to Babylon, while Lassen traces the gno¬ 
sis as far as India. Arabia had an abundant share of it. Ac¬ 
cording to Irenaeus, some of the Gnostics say that there is a 
certain primal light without end. This is the Ain Soph. This 
they call the Father of all and First Man. Compare the close 

Martyr identified Iesous with the Logos.—Justin, p. 131, 134, 137, ed. 1551-3. Christ 
is Logos-angel and Fire-angel in Exodus, iii. 5.—Justin, p. 160. 

1 The hidden treasures of Wisdom and Gnosis.—Colossians, ii. 3. 

2 Philo, Quod deterius, 1. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


367 


of Ezekiel’s first chapter, also Genesis i. 2; ii. 7, 15, 17, 21; 
and Hippolytus, I. 132, who states that the serpent-worship¬ 
pers among’ the Gnostics honored the Man and the Son of the 
Man. They said also that the Mind is His forth-going Son, 1 
sent out by the Father, and that he is Second Man, Son of 
the Man. 2 Then the First and Second Man illuminated the 
spirit and generated Incorruptible Light from Her,—the third 
Male whom they called Christ, Son of the first and second 
Man and of the Holy Spirit the first Woman. 3 This is in 
accord with the Jewish Kabalah, because the King, the Logos, 
Adam Kadmon proceeds from and out of Ain Soph, and, in the 
generation of the Anointed from the Holy Spirit, the Pater 
acts only through the Filius who is the Logos proforikos. In 
calling the Son “ Light Incorruptible ” the Gnostics, only too 
strictly, were followed by the Christians in their Light of 
Light, 4 very God of very God. Thus from the relics of an 
ancient civilization, like that of India, proceeded Judaism and, 
finally, Christianity. 

Siva 5 is the only Hindu deity to whom animal sacrifices 
were offered; 6 they were offered to Osiris, Dionysus-Iacholi 
and the Jewish Moloch, for the Jewish religion is the Diony- 
sus-Mithra worship, 7 with its baptism, purifications and lustra¬ 
tions. Zeus, the Son of Saturn, set the rainbows in the clouds 
for a sign to men. 8 

I will set my bow in the cloud.—Genesis, ix. 13. 

The divine Sekra 9 wrote with his finger upon a stone 42 ques¬ 
tions for Budha. 10 Tables- of stone were also written by the 
finger of Alahim. 11 These resemblances are the result of simi¬ 
lar ideas in India, Greece and Judea. After listening to Bud- 

1 This is the Logos proforikos. 

2 Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. Paris, 1675. 

3 ibid. The Great Spirit, Yishnu in the form of a fish, threw out ionah, the Dove 
—an emblem of the spirit, or Bel Herakles Hermaphroditus. 

4 John, i. 4, 5, 7 ; ix. 5 ; Luke, iii. 38 ; Gen. i. 3, 4; Isaiah, v. 20 ; ix. 2 ; Dunlap, 
Sod, II. 24, 49. 

5 Mithra, Dionysus, Bagis (Siva), Baga (God). 

6 Lassen, I. 924. 

7 Post, Untersuchungen, 48 ff., 58 ff. 

8 Homer, Iliad, xi. 27, 28. 

8 a name of Indra. 

10 Beal’s Fah-Hian, p. 111. 

11 Elohim. Exodus, xxxi. 18. 


368 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


lia’s sermon five hundred blind men immediately recovered 
tlieir sight. 1 In the Clementine Homilies it is stated that 
Peter delivered his sermon first, and the healing followed the 
sermon. On Sundays the Physicians 2 came to the holy places, 
sitting in rows, the young below the elders. 3 The Hindu 
Iatrikoi had the theros, or elders, and appear to have adored 
the Sun. Compare the magnificent temple to the Sun at Bal- 
bec—built in the 2nd century. 

The Sun having a cognomen to be both Saviour and Herakles.—Pausanias, 
viii. 31, 7. 


But let not any one suppose that he is that Horrible One 4 whom 
the myths describe, but that Mild and Benignant One who 
completely frees the souls from production : those not freed he 
joins to other bodies, correcting and chastising; but also as¬ 
cending and raising up the souls to the world perceived by 
mind. 5 

According to Julian, the Sun’s rays have the property of 
raising (the souls) up on high. “The Sun draws all things 
from the earth, and summons them to itself and makes them 
germinate, separating the bodies by the life-kindling and 
wonderful heat, I think, to extreme fineness (subtility): and 
those that are by nature carried down he lifts up. And such 
things, I say, must be made evidences of his invisible forces. 
For the one who thus accomplishes this by means of corporeal 
heat, why shall he not, by means of the invisible and every 
way incorporeal and divine and pure ousia 6 established in the 
rays, draw and raise up the fortunate souls ? Therefore, since 
this light appears akin to the Gods and to those that desire to 
be lifted up (to a higher place), this same (light) will increase 
in this our kosmos (orderly world) so that the day is greater 
than the night when the King Sun begins to go through 


1 Beal’s Fah-Hian, p. 78. 

2 Therapeutae, Iatrikoi, Asaya, Essaioi. 

3 Philo, quod omn. prob. liber, § 12. 

4 The torments of the wicked in Hades and the meads of the pious.—Diodor. Sic. 
I. 86. Dionysus Bull-formed in Hades brandishes a whip.—Nonnus, xliv. 280. 

5 Julian, Oratio, iv. p. 136. Here we find the Hindu and Egyptian conception of 
hells, punishment, and spiritual existences as Gods, and the fall of the soul into matter. 
The Jews inherited these notions from the East. Plato thought that the Gods were in¬ 
corporeal animated natures.—Apuleius, on the God of Sokrates. 

6 fiery, vital essence. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


369 


Aries, 1 the light of the rays of the God, through the visible and 
invisible force, has been shown to be, by nature, able to carry 
up ; by which (power) innumerable souls have been carried up 2 
having followed the most brilliant and most sunlike of all per¬ 
ceptions, for the divine Plato praised in song such ocular per¬ 
ception not alone as dear and useful but also as a leader to 
wisdom. 3 And if too I should take up the unspoken mysta- 
gogia which the Chaldean revealed in the Bacchic rites about 
the Seven-Rayed God 4 bringing up 5 the souls through him , I 
shall say what is not known and very unknown to the vulgar 
herd at least, but well known to the blessed priests. There¬ 
fore I will say nothing about them now.” 6 

The Mystery of the Seven Stars!—Rev. i. 20. 

The Mystery of God the King ! 7 —Colossians, ii. 2. ed. Lachmann. 

Behold, I will send my Messenger, 8 and he shall prepare the way before Me : 
and the Adon 9 whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his temple, even the Angel 
of the Covenant.—Malaclii, iii. 1. 

The Son of Dauid does not come until that impious kingdom (Rome) shall 
have extended itself over the whole earth.—Talmud, tr. Ioma, fol. 10, 1. 
Meuschen, p. 19. 

From heaven the King shall come, enduring through ages— 

Only think, present in the flesh, to judge the world. 10 —Sibyl. 

Herakles is termed Saviour. 11 Metatron is called Angel 
Iesua ; 12 Gabriel (Gabariel) is Hermes (Logos), Herakles (Sav¬ 
iour), and SuN-Angel, 13 Adonis. Hermes is Saviour and “ Best 
Angel.” 14 Julian says that Zeus has appointed the Goddess of 
Wisdom as Guardian to Herakles the tov k6<t/xov, the Sa- 


1 the Lamb. 

2 raised on high, exalted. 

3 Zeus is Son of Saturn the Spiritual Life to which the souls ascend.—Plato. 

4 Compare the nimbus of Apollo, the Seven Rays of Dionysus, and the Therapeute 
“glory.” The Iao and Sabaoth is Dionysus, whose sacred number is seven, who pre¬ 
sides over the orbits of the 7 planets. 

5 to heaven. 

« Julian, Y. p. 172. 

7 XPUTTOS. 

8 the glorious Adonis-Angel, Adon Ai. 

9 Saviour Angel, Great Archangel, the Adonis-angel, or Audonai-angel. 

10 Sibylline Books. Gallaeus, I. 327, 388, 389, 628, 651. 

11 Movers, p. 389; Munk, Palestine, p. 522; Nork, Rabbin. Worterbuch, II. 165, 
169, 157,172. He is the Phoenician Archal, Archaleus, ibid. II. 165. 

1 2 Bodenschatz, II. 191. 

13 Irenaeus, L xii.; Rev. i. 16, 18; xix. 13. 

14 Aeschylus, ChoSphorae, 1 ; Diodorus, V. 341. 

24 


370 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


viour of the world. 1 Hermes was the Great Angel of the Sa- 
bians. The Angel Hermes was sent by Dios.—Hesiod, Frag¬ 
ment, I. 1. Hermes, that is, the Logos (Word).—Plutarch, de 
Iside, 54. For Hermes is the Logos.—Hippolytus, p. 144. The 
Logos of God is his Son (as we have said) and he is called 
Angel and Apostle.—Justin, Apologia, II. p. 160 (whether Jus¬ 
tin wrote it or not). This Wisdom or Logos is the Oldest 
Angel, the Man in the image, according to Philo.—Philo 
Judaeus, ed Paris, 1552, pp. 222, 231, 232 ; Gen. i. 26; the Sohar, 
I. fol. 77, col. 1; Y. fol. 137, col. 4. The Angel Gabriel came in 
the Memra (the Word) from the Lord’s face.—Jerusalem Tar- 
gum to Gen. xxxi. 24. The King, the Messiah goes out from 
the Garden of Eden. 2 The Messiah dwells in the 5th house in 
the Garden of Eden.—Beresith Rabba to Gen. ii. 9. The King 
himself is the innermost Light of all Lights.—Rosenroth Kab- 
bala Denudata, Sohar, II. fol. 3, col. 3 ; Aidra Suta, ix. Your 
life is hidden with the Messiah in the God.—Colossians, iii. 3. 
The Sohar (Aidra Rabba, x. Aidra Suta, ii. v. Rosenroth) 
states that the Most Sacred Ancient is hidden and concealed, 
that the Spirit of Life will issue from the Hidden Brain of the 
Ancient, be poured out on the King Messiah, and that men 
will know wisdom in the time of the Messiah. By the inter¬ 
mediation of the Father and Mother, the spirit of the Ancient 
of the Ancient descends on the Microprosopus. The Ancient 
most sacred is hidden and concealed and the supernal wisdom 
hidden in that Cranium is found again and not found.—Kab- 
bala Denudata. See Dunlap, Sod, II. 70. The first Way is 
the Secret Wisdom (the Highest Crown) and is the primitive 
Light of the Intelligence, and is the first Power whose ex¬ 
istence no creature can conceive. 3 Colossians, iv. 3 speaks of 
the Mystery of the Messiah. 4 

At the end of Tohu and Bohu 5 and the conflux of waters, 
Iahoh will be exalted (id est, in the time of the Messiah).—Sifra 
di Xeniutha, I. § 24 (Kabbala Denudata, II. p. 348). The Mes¬ 
siah is named Iahoh,—Eisenmenger, Entdektes Judenthum, I. 

1 Julian, Oratio VII. p. 220. 

2 Sohar, II. fol. 11. Sod, II. 1, 131. 

3 Meyer’s Jezira, p. 1. Compare Proverbs, viii. 1. Hebrew text. 

4 Colossians, i. 26 declares it the Mystery which has been kept hidden from ages 
and generations ; Romans, xvi. 25 calls it a Mystery kept secret in Aionian times; Col¬ 
ossians, iii. 3, 4, mentions the Christos concealed in the God. This is all gnosis! 

5 The earth was tohu and bohu, and darkness on the faces of the deep.—Gen. i. 2. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


371 


216, 217. Metatron, his name is as the name of his Lord, having 
been created after his image, his similitude.—Sohar, III. fol. 
91. In Judaism the Shekinah was the spirit, and the Messiah 
was the spirit and the Shekinah.—Matthew xvi. 27. The spirit 
is the God.—John, iv. 24. Bal was represented with a dove’s 
wings and tail; Matthew, iii. 16 sees this emblem of the spirit. 
In the Ascension of Isaiah (a Jewish Apokruphon, of about the 
middle of the 2nd century) the prophet ascends into each of 
the seven heavens on the throne of each of five finding an 
Angel; but in the sixth heaven there was no throne; all 
praised the Father, the Son and the ‘ Holy Spirit.’ These 
three were in the Seventh Heaven. In the c prayer of Ioseph,’ 
another apocryphum (mentioned in Origen, philocalia, cap. 
xxiii. and in Ronsch, Jubilees, p. 332), it is shown that Spirits , 
which had a great advantage over men and were far better 
than the other souls, descended from the position of an angel 
into the human nature. And among these Spirits the Jewish 
Patriarchs were numbered, for Iaqab (Jacob) boasted that he 
prior to his life on earth stood before the throne of God and 
was called in heaven Israel, as the “ man who sees God.” Thus 
the Patriarchs were Angels that had become flesh. Gfrorer to 
whom we are indebted for this shrewd deduction adds : “ Only 
the Messias-Adam was considered a higher nature than them, 
consequently the descent into this world was for him still 
greater. Therefore (bei ilim, with him) intermediate members 
were assumed. Such are really found in the Ascension of 
Isaiah.” When the time came for the Son to go down into the 
world the Father says to him (10. 7) : Descend through all the 
heavens to the firmament, into the world of matter (Korper- 
welt) to the Hells angel, who indeed is liable to the Judgment 
but not yet Judged. Not all Spirits know thy rank, that thou 
dost dwell with me above the seven heavens and art set over 
their angels. And with heavenly voice I will call up the 
angel-hosts, and thou wilt assume the office of Judge and de¬ 
clare condemnation against the Principalities and angels of 
the world of matter, and then enter upon the government of 
the world. For those Spirits had lied when they boasted 
“ Besides us is no God.”—Hundert und ein Frage, p. 2. Com¬ 
pare the Rebel Angels of Jewish (and Persian) gnosis and the 
Angels and Powers of the Simonian, Menandrian, Kerinthian, 
Karpokratian, Basilidian, and Valentinian gnosis (Irenaeus, I. 


372 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


xx.—xxv.), Colossians, i. 16, and the Book of Enoch. This was 
not the only period of Semite speculation! According to 
Gfrorer, two main theories underlie this extract from the As¬ 
cension of Isaiah. It was intended to show, first, that the 
Heavenly Messiah descended gradually from one stage to an¬ 
other into the finite ; second, to make it conceivable how all 
powers of the world and of hell kept so quiet when in the per¬ 
son of Iesua such a terrible visitor for the wicked came down 
on the earth. It is further told how th6 Son descended from 
one heaven to another and how, with the exception of the first 
migration, he there changed form. In continuation is related 
how the Lord, through an eighth change into the bosom of the 
Maria became man. Many details therein agree with the ac¬ 
count of the first evangelist, several others not, 1 whence we 
have to infer that this composition was made at a time when 
besides the evangelical stories others independent of them were 
in circulation.—Hundert und ein Erage, p. 2. Luke, i. 1, says 
that maiiy had written before he wrote, regarding their com¬ 
mon belief. Consequently we must conclude that besides the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Ascension of Isaiah^ 
and the Apokalypse quite a number of other Christian works 
had been circulated prior to the appearance of the 4 Gospels. 
The followers of Saturninus were akin to the Nazorene gnosis, 
denouncing marriage as the work of Satan. Not only must 
they have taken offence at the birth of a Messiah 2 as an actual 
son of a man named Joseph, but they naturally would prefer 
the generations of the heavens to the generations of mankind. 


1 The Messiah shall be revealed in the land Galilee, and a certain Star appearing in 
the eastern quarter will swallow up Seven Stars in the northern quarter.—The Sohar, 
I. fol. 119 ; Bertholdt, 56. The Messiah appears in Galilee.—Matthew, iii. 13 ; iv. 18. 
The Seven Stars.—Rev. i. 15. This is the Messiah Sabaoth—a Chaldean doctrine—Seven 
Lamps of fire, Seven Spirits, Seven Angels about the throne of the Logos.—Rev. iv. 5. 

2 The word Mashicha appears in the Sulzbach ed. Sohar, I. fol. 75, col. 291. Mes¬ 
siah bears the sins of Israel.—Ialkut Rubeni, fol. 30 d. in Nork, Real-Worterbuch, 
III. p. 152. The Jews led the way, and the Christians interpret the same Messianic 
passages that the Jews did, in interpreting the Hebrew Bible. But many passages in 
the Hebrew Bible were written in a Messianic sense at first. Who is responsible for 
that ? The priests and temple scribes had possession of the Scriptures before Jerusa¬ 
lem’s fall. The Apokalypse shows that the Jewish doctrine of the Seven Lamps on 
the Golden Candlestick in the Holy of holies was the Chaldean Unspoken Mystery con¬ 
cerning the God with Seven Rays, through whom they raised up the souls.—Julian, v. 
p. 172. This is the Christos of the Resurrection of souls. The Chaldean God Iao, 
often called Sabaoth, is over the Seven Orbits, the Creator.—Lydus, de mensibus, iv. 
38, 74. This is the Heptakfcis, the Messiah of the Jewish Sohar. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


373 


It is perfectly clear, then, that such people could never have 
agreed with the Ebionites that Joseph was the actual father of 
Iesu. This accounts for the spirital incarnation described in 
Matthew, i. 18, iii. 16 ; Luke, i. 35, and for the expression £ the 
Son of the Man ’ applied in the Greek Gospels, while Daniel 
calls the Jewish Messiah ‘ one like a Son of Man.’ Before 
Creation the God was alone, without form, without likeness 
with anything else. But after he had created the form of 
the Heavenly Man (Adam Olah) he made use of it as of a 
vehicle, to descend. The Highest Cause is called “ Without 
End.”—Franck, die Kabbala, 126, 135, ed. Gelinek. And 
Daniel said that to the Ancient of Days one like a son of 
man (‘ the Son of the Man,’ says Matthew) was brought, 
and there was given him dominion and glory and a king¬ 
dom, that all people and nations and tongues should serve 
him—an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away. 
Daniel knew the Kabalah of Babylon! So did the Book Sohar. 
The Christian dogmas offer numerous relations with the sys¬ 
tem of the Kabbalists. 1 This is the “ detection of the mystery 
of the God, Father of Messiah (the King) in whom all the 
treasures of the Sophia (Wisdom) and gnosis are concealed.” 2 
The Elect and Concealed one existed in His presence before 
the world was created.—Henoch, xlviii. 5. The Mystery that 
from the beginning has been hid in God.—Ephesians, iii. 9. 
The Mystery hidden from the ages and the generations, but 
now manifested to his Saints. 3 For through him (the Son in 
whom we have the redemption, the forgiveness of sins) all 
things w^ere created in the heavens and upon the earth.—Co- 
lossians, i. 13, 14, 16. This is the Messiah of the Kabalah of 
the Jews. The earliest Judaism of the Kabalah held that the 
Messiah takes on himself (as Saviour Angel) the sins of the 
world. John, i. 29, takes up this idea, and repeats, that as 
Lamb of the God the Son carries away the sins of the world. 
It is the Tradition of the Kabalah repeated in Christianism. 
The Slain Lamb with 7 horns and 7 eyes.—Rev. v. 6. Gnosti¬ 
cism has borrowed much from the traditions and theories con¬ 
tained in the Sohar. 4 The Sohar is the fruit of many centuries 

1 Munk, Palestine, 567. 

2 Coloss. ii. 2, 3. 

3 i. 26. 

4 A. Franck, die Kabbala, Gelinelc’s Uebersetzung, p. 82. 


374 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and many generations of Kabalists. Moreover it makes no re¬ 
ference to the Christian religion. 1 Simeon ben Iochai himself 
says that he had predecessors in the Kabalah.—The Idra 
Rabba, ad initium. He calls Rabbi Akiba his teacher.—Scliii- 
rer, I. 570. R. Akiba lived, a.d. 100-130—ibid. I. 93. 

Isaiah, xxix. 19 refers to the original Ebionites and Nazori- 
ans in Idnmea. Tertullian’s order of succession was probably 
accepted from Irenaeus, literally, in the cases of Karpokrates, 
Kerinthus, and the Ebionim. Both make the same charges 
about all three in regard to their Opinions (Haeresies) respect¬ 
ing the human and natural birth of Iesu, and both writers say 
little of the three; but that little shows that while Kerinthus 
(who in many particulars agreed with Karpokrates) was in 
one respect differently minded regarding the Creation of the 
world, all three were clearly strict Judaizers, observing the 
Jewish Law. As the gnostic Jews, Samaritans, and Transjor¬ 
dan Ebionites were often further scattered than Antioch, Pella 
andMoab it is not surprising that Tertullian thought the Only 
Difference between Kerinthus and the Ebionites worthy of 
mention; but, since we are trying to discover if the notion, 
that there was a man named Iesua (a Jew) who delivered the 
sermons and Essene admonitions found in Matthew’s Gospel, 
is not as late as a.d. 135-145, it is desirable to note the rela¬ 
tions between Kerinthus and the original Ebionim beyond the 
Jordan, paying rather slight regard to the opinions of such 
Ebionites (whether converted or not) that Irenaeus and Tertul¬ 
lian were lucky enough to find and describe seventy-five years 
after Kerinthus who is dated about 115 by ‘ Anti qua Mater.’ 
The placing of the Ebionites next in order after Kerinthus 
tends to put them one hundred years, or more, later than their 
true date, because the Ebionites of Irenaeus I. xxvi., are as 
late as a.d. 139-185, perhaps later. The Ebionites were Juda- 
ist gnostics adhering to the Law of Moses (Matthew, i. 1, 2 ; 
xii. 3; xvii. 3, 4 ; xxiii. 3 ; Mark, vii. 10 ; Luke, ix. 33 ; xvi. 31; 
John, v. 45) differing from Kerinthus in the belief in El (their 
God). Otherwise, the gnostic Kerinthus was very much like 
them, except about the Christos ; as they used only the Gos¬ 
pel of Matthew in the time of Irenaeus. 

When we light upon so many Supreme Deities as we find 
in the Levant from Egypt to Persia, India and China, is not 

1 ibid. 94, 95. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


375 


the abstraction the unit (T'O "ON) by the philosophers of the 
orient as much a piece of gnosis as the rest ? It is the Ayin 
(Nil) of the Kabalist religions philosophy. And the same with 
the “ das Brahman,” unit of the Brahmans. Then we find the 
Monad from the unit ; then comes the Babylonian doctrine of 
the “ Father ” and the “ Son.”—Kenrick, Egypt, I. 303; Cory, 
Anc. Fragm., 253, 254; Proclns in Tim. 242. Consider the 
doctrine of One God, found by Pierret to have existed in 
Egypt, consider the doctrine of the resurrection implied in 
the narrative of Osiris, regard with wonder the divine godlike 
statue of Sarapis in all its majesty ; and the conclusion is nigh 
that mankind in the orient has known how to create its own 
abstractions and manufacture its Gods, Powers, Thrones, Lords, 
its Angels, and all the rest of its gnosis. The Ebionites did 
not regard the Christos as begotten from the God, but as cre¬ 
ated superior to the Archangels, greater than they, and Lord 
of the Angels.—Epiphanius, xxx. 16. The angels came to and 
served him.—Matth. iv. 11. The Ebionites of St. Matthew (the 
Iessaians) did not forbid wine ; but rejected Paulinism.—Matth. 
vi. 25; x. 5, 6. 

The earlier Ebionites of the first century and those of the 
time of Epiphanius agreed with the idea of Kerinthus as to the 
Christos ; but when the idea was given out that Iesu and the 
Christos were one (Acts, ix. 5), it brought about a disagree¬ 
ment with more than Kerinthus. To regard the Jewish Mes¬ 
siah as a man, a son of Dauid, agrees with what the Hebrew 
Bible said. Isaiah, lxiii. 8, speaks of a Salvator, Exodus, iii. 
2, 4, 14, and Genesis, xxxi. 11, 13, mention the Angel of the 
Lord as God ; but Isaiah, lxiii. 9, speaks of ‘ the Angel of His 
presence ’ as the Saviour, and Judaism had its “ Angel Iesua ” 
the Saviour Angel. Then Saturninus, Karpokrates, the 
Nazoria and the Ebionites beyond Jordan and in Idumea could 
all believe in an Angel Iesua, the Logos or Oldest Angel, the 
“Kingly Power ” (of Philo) and “ the Merciful Power” of the 
Supreme Being. The Jews that followed the Hebrew Bible 
were gnostics, and so w^ere the Essenes, Iessaioi, and Nazoria 
beyond the Jordan. Tertullian holds out Hebion (the Ebionim, 
Hebioni) as considering Iesu a mere man , which some of the 
later Ebionites might have said in the time of Irenaeus in re¬ 
ply to their opponents who called him “ the Son of the God ; ” 
but, whether as Jews or Judaizers, they would not have called 


376 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


‘ the Angel Iesua * a mere man. According to Tertullian, 
Saturninus held that an Unborn (innascible) Power abode in 
the boundless realms on high, but that the angels made the 
world below. Saturninus, in connection with the doctrine of 
the resurrection of the dead, undoubtedly claimed the presence 
angel as a Salvator, as Tertullian calls the presence angel (of 
Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9) the Christos (the Jewish Messiah). But to an 
Essene, an Ebionite, or a Nazarian Iessaian no human nature 
could be associated with the Angel Iesua, the Salvator of the 
souls of the deceased; consequently such persons would not 
believe in the humanity ascribed to the Salvator after Pauline 
Epistles appeared. St. Paul not only wrote against the Law 
given through Moses, but spoke of a 4 Crucified Messiah,’ which 
would naturally be as distasteful to the transjordan Ebionites 
as the crucifixion of Philo’s Logos or the Archangel Gabriel; 
as they were not beings of flesh and therefore could not be 
crucified. Karpokrates in Antioch held that there was a 
Highest Power, the Chief of the Powers above. So far, there 
is no denying a resemblance between his doctrine of the Pow¬ 
ers and that of Simon Magus, Menander and Saturninus. 
Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerinthus (and perhaps the peoples 
in Edom and beyond Jordan), maintained that the angels 
created the world of mankind. The story was afloat that some 
of the angels had descended to marry women.—Gen. vi. 2. 
Kerinthus held that the Jewish Law was given by angels, and 
described the God of the Jews as an Angel. At all events, 
Jerusalem had been destroy ed!! Tertullian represents the 
Ebionites in the Desert as holding themselves bound by the 
Law of Moses, and the Gospels describe an adherence to this 
Law. The New Testament three earliest Gospels agree with 
the Ebionites (of Irenaeus, I. xxvi.; the blessed Poor) in claim¬ 
ing that the world was made by the God, not by the Angels. 
We find the entire Iessaian, Nazorian, and Ebionite disposition 
made clear in Matthew’s Gospel and the Book of the Acts of 
the Apostles. Their disposition was clearly Essene. The 
Angel Iesua of Moses or Isaiah was a Salvator, perhaps a 
Messiah, but not a man; although Philo’s Logos perhaps. 
Irenaeus and Tertullian wrote at the end of the Second Cen¬ 
tury, after Justin Martyr’s works, the Pauline epistles, and the 
Four Gospels had already appeared. Of course they sided 
with Justin Martyr, St. Paul, and the Four Gospels rather 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


377 


than with the Gnostic Nazorenes, Ebionites, the Law of Moses, 
Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerinthus, or the Markionites. But 
Tertullian failed to see that in identifying- the Jewish Messiah 
with the Saviour Ang-el (the Christos of Antioch) he is really 
sustaining the Jewish doctrine of the Angel Iesua and the 
primitive Ebionite belief. Tertullian charges that a man, 
whom he considers Philo’s Logos, Salvator, and a human being 
all at the same time, was named Iesus, while Jews, Ebionites, 1 
and Nazorian-Iessaians had all the time previous been calling 
their Nazorene Saviour Angel by the name Iesua. Matthew, i. 
21, translates the word Iesous (which is Iesoua, with a Greek 
ending) to mean Saviour, Saviour of his people. The Gnostic 
Jews held that Iesua meant the same thing, the Saviour of 
souls. They gave the name to their Saviour Angel, not to a 
man. After the year 145-156 the 4 Gospels were written in 
Greek ; a new face, a later phase of doctrine, had been put on 
the question of the resurrection of souls, while Jews, Nazo¬ 
renes, or Iessaians had continued to hold earlier doctrines that 
some Paul of Tarsus, some denizen perhaps of Asia Minor or 
of Antioch, or of Arabia Transjordane, had discarded in favor 
of the theory of a Crucified Messiah or Saviour, whose Resur¬ 
rection would go far with the credulous people of Asia Minor 
to confirm the questioned doctrine of the Resurrection of the 
dead.—Acts, iv. 32; v. 17 ; xiv. 4 ; xix. 3, 4; xxiii. 6. Acts, xxiii. 
6 holds the bottom of the whole theory to be the Resurrection 
question among the Nazoria of John the Baptist and the Ies- 
saeans. The succession and order of Naz6rian gnostic doctrine 
is suggested by the author of “ Supernatural Religion ” in 
three volumes, who has suggested that the “ Evangel of the 
Hebrews ” was followed by our “ Four Gospels,” which ap¬ 
peared later than the first half of the Second Century. The 
Ebionites, Karpokrates and Kerinthus were all three Judaist. 
All three were Syrians. All three are charged by later Church 
writers with one especial error, that Jesus was bom like other 
men. Epiphanius says the same thing. Remember that the 
Jews did not regard the Angel Iesua as a man, but as higher 
than an Archangel. Irenaeus and Tertullian were seventy 

1 Tertullian says that Ebion too sets forth the Law (of Moses) to exclude the 
Gospel and vindicate Judaism. What could he do ? When the Temple was destroyed 
the Bible and its Law remained. It was his education, all he knew, and the Gospel had 
not yet been written. 


378 


THE GHEBEBS OF nEBBON. 


years later than the Antioch heretics, and as these last differed 
from Tertullian and had followers, and as the Church of the 
West followed the Four Gospels, it was necessary to infer or 
say something* against them in a controversial way. Irenaeus 
and Tertullian both were Western men in their Church in¬ 
terests. In writing for this Western Church, no charge 
against Karpokrates and Kerinthus was likely to be so effect¬ 
ive as this one, that they considered Iesus the son of a human 
father and mother. Now, as the Jews and Judaists regarded 
the Angel Iesua, their Salvator, as an Angel, just as Philo 
Judaeus describes the Merciful Power of the Logos, and as 
Irenaeus relates briefly that Karpokrates and Kerinthus were 
in sympathy with the Judaists, it is just possible to believe 
that they had not heard in a.d. 115 or 108 of Iesu as a man, but 
may well have heard of a Saviour Angel Iesua; since Isaiah, 
lxiii. 9 mentions such an angel and Philo Judaeus calls the 
Logos the Oldest Angel, the Great Archangel of many names, 
and speaks of his kingly Power as well as of his Merciful 
Power,—Powers, Thrones, Dominions and Principalities being 
Judaist or Sabian designations of ranks of Angels. The 
Pauline writer even speaks of the worship of Angels, and the 
Essenes made an especial mystery of the names of their An¬ 
gels. 

Outside of the Old Testament lay a tremendous fund of the 
unwritten gnosis of that period. A certain man named Simon 
had been previously in the city (Samaria) using magism and 
driving out of their senses the people of the Samaria, saying 
that c there is a certain one himself great.’ To whom they 
were all devoted from little to great, saying, ‘ This is what is 
called the Great Power of the God.’—Acts, viii. 9, 10, 11. Si¬ 
mon had been for a considerable time teaching. The Clemen¬ 
tine Recognitions, I. 72 ; II. 7 call this one “ the supreme 
Power of the High God who is superior to the Maker of the 
world.”—Movers, I. 558. Simon must have been a leading 
Gnostic! But must not the scribe who used the expression 
El Elion (the Most High God) in Genesis, xiv. 18 have also 
been something of a gnostic ? He certainly had the idea of 
the Oldest or Greatest Angel such as Philo Judaeus gives it 
and as we find it in Genesis, xxii. 14 ; Exodus, iii. 2,4, 14. The 
Clementine Recognitions here give the very doctrine of the 
Gnostics, while Philo, Genesis and Exodus evidently imply a 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


379 


knowledge of the theory of orders of Powers and Angels. This 
theory is the theory of the gnosis and kabalist tradition. Ac¬ 
cording to Moyers, I. 557, this Elion is Iao who is oyer the 
Seven Orbits, id est, the Chaldaean and Phoenican Iao de¬ 
scribed in Exodus, xxvii. 17, 18, and Rev. i. 13, 16. Here is the 
Greatest Power; this is the Word! Movers, 557, indicates 
that this Iao or Elion was adored by the Samaritans in con¬ 
junction with the Israelite Iahoh,—which view seems con¬ 
firmed in the first chapter of the Book of Revelation. While 
Philo and the Nazorians in their speculations regarded the 
Deity as Life and Mind , the ‘ I am ’ of the Hindus and Jews, 
they knew nothing about either except to write their own 
ideas about them. But Iahoh is, like Iao, an unspoken mys¬ 
tery (only the priests could read), a mystic Name,—the name 
of Life. Philo divides this divine Source (Life) into two per¬ 
sons. So did the Babylonians. So does John, i. 1, viii. 18, 
19, 42, x. 30, xiv. 6, 7, 9. The relation of the Chaldaean Father 
and Son is not unfitly expressed in John, xiii. 3, xiv. 9. He 
who has seen me has seen the Father, expresses the relation 
borne by the Chaldaean Logos (Mithra Sabaoth) to the Chal¬ 
dean Unknown God. 

In the worship of the Lord Iahoh there were eunuchs in 
the Jewish Temple (Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, 5) and in the rites of the 
Lord Adon (Lucian, Dea Syria, 15 ; vol. iv. p. 267) at Byblus in 
the 2nd century of our era eunuchs symbolised the Adon Lunus. 
—Gen. ii. 23. Hermes Trism. I. 9; Parthei, p. 4. Starting, 
then, from the Sun (Asar, Asari, Osiris), and Luna (Ashah, Issa 
Isah, Isis, Astarta, Yena) from the Adon and Yenah of the Le¬ 
banon (Ezekiel, viii. 5, 14) with the numerous deities of the 
Planets and Stars, the oriental philosophy inferred 1 back of 
the Sol and Luna (compare the Arsenothelus of Gen. ii. 22 and 
the Clementina) a Deity or Cause, of dual nature correspond¬ 
ing to the outward manifestation (Mithra Invictus, Adam Ada- 
matos, Kadmus-Adam, the Sun, Bal of 2 genders, Belus 
Minor, Logos). This first Cause 2 was regarded as further off, 

1 Bel by a certain calculation (reasoning) of tlie priests was both Saturn (Ancient 
of days) and Sol.—Servius ad Aen. I. 642, 729; Movers, 185. The Old Bel, the God of 
Time, was the Ruler of the World.—Movers, 161. So that the Babylonian religion, 
between Judaism and Christian gnosis, has substantially descended to our time, minus 
some things. 

2 What is the authority for this statement ? What is the authority for the state¬ 
ments in Hermes Trismegistos ? Who, except a mythical Moses, is the authority for 


380 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


more remote from man, than the Logos 1 was supposed to be. 
“ Before all things that actually exist ” they said “ and before 
all the ideal forms 2 there is One God prior to the first God and 
King” Here we have the Unit, as long prior to the Monad 
(the Monad from the Unit). And from this Unit (the first 
cause) springs ‘ the Monad.’ Philo (Confusio linguarum, 14) 
speaks of the firstbegotten and oldest Son. This Monad 
splits into a duad; thus the Adam has in his rib the Moon- 
crescent Issa-Isis; Kadmus becomes Kadmus-Harmonia, and 
Mithra has his feminine part the Aphrodite, the fruitful God¬ 
dess Eve, the Mother of all, like Demeter, mother of plants 
and animals, the pharadita or pharadatta. The first cause was 
regarded by the Babylonian sages as neutral in gender, but the 
Monad springs from this neutral cause, and divides into the 
preconceived causes of either sex; and Mithra (Christos) had 
his power in the sun, his wisdom in the moon. Here the gnosis 
is obvious. The Kabalah gives in extenso the continuation of 
this old Babylonian gnosis, describing the Angels and the 
Memra, 3 until at last Jordan Nazoria produce the Iessaeans, 
these deliver the gospels, and Borne the papacy. From the 
image of the Jealous Lebanon Yenus in Ezekiel viii. 3, 5,14, 
to the papacy, from Mithra to the later Christos, is one con¬ 
tinuing development of gnostic doctrine and Babylonian Tra¬ 
dition (the Kabalah). There is no evidence that anything has 
come sprungways (« sprungweise ) by Bevelation; but all has 
gradually been evolved out of the oriental philosophy by 
erring human mental efforts. The progress of the intellect 
has been continually defeated. The path of the teachers of 
truth and history has been sown with mantraps for ages. Of 
what use is Babylonian and Jewish gnosis, when it is mere 
speculation and untruth! Philo himself teaches those who 
cling to the ancient, antiquated and mythic time not to enter¬ 
tain false ideas because they have been brought up in ancient 


the statement that, in the Beginning, Alohim bore (created) the heavens and the earth ? 
Such statements need confirmation. According to Philo, there is no such thing as 
being able to penetrate to the God in his real being, ov <f>9dpei irpog top Kara to elvai 9eop 
e\0elv, 1 he does not soon come to the God in His real essence,’ but ‘ the comprehension 
of Him is the furthest removed from every human intellect.’ This again is gnosis ! 

1 Philo Jud., Dreams, I. 11: Mutatio Nominum, 13; Job, xi. 7; Matthew, xxiv. 
36. 

2 Job, iv. 18. 

3 Word, Mind, Iahoh, Word of Life. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 381 

mythic legends which a long period of time has handed down 
for the deceiving of mortals. 1 

When we read in Numbers xxv. 4 c Hang him up to the 
Sun, to Iahoh,’ when we find a demon exorcised by Theose- 
bius “ pointing to the rays of the Sun and the Hebrews’ God,” 
when in psalm xix. 4 (Greek and Yulgate Versions) we see 
that ‘ Iahoh has placed in the sun his tent, when Julian, in 
his oration on the Sun, p. 136, says of Sarapis ‘ going above 
and raising up the souls to the Intelligible World,’ we have 
to confess that both Jews and Chaldaeans adored the Sun, 
Iao.—Compare Movers, p. 552, 554. This Iao is nearly re¬ 
lated to the Mysterious Being that the Chaldaeans named 
Aoumis, the Gnostics, Ialda Baoth, the Phoenicians and Or- 
phics the Firstborn! In the Chaldaean Gnosis, the Only- 
begotten is the first birth of the Mother of the Gods. Da- 
maskius explains that he is the ‘Intelligible World,’as the 
Chaldaeans named Bel-Iao. That this Onlybegotten is the 
same as ‘ the Firstborn ’ of the Phoenician Gnosis, with the 
same-named Being of the Valentinians and the Ialda Baoth 
of the Orphic theologians, Movers, p. 556, claims to have al¬ 
ready shown. Among the Chaldaeans, Sabaoth is God the 
Creator (Movers, 550; Colossians, i. 16), He is Bel-Iao but 
not the Father, who is Bel-Saturn. As Saviour, Logos and 
Intelligible Sun, he raises up the souls to the intelligent 
life Saturnian. Filled with his own Father, the Light 
(of Light), the Ziua (or Power of the God), lifts up the souls. 
With him compare (John v. 25, 26, x. 30, 38, 36) the Chaldaean 
doctrine of the Son of the Father, “ I and my Father are One.” 
—John, i. 1. John has substantially (in these passages) the 
Chaldaean Logos doctrine in the passages collected in Movers, 
Phonizier, I. 550-556. To the Firstborn or Onlybegotten of 
oriental divinity corresponds the Protogonos Phanes or Erika- 
paeus of the Orphics (the Arik Anpin or Long Face of the 
Jewish Kabalah) who, like Iao, represents these firstborns, since 
he is Dionysus, Son of the aether, SuNgod, physical and spir¬ 
itual life-principle, and, generally, the Deity revealing himself 

1 Philo, Sacrif. of Abel and Kain, 21. Philo was himself a teacher of the gnosis. 
—ibid. 22, 23. He represents the Bel-Mithra gnosis of Babylon, the Father, the Logos 
(Word) and the Mediating Angel, the Great Archangel with many names ; but he was 
not a Nicolaitan. The Christians were a sect with Essaian (Essene) principles, accord¬ 
ing to Matthew, x.; xix. 12. They were called Iessaeans before they were called Chris¬ 
tians.—Epiphanius, ed. Petavius, I. 120. 


382 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in natural life, like the Onlybegotten. Time and the First¬ 
born Plianah, Phanes ! Herakles, Saturn, Phanes, Adon, Osiris, 
qtc., were all in danger of being combined in one. “ One Zeus, 
One Hades, One Helios, One Dionysus ” and “ One Zeus, One 
Hades, One Helios is Sarapis ” are therefore late expressions 
indicating that approach to the doctrine of One God (and his 
Angels) 1 which is seen in the psalms, which locate him riding on 
the heavens 2 and in Hades. 3 The Aramean translation by On- 
kelos of the Books of Moses uses Memra (Word ; i.e. the Mind 
or Logos) instead of Jehova (Iahoh, or Life). It reads : The 
Thought or the Divine Word made man in his image, in an 
image before (the face of) the Eternal created he him. 4 Philo, 
Quis Heres, 12, 42 mentions the Saviour! Thereby Ia’hoh is 
meant; shall we not say Dionysus Iacchos God of Life! 
Exodus, xxiii. 20, 21 and Philo, Migration of Abrahm, 31, have 
the Angel-Logos, Ia’hoh. 

Between Leo and Yirgo stood the deity Jupiter, Seb ac¬ 
cording to Uhlemann, iv. 221-223, and between Yirgo and 
Libra a God called Bok-Tore, which is the planet Jupiter. 
Thor’s day (Day of Jupiter) is Thursday. Ammonios (Amman- 
uel), Ammon-Iar, that is, Ammon-Horus, is born in July with 
the Lion’s head; and Christos, the Unconquered Lion, rising 
after overcoming the Dragon of Hades (Bev. xii. 7; xx. 3), 

1 ps. ciii. 20, 21. This is the gnosis. The Angel Gabriel is the Fire-angel of the 
Nazoria.—Matthew, iii. 11; Luke, i. 19,35; iv. 18. Philo, Quis Heres, 24, 27, says 
that the Unseen, Spermatic, Contriving, Divine Logos opens the womb of all things.— 
Exodus, xiii. 2. 

2 ps. lxviii. 4 , this psalm locates him in the sun, as Life-god Iach. See 1 Sam. xxv. 
29 Homer, also, represents Herakles in Hades. Therefore Hades and Bel-Saturn 
unite, like Osiris the Sun in Hades, the Acbar Israel contending against the Darkness. 
Philo declares the Logos (the Word) a suppliant to the immortal in behalf of the mor¬ 
tal.—Quis Heres, 42. Then the Logos is the Archangel Saviour. 

3 ps. lxxiv. 12; cxxxix. 7, 8. The Dionysus-religion has the doctrine of the pneu- 
ma, spirit. For when the God comes abundant into the body he makes the raving tell 
the future !—Euripides,Bacchae, 300. So 1 Sam xix. 20, 23, 24. Piety with gnosis !— 
Hermes Trism., chap. vi. 5. Piety is the gnosis of God.—ibid. ix. 4. The Sun sees the 
pure polos (circle, orbit). - Cory, p 206. 

4 Franck, Die Kabala (Gelinek’s translation) p 49. Devant, in French = before. 
In Onkelos, about the close of the first century before our era. a spirit rules opposed to 
the Pentateuch itself, to ordinary Judaism and the Mishna. Among some of the oldest 
Jewish doctors (the Tanaim) a certain philosophy, religious metaphysics, was taught 
secretly.—Franck, p. 40-44, 49. Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 89. The wise are all God’s friends, 
and most so in the most holy giving of the Law.—Philo, Quis heres, 5. Philo, besides 
being Nazorian, is here quite Ebionite in his preference for the Law of Moses (—ibid. 
50, 52) and has the gnostic doctrine of the Powers of the God.—Fugitives, 13,14 ; Gen 
i. 26. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


383 


summons the dead to life. How must we arrange these data ? 
The Talmud mentions the image of a Nursing Mother and 
child. Cicero, N. D. I. 15, separates ‘ the Birth of Jupiter ’ 
and c the rise of the Virgin ’ from fable by referring them to 
natural phenomena. The ancients had the zodiacal concep¬ 
tion of a woman holding the sun in her arms (Bev. xii. 1, 5). 
Her name was Ishah, the Mother of Seth-Horus; for Zeus is 
the Sun, Abel Ziua represents the Shining Logos (whose em¬ 
blem is the sun) and we have a beautiful representation of Isis 
holding Horus on her lap ; while Horus-Ammonios is superb¬ 
ly posed, with a lion’s head on his shoulders in the seal be¬ 
longing to Dr. Abbot’s Egyptian Museum in New York. 

Christus Invictus Leo 

Dracone surgens obruto 

A morte functos excitat.—Christian Hymn in Rambach, I. 

Philo’s Logos (Philo, Quis Her. 42) is the Archangel Saviour. 
Philipp, ii. 6 ; 1 Thessalonians, iv. 16 ; 2 Thess. i. 7, 8. To 
connect the Book of Daniel with the Apokalypse we must do 
it through the native language, the Aramean tongue. What 
books give us this language? We find the Targums, the 32 
Ways of Wisdom (the Jezira), the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews and the oldest books of the Sohar. Like Philo, the 
writers of these works all know the Chaldaean Logos-doctrine. 
The connection between the Old Testament Books (Genesis 
and the Prophet Daniel) and the Kabalah comes naturally 
through the gnosis and in the native language. Thus we 
are led at once to the Codex Nazoria (Liber Adami) which is 
in the native tongue of the Nazoria. 1 This brings us directly 
to the transjordan region. The Essenes used exorcisms and 
performed magic cures.—Griitz, Gescliichte der Juden, III. 

1 Which was spoken between the Jordan and the lower Euphrates at Bassora. 
The 1 Evangel according to the Hebrews’ was written in the Chaldaean language, but in 
Hebrew characters. The language of the Targums and the Sohar points out the road 
between Daniel (the prophet) and the Apokalypse,—between the Chaldee and the 
Greek. Genesis, Isaiah, Daniel, Micah, psalms, ii., cvi. 21, Matthew and Luke give us 
the Angel Lord and Saviour, while the Targums deliver the King and the Memra 
(Word) ; Philo, the Apokalypse and John’s Gospel give us the Logos, the Great Angel 
of many names. Munk, therefore, sees a close resemblance between the Angels of the 
Kabalah, the psalms, and the Gospel manifestations of this sort. But the sine qua non 
is the addition of the Essaean, Nazorian, Ebionite, and Iessaean handling of matters. 
“Jordan was the beginning of the evangels.” The time of the Saints and Nazorenes 
was come.—Daniel, i. 12; viii. 13 ; x. 3; xi. 40, 41; ps. cxvi. 15. Compare Luke, iv. 
18, 44. 


384 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


p. 526. The Divine Sophia (Wisdom) is fond of the desert (is 
phileremos).—Philo, Quis Heres, 25. Philo, Ten Commandm. 
33, mentions the £ Great King,’ Matthew v. 35, xxv. 1, 31, 34, 
has the ‘ Great King ’ and the lamps carried by virgins to 
meet the Bridegroom,—while an ancient Latin hymn of the 
Christians preserves the words : 

In occursum Magni Regis 

Fer ardentes lampadas.—Rambach, Anthol. I. 

The lamps were carried in allusion to the Chaldaean Bel-Iao 
in the midst of the Seven Planets. The Sabian Sun was de¬ 
picted as a Youth with the ring of eternity in his hand. The 
Nazoria and Ebionim, before our era, were in Galead, Basan, 
Moab and Idumea. The Light of the world was represented 
as a Light with its 7 lamps.—Sakariah, iv. 2, 10. We find the 
Sabian civilisation in Eastern Syria. Weightier is the resem¬ 
blance in language and thought between the Sohar, the Kaba- 
lah, and all Sects of the Gnosis, especially those of which 
Syria is the cradle, as the Codex Nazoria.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 
32; Franck, Kab. 81. Kerinthus in Asia taught that the 
world was not made by the first God, but by a Power very 
remote from the Supreme Being and ignorant of Him. The 
Mediator Metatron stands before the THRONE, the King 
Messiah is appointed to reign! We are now come to the 
period of the Gnostic 1 authors of the Christian religion, 2 to the 
Tradition in Eastern Syria. The name Christos 3 has a purely 
spiritual meaning. Massiacha, Messiah, if we take it in the 

1 Matthew, xvi. 27; John iii. 12; vi. 46, 62; xii. 34; Matt. xxv. 31. 

2 ty)v yap acrapnov iSeav ov Aeyw SvvaaOai irarpos ij mow iSelv . . . a<rap<ov yap Svvap.iv ov 

plovov vlov a AX’ ovS’ ayyekov ISdv ns Svvarai —Clem. Horn. xvii. 16. The Homilies show 
that they are gnostic since ‘ a knowledge of things as they are 1 is made necessary to en¬ 
ter the Kingdom of God as the only way,—Gnosis without the fulfilment of the Law 
is useless. They fight the false Gnosis by setting up a true Gnosis.—Uhlhorn, 257. In 
the Homilies a strong Gnostic element is most prominent.—Uhlhorn, die Homilien und 
Rec. 256; Horn. III. 18. 

3 Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Ierusalem, and sign the 
4" sign on the foreheads of the people. 

But of those that have the tau sign on them touch none.—Ezekiel, ix. 4, 6. 
Herakles is the Semitic Fire-deity, Astrochiton Herakles, King of Fire ! But he is 
also Herakles the Mighty (Gabar), Gabriel the Angel of Fire and Life. He should have 
the crux ansata, the sign of life. Tertullian observes that in the Mysteries of Mithra 
they signed the initiated on the forehead (like the Christians at the Confirmation).— 
Dunlap, Sod, II. 120. No wonder! The Ebionites lived beyond Jordan, in contact 
with the Mithrabaptists of the Euphrates. The cross is connected with the sun and 
means Life.—Ernst von Bunsen, 12-14. Take up the Cross.—Mark, x. 21. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


385 


sense in which it was used by the Prophets means the Anointed 
(ftacri\ev<s *IcrparjX icTTiv. —Matthew, xxvii. 42) and is apparently 
equivalent to the word King. Kings and priests were an¬ 
ointed. But king may mean an anointed king (King of 
Israel, and Son of God.—Matthew, xxvii. 42, 43); or it may 
be employed as Philo, Ten Command., 33, and psalm ii. 6, 12 
imply, meaning the ‘ asarkos idea,’ a spiritual being not made 
in the flesh. So that there is a chance for a double meaning, 
a regular double entendre.—Mark, xii. 35; 1 Sam. xvi.; Mat¬ 
thew, xx. 30 ; Luke, iv. 18; Isa. lxi. 1. Civilization, law, and 
popular ignorance were all to be found in the days of Cicero ; 
some of it in Syria under Herod’s administration : and Judas 
the Galilean had called his nation to the war against the 
power of Borne in Judea. 

Galilaei, a Iuda quodam seditioso Galilaeo, accepta origine.—Note to Iren- 
aeus, ed. 1675, p. 343. 

They were all Galileans !—Luke, 1 xxiii. 5, 6 ; Acts, i. 11 ; ii. 7 ; v, 37. 

The cunning Josephus writing at the court of his conqueror in 
the position of a prisoner liberated by the favor of Titus was 
hardly in position to speak his mind too freely on all points, 
yet he has left us a striking picture of the sufferings as well as 
of the patriotic feeling among his people. At the age of 15 he 
was living with the Saint and Washer, Banous, in the Desert 
subduing the flesh; then he returned to Jerusalem and was 
sent to Borne at the age of 26 for the liberation of certain 
priests about a.d. 64, finally appointed to the command of the 
Jewish forces in Galilee. The date 64 is of interest; because 
if St. Paul had been put to death in 66, Josephus, having been 
in Borne two years previous, would have been likely to have 
felt an interest sufficient to have mentioned the event. But he 
does not. He never speaks of Christians, 2 but only of Essaeans. 

1 Matthew, iv. 12, 18 ; Luke, xxiii. 49. To find the doctrine of Kerinthus respect¬ 
ing the Christos , see John, iv. 42; vi. 62 ; Irenaeus, I. xxv. To reach the Ebionite, 
see Matthew, xvii. 10, John, v. 46, 47 as to the Ebionites adhering to the law of Moses. 

2 Josephus, xviii. 2. 3, and 5. 1, 2, mentions Herod Antipas tetrarch of Galilee. 
Luke, xxiii. 7, 8, says that Pilate sent Iesous to Herod who was in Jerusalem. Justin 
(Trypho, p. 103) repeats this story. Josephus, xviii. 5. 3, shows that Herod was in 
Jerusalem at the time of the Festival. Josephus, then, could have supplied the author 
of the Gospel of Luke with these definite historical facts, that Herod was tetrarch of 
Galilee and then in Jerusalem. Did Josephus in xviii. 5. 2 write the account of John 
the Baptist, or is it an interpolation ? It looks as if it was inserted as a support of 
the account of the four evangelists. Where else did the Ebionites, or Jews, or other¬ 
wise, get their historical data ? That the 4 Evangelists supported their doctrine on 

25 


386 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


Yet his stay with Banons in the desert must have introduced 
him to life among the Nazorenes, for that element was in full 
growth, before and after Christ, beyond the Jordan and on the 
Jordan ; and if Paul was a leader of the sect of Nazorenes 
(Nazoraion, Acts, xxiv. 5) his death in Nero’s gardens, if it ever 
occurred, would naturally attract his attention. He does not 
mention it, yet he lived to a.d. 103. 

If there is a cause of all things, and the Good Principle 
could not afford a cause of evil, nature must have a particular 
Source and Element of evil as well as one of good. 1 Genesis 
continually returns to this subject. The Devil was red. Adam 
(Edom), too, means red. Saue in Edom was a town. Combin¬ 
ing these suggestions, we have the name Asau (Asu = Spirit, 
and the Evil Spirit), a red Devil or Adversary. Moreover 
Queen Aso was an ally of Typhon, the Egyptian Dfevil, against 
the Good Principle Osiris. Genesis, xxvii. 40, describes Esau’s 
sword against every man, “ by thy sword shalt thou live,” like 
the Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and the other tribes of the Desert. 
Josephus, Ant. ii. 1, says that the Hebrew name of Edom is 
v ASco/xa. Isaiah, xxix. 19, says that the Ebioni of Adoma shall 
rejoice in a Holy One of Isarel (Israel). Here we find the Ebi- 
onites placed by the author of Isaiah in the very spot where 
they resided after the Christian era. The Nazarenes and 
Ebionites lived in the Desert between Egypt and Syria. That 
is just where Edom was. Epiphanius (I. 121 ed. Petav) says 
that the Nazarenes were before Christ , and knew not Christ. Ac¬ 
cording to Isaiah, xxix. the Ebioni were before our era, since he 
mentions them. They, like the Nazoria, lived in the Desert 
(like the Beni Esau).—Matthew, xi. 7, 8, 9 ; xxiv. 26. The 
apostles were men sent off to carry the message of the saints, 
and Matthew, xi. 10 has the very expression, 44 Messenger,” 
which the Nazoria applied to the 4 Messenger of Life, Manda 
di Chia.’ Now this Messenger is an Angel in Matthew, and 
apparently such in the 4 Codex Nazoria.’ Josephus says that 

the Ebionites is plain from Luke, xiv. 13; xv. 4; John, x. 3, 4, 5. 16; Luke, iv. 44; 
v. 17, 33. 

Luke, xxiii. 7, 8. 11, lets Herod Antipas have soldiers with him at Jerusalem, and 
Justin, p. 103, supposes that Herod Antipas succeeded Archelaus at Jerusalem. Where¬ 
as Josephus, xviii. 5. 3 says that Ouitellios with Herod the tetrarch and their friends 
went up to Jerusalem, leaving the Army to go through the Great Plain. This goes to 
show either that the evangelists took from Josephus, or differed from him. 

1 Plutarch, de Iside, 45. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


387 


his ancestors were a sect of the Brahmans. We have seen that 
Abrahm, the Ghebers of Chebron (Hebron), Balaam and the 
Canaanites were all fireworshippers, as also the Ebionites be¬ 
yond the Jordan.—Matthew, iii. 11. Abrahm was the father of 
the Ebionites 1 —ibid. iii. 9. Consequently they were the de¬ 
scendants of the Ghebers of Hebron who (or their associates in 
Gheber fireworship) dwelt in all the cities where Mithra Sabaoth 
was worshipped on Seven Altars.—Numbers, xxiii. 1, 3. The Lo¬ 
gos holds the sun’s place.—Philo, Quis Heres, 44, 45. Now, we 
find the Mithra worship (see Justin Martyr on the cave at Beth¬ 
lehem) celebrated on 7 altars on the very spot (Numbers, xxii. 
36; Deuteron. xxxii. 49) where the Ebionites resided, namely, 
beyond the Jordan in Moab. 2 The Ebionites still adherred 
(like Philo) to Moses, the Prophets, and the Jewish Law. 3 
The Resurrection of the dead was the most prominent topic 
among them. 4 The Nazarenes and Ebionites dwelt together 
beyond the Jordan, and no one can discriminate between them. 
They lived in Moab, Nabathea, Adoma, and, further north ; 
they were found as high up as the country far to the east of 
the Orontes, so that the Nazorian Healers could without effort 
be supposed to have occasionally visited the parts east of Tyre 
and Sidon.—Matt. xv. 21. But Nabathea was in the midst of 
the deserts. 5 The Judaist Nazoria could not tolerate the eating 

1 See Luke, vi. 20 ; xxi. 3. Philo Judaeus, Legal Alleg. I. 33 taught the Resurrec¬ 
tion of souls ; he reasoned (De Somniis, I. 20) concerning temperance, self-denial, fru¬ 
gality, fortitude. Philo was essentially a Nazarene; Paul, a leader of Nazorenes 
(—Acts, xxiv. 5, 25) reasoned of temperance, justice, and judgment to come. 

2 The country hallowed as the scene of the death of the Semite Lawgiver.—Numb, 
xxii. 5 ; Deut. xxxiv. 5, 6. The Sacred Logos the centre of the planets makes up the 
number seven.—Philo, Quis Heres, 45. Matthew^ xxiv. 11, 24, in speaking of the false 
Messiahs, strikingly resembles a passage in Justin Martyr; who, however, does not 
mention Matthew’s name. 

3 Matthew, xxiii. 2, 3 ; Luke, v. 14 ; vi. 20; xvi. 31 ; Mark, xii. 19 ; John, i. 45, 47; 

viii. 5 ; xii. 34. 1 The hidden, sacred light of the oracles ’ (Sacred Writings).—Philo, 

On Dreams, I. 26. This is as gnostic as St. Paul’s ‘ Hidden Wisdom.’ 

4 Mark, xii. 26, 27; Matthew, xvi. 12 ; Ephes., i. 20; Philipp, iii. 10, 11. 

6 Genesis calls it Nabioth. The Ossenes were in Peraea and Moab. The Book of 
Daniel, the pre-Christian Targums, and Kerinthus, like the Ebionites and Essenes, 
made no distinction between Judaism and the Kingdom of Heaven, or what was already 
in the time of Kerinthus called Christianity.—Bunsen, Angel-Messiah, 320. The sus¬ 
picion (Bunsen, 323, 324) that Kerinthus wrote the Apokalypse goes to show that he 
occupied a prominent position at a very early period among the Ebionites. It also ex¬ 
hibits the uncertainty concerning the apostolic writers at an early period. The saints 
are in Daniel; of course they were beyond the Jordan ; and the Nazoria had both 
saints and elected apostles.—Rev. xv. 3 ; xix. 8 ; xx. 9. The saints are in Philo ; who 
sticks to the Seven Planets and their circles.—Quis Heres, 48, 55 ; Rev. i. 13. 


3S8 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of food offered to idols, consequently a distinction arose between 
the strict Ebionite, who abominated (like the Persians) the 
idols of Ephraim, and the Gentiles. The ‘ call of the preacher 
in the desert ’ was not a call to worship idols, but to prepare 
the way of nilT (the Unspoken Word of 4 letters). The Sun is 
the Mind of the Kosmos. 1 The Logos (the Word) holds the 
Sun’s place in the midst of the seven lamps of the Hebrew 
Sacred Candlestick. But the Gnostics called their ‘ Firstborn 
from the Unborn Father ’ Nous , Mind. —Basileides; Irenaeus, 
I. xxiii. p. 119; Antiqua Mater, 163, 218. 

The older writers, from Irenaeus on, know little of certain 
Nazarenes 2 until the end of the 4th century. The older fathers 
know just as little of a division of the Jew-christians into those 
that observed the Jewish Law only for itself and those who 
w T ould have forced it on the heathen also ; and least of all have 
we a right, in just this difference of opinion concerning the 
Law% to see the dividing line between two different sects, the 
Nazarenes and Ebionites, whose separation must date from 
before the times of the jmmitive church and who have con¬ 
tinued unaltered down to the end of the 4th century, where 
Hieronymus and Epiphanios will have first observed them 
again. The Hebrews in Choba believing on Christos are called 
Ebionaioi. Eusebius knows the name Nazaraioi as the oldest 
designation of the Christians. All Ebionim, whether they re¬ 
jected or accepted the supernatural birth of Iesus, regarded 
the Apostle Paulus as an Apostate from the Law.—Eusebius, 
H. E. III. 27. Down to the end of the 4th century the name 
Ebionim was the only customary name in the mouth of the 
Katholics. The word Nazarene was from the oldest time ap¬ 
plied to those who wished to be Jews and Christians at the 
same time. Minim (haeretics) was among the Jews the usual 
name for the Jewish Christians in general, and the Jews, like 
the older Church fathers, know no distinction between two Jew- 

1 Philo, ibid. 53. Speaking of the more matured and perfect Gnosticism, Milman, 
p. 208 says : This was perhaps at its height from about A. D. 120-140; in all the great 
cities of the East in which Christianity had established its most flourishing communi¬ 
ties sprung up this rival. But Milman was mistaken. Christianism did not precede 
the gnosis. Chaldaean and Jewish gnosis preceded Christianity. The Jewish Bible 
has plenty of gnosis in it. 

2 Codex Nazoria, III. 76, has the name ‘ Agab. the King.’ The names Iacob and 
Iagab could not be easily differentiated when spoken. So Aqabara and Agabara would 
give about the same sound in pronunciation. Aqabar or Agabar is the Mighty Angel 
Gabariel, or Iacob Acbar. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


389 


Christian sects. The Ebionites held Iesus for a mere man (ac¬ 
cording to Hieronymus); but St. Jerome’s Nazarenes believed 
in the Gottes-Sohn born of a virgin, and recognised the ‘ Apos¬ 
tle to the heathen ’ as such, while other Ebionim rejected him. 
The testimony of Hieronymus is no proof of the existence of 
two sects of Ebionim, but that his own immediate Nazarenes 
near Beroea varied a little by renouncing circumcision and ac¬ 
cepting “ Paul ” as an Apostle to the heathen. Lipsius, p. 131, 
132, also mentions Essaean Ebionites (“ essenischen Ebion- 
iten”). As the abode of these Nasaria, Epiphanius gives 
Gilead, Basan, and the transjordan land, from the Dead Sea to 
Iturea and the neighborhood of Damaskus, and to the land of 
the Nabatheans. The original settlements of the Ossaians are 
Nabathea, Iturea, Moabitis and Arielitis. The Ebionim dwelt 
from the Dead Sea to Coelesyria and to Nabathea. So too in 
the case of the Sampsaioi or Elkesaites: At that time there 
was no distinction between Nazaraioi and Ebionites. The 
identity of the Nazoraioi and the (Christian) Essaioi is shown. 
Elxai, the representative of Esserie Ebionism, is expressly con¬ 
nected with the Nazorenes. The Nazoraioi in the Beroian, 
Dekapolitan and Basan districts were greatly disliked by the 
Jews of the synagogues, who called them the Minim ; but these 
last occupied a much less extent of country than that which 
was the abode of the Nasaraioi, Ossaioi, Ebionim and Elke¬ 
saites. The Minim that the Jews so greatly disliked were the 
Elkesaites, the renegades of Beroea, the Nazarenes of St. Je¬ 
rome (—Lipsius, 136; 129-137), and the Ebionim, apparently, 
of Irenaeus, I. xxvi. After all the research of Lipsius, it is 
easy to see that our Four Gospels were composed about the 
time of separation between the Ebionites upon the question 
(in the Old Testament) whether the Messiah was to be a man 
or the Angel Metatron (Iesua), and a further impulse to the 
success of the theory of the two natures was given by the com¬ 
position of an 4 evangel.’ The Haeretists had their books. 
But the Sipliri di Minim do not necessarily indicate any spe¬ 
cial work, such as the Gospel of the Hebrews, but something 
still earlier. Most Ebionim probably agreed with Kerinthus 
in the Christology, although the Ebionim themselves differed 
in regard to the Christology (Lipsius, 138; quotes Origen, v. 
61, 65; Euseb. H. E. III. 27). In the time of Epiphanius (c. 350) 
the Essene branch of the Ebionites was the more important.— 


390 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Lipsius, 139, 142 ; compare Matthew, x. xi. xii. 48-50 ; xviii. 34, 
35 ; xix. 7-12. If the hint of Lipsins, p. 140, 141, is correct, 
the connection between Kerinthus and the Ebionites is con¬ 
cealed by substituting one word for another; but, as there 
were various opinions among the Ebionites, the Ebionite rela¬ 
tionship to Kerinthus may have been closer than Irenaeus 
would lead one to suppose. Epiphanius, says Lipsius, p. 143, 
traces the Essaian Ebionism back to Elxai. Christianism was 
born of the gnostic mysticism of the East, and received its 
present shape in the narratives of the Evangels. Let the 
Therapeutic people always strive to see the sight (theas) of 
the Self-existent Being, and pass by the visible 1 sun and never 
leave this position that leads to perfect happiness. . . . Then 
through the longing for the immortal and blessed life, think¬ 
ing that now the mortal life is ended, they bequeath their 
properties to sons or daughters, or to other relations, willingly 
making legacies to those not related to them, companions or 
friends.—Philo, de vita contemplativa, 2, Paris, 1552, p. 610. 
All the testimonies seem to make it clear (even when the 
name Christos has been turned into Iesus in the Latin trans¬ 
lation) that the original doctrine of the Christos was a recog¬ 
nition of him as a supernal being, asarkos, without flesh. 
Compare fourth Esdras, xiii. 28, 29, 51, 52. But this is not 
meant to exclude the early Jewish expectation of a great 
king. 

The Sabians on the peninsula of Mt. Sinai practised absti¬ 
nence. There is the evidence in Philo’s treatise de Yita Con¬ 
templativa, that the Therapeutae preferred the convent life, 
like the Essaians, Sarapians, and Budhists. As the growth of 
ideas is gradual, it is reasonable to infer a gradual growth of 
the communist theology which in the time of Philo was al¬ 
ready of considerable extent, connected as it was with gnosis. 
There is an Ebionite fragment of a gospel (supposed to be 
Mark’s evangelium), found buried in the sands of the Eaioum 
in Egypt, which has not the verse Mark xiv. 28 in which the 
Besurrection of Iesu is maintained. In this case, that passage 
is wanting, although the other verses before and after Mark, 
xiv. 28, are said to be there, but with only this one verse 

1 The Essenes, Therapeutae, etc. adored the Sun (as we learn from Josephus and 
Philo), not the visible sun, but the God in the sun.—Ps. xix. Septuagint, Arabic, and 
Vulgate texts. Further on we shall find Jacob as Angel. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH . 


391 


omitted. 1 There are two inferences, one that it never was in 
the papj^rus (the fragment being only a few inches in size and 
containing only a few verses), the other, that it was omitted 
because it contained an assertion of his Resurrection from the 
dead. 2 The Pauline passage 1 Cor. vii. 1, takes the ground of 
the Therapeutae, preferring celibacy to marriage, and Eusebius 
declares the Therapeutae to have been the early Christians. 
The treatise de Vita Contemjjlativa mentions the Essaians; 
and Epiphanius (1.113, ed. Petau) says that the Ebionites, who 
lived with the Nazorenes (who were called Iessaeans), held Iesu 
to be merely a man. But they were all anxious to be saved 
(Mark, viii. 31-38) by self-denial and communism. Naked, 
having destroyed every bond of passion and necessity of the 
body!—Philo, Legal Alleg. II. 15. The body having been 
stripped off like an oyster shell, but the soul being stripped 
bare, and desiring the natural change hence.—Philo, de hu- 
manitate, 4. But it is not possible to destroy the evils, O 
Theodoras, for it is necessary always that there should be 
something contrary to the good; nor can these be located in 
the Gods; but they patrol about the mortal nature and this 
region, from necessity. On which account we ought to try to 
flee from here up there as soon as possible. And flight is be¬ 
coming like to God as far as we can, and becoming just and 
holy, with wisdom, is resemblance.—Plato, the Theaetetus, 
cap. xxv. 

Those who beheld the light of Mithra (in the sun, moon, 
and the 5 planets) worshipped the Helios noetos, the Aur 
Gadol, in Babylon, Syria and Egypt, their Intelligible Sun and 
Logos ; and a Pharisee in a.d. 45-58 would know as much about 
the Christos-King, 3 Mithra, as any one. Luke, xix. 42-44, thus 
lets the Healer apostrophise Ierusalem: If that thou hadst 
known at this very day, even thou, what concerns peace; but 
now they were hidden from thine eyes. That days will come 
upon thee and thy foes will cast up an entrenched camp before 
thee, and will surround and hem thee in on all sides and level 
thee to the ground thy children in thee, and not leave stone 

1 New York “Times,” July 5th, 1885. The Times called it the earliest fragment 
of a written gospel. 

2 But Mark, xiv. 28, is to be found in Matthew, xxvi. 32. Were not the doctrines 
evolved gradually, and the gospels likewise added to ? 

3 Isaiah, vi. 5. The Pauline author claims that Paul saw the Aur Gadol near Da- 
maskus. 


392 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


upon stone! Luke follows Josephus as closely as if he had 
copied him. Epiphanius, I. 121, says that the Nazorians were 
before Christ and knew him not! So that we have to go back 
to the Iessenes for the origin of the Nazoraians. 

The Apokalyptic John of the Book of Revelations and even 
the apostle Paul tell almost nothing of the history given in the 
first three Gospels concerning Iesua the Nazorian. The Pau¬ 
line writer seems fully satisfied with the incarnation and cruci¬ 
fixion, being doctrines sufficient for him. It is not safe to rely 
on the purity of the text in the case of works of this class (the 
Apocalyptic sort) which have come down to us through Chris¬ 
tian hands. As we have seen, four chapters of Christian com¬ 
position, which were originally quite independent of 4th Ezra, 
were at first attached to and finally incorporated with it. In 
verse vii. 28, where the Latin copy reads * My son Iesus shall 
be revealed,’ the word 4 Iesus ’ is peculiar to the Latin. The 
Syriac and Arabic have 4 my son Messiah ’; the Aethiopic has 
4 my Messiah ’; and the Armenian (copy) has 4 the Anointed of 
God.’—-Drummond, ‘Jewish Messiah,’ p. 90. Since all the 
oriental copies adhere to the meaning Messiah (Anointed) and 
only the Latin (the Western copy) varies, it is made clear how 
the Roman tampered with and altered the oriental idea. The 
Angel Iesua (ths oriental Saviour) becomes the man Iesus of 
the Western notion. It makes little difference whether some 
orientals may have had or not have had the Western view ; it is 
of no consequence wdiich view was the one in Isaiah. Let us 
not be deceived here by a logical fallacy,—the begging the 
question. The point is 4 what was the original oriental opin¬ 
ion ! Four versions give the oriental view, excluding the name 
Iesu. The Latin version alone gives the man Iesus in place 
of the oriental Saviour Angel. Of course, theological bias, 
astronomical and astrological prognostications and popular 
superstition are responsible for this change of an oriental 
Gnostic Angel into the man Iesu ; but an authority for it is to 
be found in 1 Samuel, xvi. 10, 12. The oriental doctrine was 
that of psalm, ii. 2, 12, Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9, and Philo Judaeus. 
After all, the Jewish Messiah was (in one point of view in 
Isaiah) an expected king descended from Dauid. Any one can 
see at a glance that the Gospel Iesua is not the Warrior king 
of Judaism or the type of the Apokalypse of John xix. The 
Apokalypse is Mithraic, transjordan in its aspect, late Ebio- 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


393 


nite, apostolic, and gnostic ; Rev. xix. 11 f. suits with Matthew, 
xxv. 34, 40, and with Philo’s doctrine of the ‘ Kingly Power ’ of 
the Logos. But the changing of the word Anointed, Messiah, 
or King in the oriental Mss. of 4th Ezra into Iesus in the Latin 
Ms. is essentially dogmatic, Roman, and partisan. The Chris¬ 
tos is the earlier view, which the Pauline writings hug (Co- 
lossians, i. 15, 16, 27 : this Mystery among the Nations, but the 
Christos in you!) as does the Apokalypse. The foundation 
doctrine in all the Logos-churches was that the * Anointed ’ is 
the Power of the God.—1 Cor. i. 24 ; vii. 17; x. 16, 17, 32, 33. 
The crucifixion of the ‘ Christos’ was apparently a later addition 
to the other.—ibid. i. 21; x. 16. Consequently, to be crucified, 
it was essential to crucify the human flesh! But the 9 crux 
ansata was the emblem of immortal life on the cover of Pepi 
Merenra’s sarcophagus in Egypt— anch ra kha , according to 
Chabas’s reading of it (—Chabas, Papyrus Magique Harris, p. 
8; Tableau phonetique, plate I.); but Brugsch reads anch ma-ra, 

‘ lebend wie die Sonne.’—Agypt. Zeitsch. 1881, p. 5. In the 
Mithra-religion Christ’s dwelling was largely in the sun. Seyf- 
farth read its Coptic equivalent kli,—thus agreeing with the 
kh of the reading, in Chabas, of said hieroglyph. The sun 
symbolised time, eternity, and the resurrection. No religion 
that looked forward to the Resurrection could possibly do 
without faith.—1 Cor. xv. 50. On the sarcophagus of queen 
Anchnes, Osiris (Asar) is styled King of the period of the pure 
spirits.—Palmer, Egypt. Chron., 688; vide Matthew xxv. 34. 
These are the ‘ Mysteries of the dead ’ in the ancient world.— 
Acts, xxiii. 6-9. The Saddoukees denied a resurrection, angels, 
and spirit. —ibid. 8. The Pharisees therefore set up the Jewish 
gnosis and its mysteries. 

The God was named by the Kabbalists Adam ha-elion, the 
Man Most High.—Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verfassung der 
Juden III. p. 152; quotes Emek hammelech, fol. 3. col. 4. cap. 
3. Neither Adam was transgressor who was brought into ex¬ 
istence by the hands of the God, nor was Noe intoxicated, who 
was found more just than all creation; nor did Abraam live 
with three women simultaneously who on account of his 
chastity was considered worthy of an extended progeny, nor 
did Iakob commune with four, two of whom were sisters, who 
was the father of 12 tribes.—Clementine Homily, ii. 52. These 
words the Homily puts in the mouth of Peter the Apostle. In 


394 


THE GI1EBERS OF HEBRON. 


the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ we find (Acts, v. 18; vii. 6) active 
apostles. In Acts, iv. 37 the apostles evidently perform the 
function (in this instance) of the Iessaean stewards or man¬ 
agers. The Essaioi being just moderators of anger repress 
wrath.—Josephus, Wars, II. viii. This is the Iessaean doctrine 
in Matthew v. 22-26. -The Essaioi are the Essenes, and the 
Iessaean Healers are a sect of the Essene Healers,—not named 
after Iesu, but from the c Essaioi iesomenoi,’ the Essene physi¬ 
cians.—Jos. II. vii. 6. Peter and the Apostles are named.— 
Acts, ii. 37. These Iessaian apostles were Messianist Hagioi, 
missionaries, prophets. Antiqua Mater, 43 regards these 
apostles (Iessaean Hagioi) as the actual founders of the Naza- 
rene Sect,—after Antioch, called Christians. The Essaeans 
love one another more than the other sects do.—Josephus, 
Wars, II. viii. 2. 1 John, iv. 7 says: Beloved, let us love one 

another. The Iessaeans have the distinguishing traits of the 
Essenes. If we love one another God dwells in us.—ibid. iv. 
7-12. The Essene neophytes had to prove their self-denial by 
certain tests. See this rule applied in Matthew, xix. 21 by the 
Iessaeans. 

Christian Nazarenes claim as their founder the Baptist 
John. The Ebionites were Nazorenes, the Nazoria.—Luke, vi. 
20, 21; Acts, xxiv. 5; Matth. xxi. 26. Matthew lays down the 
gnosis that the Healer was born of the holy spirit by the vir¬ 
gin. Luke brings in the Angel Gabriel (the representative of 
Herakles and the Logos), and two evangelists refer to John 
the Nazarene as a witness to the Baptism of the Jordan. 
When therefore we read that the Ebionites differed as to the 
degree of relationship in which the Healer stood to the holy 
spirit we see that the Good Tidings of Matthew were available 
for either form of the controversy, inasmuch as Matthew, iii. 
16, 17, could lend support to even Kerinthus. Our Gospels 
were not composed in a hurry. If Luke’s Gospel appeared in 
the 2nd century, he had abundance of time to copy the narra¬ 
tion of Vespasian’s encampments out of Josephus. If Krishna 
(Herakles Aaqabar) was finally regarded as an incarnation of 
Vishnu, why should not Iesu receive the Christos in himself ? 
—John, i. 32-34. The Budhists were known on the Ganges in 
the time of Alexander. The general council of Budhists was 
held at Patna in b.c. 258. At the time of the Christian era 
Budhists were known in Babylon and had appeared in Alex- 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


395 


andria in Egypt. Tathagatha means £ He that should come ,’ 1 
Budha, of royal descent, the S&kya-muni, the Lion from the 
tribe of Sakya. Sakya-Muni healed the sick, performed mir¬ 
acles, and taught his doctrines to the poor. With the excep¬ 
tion of the death of Iesua on the cross .and of the doctrine of 
atonement by vicarious suffering, which is absolutely excluded 
by Budhism, the most ancient of the Budhistic records known 
to us contain statements about the life and doctrines of 
Gautama-Budha which correspond in a remarkable manner 
with the traditions recorded in the Gospels about the life and 
doctrines of Iesu Messiah . 2 It may be asked, if Sakya-Muni 
was born several centuries before the Christian era, why the 
Arabs and Nabatheans should not have taken hold of the doc¬ 
trine earlier. They may have done so . 3 

A King shall reign for justice.—Isaiah, xxxii. i. 

But, as far as the population of the Jordan and Nabathea were 
concerned, the invasion of Judea by the Romans was enough 
to keep the people in a ferment for almost a century, exclud¬ 
ing other thoughts than the expulsion of the Romans and the 
hope of a Messiah. “Inter arma, leges silent! ” 

Philo indirectly connects the Essenes with East-Asiatic re¬ 
ligions . 4 The Mithra worship was in Egypt, in Ezekiel viii. in 
Idumea, Moab, the Hauran, Gaulan, Iturea, and on both sides 
of the Jordan. The Magoi were a witness to Mithra and to 
Sakya-Muni also. For the Magoi came from the Eastern 
parts, saying: We have seen the King’s star in the east! 
Gautama taught that all men are Brothers . 5 Jordan was the 
beginning of the evangels.—Matthew, iii. 13 ; Mark, i. 3. The 
Essenes and Mithraworshippers certainly saw their God in the 
sun, for before the sun rose they prayed with their faces 
towards the east. The Essenes continue in their first position 
and have not altered at all, says Epiphanius (a.d. 403). As to 
the Ossenes, closely connected with the former, he records the 
tradition that they had originated in the regions of Nabatea, 

1 Luke, vii. 19 and Matthew, iii. 11; xi. 3 are to be compared. 

2 Bunsen, Angel-Messiah. 

3 ibid. Ill, 112; Chwolsohn, I. 134, 136, 137. 

4 Bunsen, 77, 78, 102. 

5 ib. 45. Compare the ‘Brothers’ in Matthew, xxviii. 10. Astrolatry was the 
main characteristic of the Harran Sabians.—Chwolsohn, I. 19, 20. See Matthew, ii. 2. 
Sabians worshipping Stars.—Chwolsohn, I. 44, 64, 69, 81, 135. 


396 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


meaning Arabia-Petraea; and among other places he mentions 
the surrounding neighborhood of the Dead Sea, on the Eastern 
shores of the lake. Elksai, before he went to Palestine, arose 
in the year 97 a.d. in the north-east of Arabia in the regions of 
Wasith and Bassrah. The Christian Gnostic sect of the Man¬ 
dates or Mendaeans regarded him as its originator. The Ara¬ 
bian writer En-Nedim calls him Scythianus, and his disciple 
had been Therebintlius-Budha. Elkesai (Elxai) joined the sect 
of the Ossenes, some remnants of which (in 403) were still to 
be found in the same regions of Nabatea and Peraea towards 
Moabitis (Moab territory). The connection of the Book of El¬ 
kesai with Parthia is very important, as the Parthians formed 
a bridge between the asceticism in Mesopotamia and that in 
India. The Mendaites were called Disciples of John and 
‘ Sabians of the Marshes ’ between the Arabian Desert and the 
lower Euphrates and Tigris, the Mogtasilah, or Washers. So 
‘John the Baptist’ may be regarded as a transliteration of 
‘John the Essenian.’—De Bunsen, 111-115; Chwolsohn, I. 114 
-118, 130. In those days came John the Baptist preaching in 
the Desert of Judea. His clothing of camel’s hair, and a girdle 
of leather round his waist. This was a Nazarene! and a 
Sabian! He is made in Mark, i. 7 to proclaim the Coming 
Messiah. 

Art tlion the Coming One, or do we look for another ?—Matthew, xi. 8. 

Elxai gave out that he was the founder of the Ebionites, Nazo- 
reans, Ossenes and Nazarenes. The Kerinthians and Naza- 
renes were related to the Ebionites (with whom again the 
Sampsaioi and Elkesaites were allied) and all wash summer 
and winter. 1 

1 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 116, 117, quotes Epiphanius. The Sampsaioi (from Shems, 
Sun) were the Heliacoi.—ibid. 117, 118. New religions have to contend against the 
vis inertiae. The Jerusalem theocracy would naturally be reluctant to have their sec¬ 
tarianism, confirmed too by circumcision, invaded by Budhism. The expedient of one 
or two Messiahs referred to in the Prophets would partially counterpoise the succession 
of Budhas by a succession of Prophets, so long as the power of the Pharisees lasted. 
But when Rome’s stern hand removed that party there was room for the other demon¬ 
stration,—as when a forest is cut down a new one takes its place, but composed of en¬ 
tirely different trees. It is evident that while Herod was king and the priests and the 
Pharisees controlled Jewish religious destinies neither Budhist nor Baptist nor Naza¬ 
rene could occupy the ground. 

Spencer considered the Sabian doctrines made up of Chaldaism, Judaism, Gnosti¬ 
cism, Kabbalism, Platonism and Pythagorism,—Chaldaism predominating. —Chwol- 


BEFORE ANTIOCH . 


397 


The fourth book of Esdras, chapter xiii., unequivocally 
speaks of a Logos-Messiah not in the flesh. The Babylonian 
and Philonian Logos being purely spiritual essences (asarkoi), 
neither Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerinthus, nor the Nazoria, 
nor Ebionites, until Markion (nor in fact any of the earlier 
gnostics), were very likely to have heard of the virgin Maria, 
Ioseph, or Iesu. We may feel sure of this in the case of Kerin¬ 
thus ; for if Irenaeus could have shown that Kerinthus knew 
the formula “ born of the virgin Mary ” he never would have 
left out such a piece of evidence, one so much in favor of the 
side on which he argued. Looking at all the evidence in the 
case, it* seems doubtful if Kerinthus had ever heard more 
than the names Mithra, Logos, Messiach or Christos in con¬ 
nection with the general gnosis of Antioch. The account of 
Kerinthus in Irenaeus, I. xxv. may have been derived from 
hearsay, or mere unfounded inference. Kerinthus could not 
have known Markion nor Matthew. Hence (as Irenaeus, I. 
xxv. stands) Kerinthus is singularly represented (by implica¬ 
tion) as knowing the story of the virginal birth and disbeliev¬ 
ing it! As Kerinthus was connected with the Ebionites and 
Judaizers, and as most of these, in the time of Irenaeus and 
the lawyer Tertullian, regarded Iesu as a mere man, the son of 
Ioseph, Irenaeus may have given this Ebionite view as the 
view of Kerinthus ; but it is not so clear that Kerinthus knew 
whether the Iesu was crucified and rose again, 1 or that any 
considerable part of the Ebionites in the time of Tertullian 

sohn, I. 40, 167. Elxai was one of the oldest if not the very oldest representative of 
post Christian gnosis. There is no doubt that individual gnostic elements existed al¬ 
ready before Christ in Western Asia and particularly among the Jews.—ibid. 112. 
Mandaism the source of Manicheism.—ibid. 130. Mani born c. 190.—ibid. 132. The 
Arab writers have not strongly distinguished the Chaldeans, Nabatheans and Syrians. 
The Arabs call the Syrians Nabatheans.—ib. 162, 163. The Sabians were a Syrian race 
(a.d. 722) whose religion was composed of Judaism, Magism, and Christianity.—ib. 
185-188. There were two sorts of Sabians (according to el-Karchi, died, 955), one 
recognises Jesus Christ as Prophet, the other denies that he was a Prophet and adores 
the Sun. To this statement regarding two sorts of Sabians Chwolsohn, 191-193 enters 
an objection. But the Manicheans regarded Christ as Mithra (vide Matthew, xvii. 2; 
xix. 28; Rev. i. 16; xix. 11, 13) and the sun is the emblem of the Logos. All we have 
to do is to admit that the Sabians, some of them, acknowledged Jesus Christ as Prophet 
and connected him with the sun through the pneuma or spirit (Diodorus, I. 7, 11; Mat¬ 
thew, iii. 16). Then the late Arabian writers are substantially confirmed in the first 
third of the 2nd century. The Egyptian priests understood the doctrine of spirit, in 
the oriental philosophy, as well as the Jews did. 

1 anastanta ek nekr<5n, kai anabanta eis ton our anon.—Justin, Trypho, p. 42. 
Justin could furnish the phrase. 


398 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


admitted this. As Kerinthus could not be made to say that 
Iesu was the Cliristus, he could be represented as admitting, 
although contrary to the doctrine of Saturninus, the crucifixion 
and resurrection. Justin p. 54 leaves out Kerinthus, when 
speaking of the Markionites, Oualentinians, Basilidians, Sa- 
tornelians, and others of various names; but Irenaeus con¬ 
trives to get off upon him two admissions, that one would not 
expect from those who denied the virginal birth and held that 
Iesu was not the Christos. The shrewdness of Irenaeus is here 
exhibited. If he could not make out that Kerinthus believed 
that Iesu was born of a virgin, he does the next best thing in 
making him admit (in Irenaeus's own parenthesis) an acquaint¬ 
ance with the hypothesis. Now if that hypothesis after 140 or 
155 was in Matthew directed against Markion, how could Kerin¬ 
thus who lived in 115 (as “ Antiqua Mater ” thinks) have had 
any idea on the subject ? The Apokalypse does not mention 
it. The Gospel of Matthew is not early, Justin Martyr never 
quotes it. His quotations are taken from the “ Gospel accord¬ 
ing to the Hebrews,” at least as ancient a gospel as any. The 
Assumptio Mosis (in 139) mentions no Messiah, although it 
knows Ezra’s Messianism; it is because of Bar Cocheba’s de¬ 
struction and Adrian’s Kolonia Aelia. 1 Not a word of the Tem¬ 
ple. 2 Revenge is seen in the Apokalypse (Rev. xviii.; xix. 11); 
and “I come quickly.”—Rev. xxii. 20. This “ Coming ” shall 
bring the Vengeance on the wicked Heathenism of Rome ; for 
Israel all that remains is the full, severe, faithfulness to the 
Law, worthy of Akiba, 3 wherein the higher hope rested. Have 
we no temple and no Jerusalem more; indeed at the end of 
the whole Roman earth no native land left ? The Lord comes 
and lifts us up, chastising the Heathen and annihilating their 
idols. God will make you to float in the Starheaven, instead 
of your home, and you will look down from on high and see 
your foes on earth, and recognize them, and be happy.—Mo¬ 
ses, Prophetie und Himmelfalirt, xii.; Volkmar, 46, 72. After 
unheard-of cruelties, the Romans left the unfortunate Jews no 
resource but their God! Prepare for death, said R. Akiba, for 
horrible days will come upon us! Let us rather die than 
break the mandates of the Lord! But the “ Coming ” of the 


1 Volkmar, Mose Himmelfahrt, 69, 70. 

2 in Assumptio Mosis. 

3 The great leader in the Law of Moses. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


399 


Messiah belongs to the oldest Christianism of the Ebionites ; 
and the Christians could speak or write of an expected Mes¬ 
siah when a follower of R. Akiba might have been bereft of 
hope after Bar Cocheba’s fall. We find in Latin translations 
of Christian-Greek writings an occasional substitution of Iesus 
instead of Christus. An instance of this occurs in 4tli Esdras,. 
VII. 28, 29 ; Drummond, Jewish Messiah, p. 90. This is one 
mode of confusing the two characters Christos and Iesu ; 1 for 
the Jews who found in Daniel the Messiah doctrine did not 
admit that thp two names Iesu and Christos (Messiah) applied 
to the same person. The Messiah was asarkos ; Iesu was 
claimed by the Christians to be both man and asarkos. But as 
a Iessaian Healer they might have claimed never to have 
heard of him until the Christians wrote the gospels. As long 
as the Ebionite Messianists were not separated from the Jews 
their idea must have been Jewish in character, that is, they 
would (like the Apokalypse) side with the Jews, or at least be 
neutral between Hadrian and Bar Cocheba’s faction. When, 
however, the Christian writings propose to “ give to Caesar 
what is his ” and simultaneously cry “ woe to you scribes and 
pharisees,” we see that the writer of the Gospel of Matthew 
belongs to a party of the Messianists, opposed to Judaism 
and the Pharisee party, and half ready to receive permission 
from Hadrian to reside in Aelia Capitolina. The split had 
come, then, after Bar Cocheba’s time; and the Christian 
Ebionites took up an entirely different position towards the 
doctrine of a Messiah. He was rather the reverse of Bar 
Cocheba, no Warrior ; he was not to oppose the Roman Power ; 
the speedy appearance of the Saviour Iesua was proclaimed, 
and also that he had already appeared as an Ebionite or 
Iessaian teacher and healer. The Essaian morals were to dis¬ 
tinguish the new promulgation of doctrine, to be its text. 
This doctrine would not offend the Transjordans, nor Gali¬ 
leans, and, moreover, the Messianic agitation would not be 

1 The Apokalypse mentions no gospels ; only the gnostic Essene (?) Nikolaitans. It 
refers to an evangel of Judgment (like that mentioned in connection with Sabaoth 
Adonaios, in the Jewish Sibyl). This is not a Gospel, but the wrath to fall on Rome. 

_Rev. xiv. 8. The Lamb is the Sabian-Logos, Sol-Mithra in Aries, the Christos.— 

Rev. xix. 11. Matthew, iv. 25 ; ix. 35 ; xi. 5, preaches the Good Tidings to the Jordan 
and Transjordan population, yet the Apokalypse never mentions a gospel, and Philo 
Judaeus (b.C. 10 to a.d. 50) knows nothing of the Light of the world in all the cities of 
Galilee preaching the Kingdom of the heavens. 


400 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


abandoned in consequence of Bar Cocheba’s death in about 
134. It would be a Messiah of the Iessaians, a Iesua Christos, 
instead a Jewish Messiah. Now which of the gospels bears 
out this view ? Matthew’s certainly does. He gives the 
Essaian sermons, mentions the miracles, attests that the Iesua 
is of David’s line, renders to Caesar the things that are Cae¬ 
sar’s (and Hadrian was master of about all there was in Iudaea), 
announces open hostility to the Scribes and Pharisees, just as 
if he were a Galilean, Jordan or Transjordan missionary, and 
finds a rock on which to found a Church and establish a bishop 
Peter over it. To have relinquished the Sibyl’s doctrine of a 
Messiah in the sun descending as a King , changed the whole 
character of Jewish Messianism, created a new policy and a 
new religion, required all the time of St. Matthew until after 
145 or 160 perhaps. The Gospel according to the Hebrews 
was exclusively used by the Ebionites (—Euseb. H. E. iii. 25) 
and was in such repute among the earliest Christian communi¬ 
ties that it was generally believed to be the original of the 
Greek Gospel of Matthew. 1 Justin did not use our Matthew, 
but one in many respects like it. But what throws the 
strongest light on the date of the Gospel of Matthew is the 
proposition (in a Churchgovernment of Presbyters previously) 
to make Peter the Head of the Church.—Matth. xvi. 18, 19. 
Matthew represented the Jordan and Transjordan Nazorene- 
Ebionite Ecclesia ; and as the Ebionites and the Nazoria were 
become Minim in the Second Century, it might be expected 
that the Petrine tendency in Matthew’s Gospel would be con¬ 
nected with the Ebionite-Petrine tendencies manifested in the 
Clementine Homilies, — even if it made its appearance in 
Matthew’s Ebionite Gospel (x. 6) somewhat earlier than in the 
Homilies. That Matthew, x. 6, would not like the Samaritans, 
Simon Magus or Markion is clear; and the Homilies (or the 
pamphlet against Simon Magus, Paul, and Markion, which is 
said to have been the original groundwork and basis of the 
Homilies) indicate a sympathy with Matthew’s Gospel on 
these points. The Ebionites reject the Apostle Paul, calling 
him an apostate from the Law, and use only the Gospel 
according to Matthew (?).—Irenaeus, I. xxvi.; so Matthew, v. 
17, 18. Irenaeus knew the Ebionites as they were in about 
a.d. 190. So that there is nothing in this to lead one to date 
1 Supemat. Rel. I. 423, 424, 425. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


401 


Matthew’s Gospel any earlier than the previous considerations 
may warrant. In rejecting- Paul, the Ebionites selected Pe¬ 
ter. Matthew’s Gospel does the same. But what knowledge 
any one had of Peter more than that his name had been asso¬ 
ciated with Iessaians, Nazoria and Ebionites for sometime it 
would be hard to say. 

Here we have Philo’s description of the prevalent sacred 
gnosis. “ To cover up and hide hidden mysteries in ordinary 
words under the pretext of a certain history and narration of 
visible things. Therefore an account of the visible creation is 
introduced, and the condition and hypothesis of a first Man. 
. . . But in a wonderful way the account of even the battles 

was arranged, a diversity descriptive of those now conquerors, 
now conquered, by which things certain unspeakable sacra¬ 
ments are declared to those who understand how to explore 
sayings of this sort. But also the Law of truth and the proph¬ 
ets is woven in with the Scripture of the Law through the 
admirable instruction of wisdom, which divine things have 
been each covered up by a certain art of wisdom, as if some in¬ 
vestment and concealment of spiritual meanings : and this is 
what we have called the corpus of Scripture; so that even 
through this that we have called ‘clothing of the writing’ 
woven by the art of wisdom many could construct and progress 
who could not do so by the mere words.”—Philo Judaeus. Of 
such seem to have consisted the writings of the scribes of the 
gnosis. 

The religious beliefs of all Europe are founded on tradi¬ 
tional conceptions of Oriental origin. Stuart-Glennie com¬ 
pares the ideal conceptions of the life, death and resurrection 
of Osiris or that of the soul and its Other-world progress to 
the region of sacred repose with such ideal conceptions as 
Universal Gravitation, Universal Attraction and Eternal Evo¬ 
lution. These ideas are as taking to some now as the Osiris- 
myth was in the centuries before our era. The earlier con¬ 
ceptions of Causation were ignorant! But they led, as in the 
case of the Adonis-myth, to the conception of a divine King, 
expected to come on earth as Osiris is said to have done. In 
this way minds got used to the expectation of the appearance 
of a divine personage on earth in human form to aid humanity 
in its straits. We see at this moment an instance of this habit 
of thought,—the belief in el Mahdi. As divine judge Osiris 
26 


402 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


appears, like Sabaoth Adonaios and the Messiah. Amon 1 and 
Thoth represent the divine Logos. The deceased calls on 
Osiris to save him from his accusers, from the Lake of Fire 
and his tormentors. 2 

“ The hierophant then taught them that there was one 
supreme cause of all, alike free from imperfection and change, 
who by his providence regulated the course of events through¬ 
out the universe.” 3 This of itself implies Osiris, who (as 
spiritus and logos) corresponds to the idea given out in psalms 
civ. 30, cxxxix. 7-13, Genesis, i. 2. The Semite priests, then, 
had taught that the spirit is the logical cause of all things. 
Thus Patah’s World-Egg in Egypt and the ‘Egg of Cyprus’ 
with a Bull on it represent the kosmos pervaded by spirit. 
The Bacchi bulls, Apis, Mnevis, and Iroboam’s bulls represent 
the vital spirit and Power of Osiris. These two leading sym¬ 
bols of Egyptian allegory, the bull and the cow, indicate, one, 
the divine spirit that begets, the other, the power that brings 
forth, 4 —the Wisdom in the moon. Hence the word Elohim 
means these dual powers in one ! The light surging from the 
water, the principle of fire receiving birth from the humid 
principle, such is the point of departure of the Egyptian 
mythology. 5 According to certain passages in the Book of 
the Dead the divine monad has lifted himself up as the light 
of the chaos, has commenced the great work of creation and 
has made of the kosmos his body or his dwelling place. 6 The 
Light has itself been the Creator who has suspended the 
heaven, erected the column of air, established the ground, hol¬ 
lowed under the earth the abyss of Tartarus 7 as his impene¬ 
trable mystery, and brought into existence the innumerable 
beings of creation. 8 Not enough allowance has been made for 

1 Kneph is about the same as Amon.—Baethgen, p. 63. Kneph in Hebrew means 
celatus, concealed, ablatus volatu.—Ign. Weitenauer, Hierolexicon, p. 143; so Baeth¬ 
gen, Sem. ReL 28, 29, 63. Amon is the concealed.—De Iside, 9. 

2 Stuart-Glennie, in Morningland, p. 369. Gabriel Angel of Fire; Herakles, King 
of Fire. Keb is Saturn in Egypt; Iaqab is Herakles the Akbar, Gabar. 

3 Essay by Dr. Hill of St. Andrews, quoted in Landseer, Sabaean Researches, 
p. 193. 

4 Pierret, Revue Egypt, p. 127. Light and Darkness are the two natures or prin¬ 
ciples in the philosophy of the Sethians, and in the centre between the two is the 
unmingled spirit.—Hippolytus, v. 19. 

8 ibid. p. 209. 

6 Compare Genesis, i. 2, 3. 

7 Enfer ; Hades, Sheol. 

8 Pierret, 129. The divine force resides in the bosom of primitive matter, and, in 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


403 


the mind of the East. Its speculations were cradled in the 
depths of the gnosis which runs with the Hebrew scriptures, 
as the inner, the ‘ Hidden Wisdom.’ 

Tammuz (Adon) was the Life-god (Iahoh, Iachi). Often 
killed, he returns to life.—Sayce, Hib. 239. Twice a year sea 
water was carried into the temple of the Great Syrian Goddess 
at Hierapolis and poured into a hole that was there (Baetligen, 
p. 74). The same thing took place also at Byblus (—Dunlap, 
Sod, I. 28; Lucian, De Dea Syria, 48). In like manner at 
Mazephat, between Jerusalem and Gibeon, the Ghebers (He¬ 
brews) poured out waters before Iahoh (the God of life, Adoni) 
and fasted.—1 Samuel, vii. 6. This was done in the midst of 
the Bal (Baal) and Astarta worship at Mazepha where Samuel 
was Judge of Asarel. This shows that the Jewish religion was 
pure Syrianism, the religion of Syria and the Levant. Com¬ 
pare Baethgen, p. 71-74. There seems to be no doubt that 
in the doctrine that the Male Deity and Female God were 
united in name and in essence (hermathene, Adonis without 
sex) was a direct movement towards monotheism in reasoning 
minds. Speaking of the assumption of Ata by the Female 
Deity, Baethgen, p. 74, says : “ The idea, which this universal 
deity-form (Gottergestalt) has called into life denotes a reaction 
against the plurality of the Gods and their sexual differentia¬ 
tion ; ” and he speaks of this as an effort after Unity within 
Semitic polytheism. Now we may regard the Hebrew Bible 
as the result of this striving after a certain degree of Divine 
Unity, together with a priestly effort to let into the temple 
(under the Angel-theory) those that were not yet Unitarians 
nor Mohammedans, not yet congregated under the flag of the 
Divine Unity ; but still disposed to regard the Powers on high 
as somewhat distributed among Powers, Gods, or Angels. The 


the Egyptian view, is inseparable from it.—Pierret, p. 127. All things were made by 
the Logos and without it was not anything that exists.—John, i. 1, 3. As to the 
“Darkness” of the Sethians;—the DemStSr Melaina, was anciently represented with 
the head of a horse. The black color means below earth. There was a horse-headed 
Gorgo.—Milchhoefer die Anfange der Kunst, 59, 60, 62. Mithra is a symbol of light 
and born also in the cave of darkness. A horse was his emblem, the Sun’s White 
Horse means the light of the Logos.—Rev. xix. 11-15. 

The spiritual nature preordained for certain salvation is stored up in Seth. —Ter- 
tull. vs. Valent, xxix. Seth’s position in Genesis is the very best. His name is a 
form of Sada, Saad (fire, Merkury) ; and He is very like Hermes, the Divine Wisdom 
personified. Josephus refers to the pillars of Seth in the land of Siris (the land Sirida). 
—Jos. Ant. I. 3. 3. 


404 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Phoenicians regarded all Gods as different forms of manifes¬ 
tation of one and the same Chief Deity.—Baethgen, 121. 

About the time of the Christian era and in a.d. 105 from 
Damaskus to Petra, into Middle Arabia and Sinai the Na- 
batheans adored Dionysus - Dusara. — Baethgen, Semit. Bel. 
91-101. The name Asara (Osara), which is Osiris, resembles 
Ousir and Usara, Osirian names. Du (meaning Lord) may 
have been prefixed to Sar (Asar); as Sar-Azar = Lord Azar, 
Asar. The Dusares-worship was in all the land east and south 
of the Israelite country. According to Suidas, the God’s form 
was a black, four cornered, unhewn stone which stood on a 
golden base.—Fr. Baethgen, Semit. Bel. 93; Wetzstein, Beise 
in Hauran, 113. This black stone, as an emblem, identifies 
him with the Arabian Saturn at Mecca, with the color (black) 
of Osiris, and with Dionysus in Hades. Dionysus was the 
Sun, having the pomegranate and (under the name Baal-Cham- 
man) grapes as symbols (—Baethgen, 95, 96, 97); and being 
the chief deity of theNabatheans, the manly God who breathes 
into the souls womanless life (Movers, I. 338, 339, quotes 
Marinus and Damasc. vita Isadori, in Photius, Bibl. p. 347). 
This has the look of Nazarene self-denial as well as Nabathean 
Dionysus-worship. Dionysus was called Elel.—Ovid, Met. iv. 
15. When we remember the Semite-Hebrew tendency from a 
to e (as Allah, Elah) we need not hesitate out of Elelat (the 
feminine of Dionysus) to collect the form Alilat. Alai will 
turn to Elel (Eliel); Alilat is the Ourania of Herodotus, III. 
8.—Baethgen, 97. Urotal is, then, the Semite firegod; and 
has the gkapes that Josephus mentions as among the symbols 
on the temple at Jerusalem. So that it is easily inferred that 
Adon, Asar, Dionysus, Seb, Dusares, Osiris, Saturn, Urotal 
and El are all names of Dionysus-Bel in Hades, mourned as 
Adon the Deathgod Adonis. Tanat was Artemis (Yirgo) and 
Yenus (Astarta), the Yirgo Celestial and Celestial Juno. Ta- 
nit was Mother and Spouse ; the face of Baal,—the Mighty 
Mother.—Baethgen, p. 58. The Nabathean worship of Dusares 
brings us near to the Jordan peoples as well as to the Osirian 
resemblances to Christianism in its earliest period. 

Zeus has carried Semele up to Olumpos 1 the Mother of Bakchos, 

And he will bring Dionusos into Aether.—Nonnus, xxxi. 231. 

1 Compare Oulom, time, eternity. Here we have Father, Son, and spiritns vitae; 
and the Virgin. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


405 


The Aitlier, the abode of Semele. 1 —Nonnus, xxxi. 255. 

The komos of Chthonian (Subterranean in Hades) Luaios!—Nonnus, xxxi. 
149. 

Dionysus having life’s end the again-recalled commencement.—Nonnus, vi. 

175. 

Homage to thee, Ra, the beetle 2 that folds his wings, that rests in the em¬ 
pyrean, that is born as his own son. 

The scarabaeus which enters life as its own son. 3 


Here we have the Melqart-Astarta, the Hermathene Adon. 
See Baethgen, 39, 40, 47, 48, 72. 


Towards thee too Aides was merciful, and for thee She, 

Persephone, altered her savage, eager desire, 

And thee, a mummy, restored to life 4 for brother Dionysus. 

You did not die as died Atumnios ; nor water of Styx 

Nor Tisiplione’s fire nor Megaira’s eye didst thou see.—Nonnus xii. 235-240. 

You have all the form of Zagreus; but do you grant 

A lately-performed boon to him from whom you sprung; 

For you rose up from the heart of the primal Dionysus so celebrated in song. 
—Nonnus, xxiv. 47-49. 

As mortal, and weaving traps, Dionysus concealed an immortal shape.— 
Nonnus, x. 195. 

But along the neighboring plain of law-administering Beroe, 

Ye Lebanon 5 Muses, chant the hymn of Amumone, 

And of sea ruler Kronides and of the well-hymned Redeemer 6 
The war of waves and the strife of the vine.—Nonnus, xli. 13. 

Dionysus, Guardian of the human race. 

And God twines about his locks as crown 
A reptile lying upon the dark-colored ivy, 

Having a snaky mitre, a sign of his Youth.—Nonnus, vii. 99. 

1 We see that the word Semal makes, as name of the moon, the feminine Semele. 

2 khepr. Maspero calls the scarabaeus khopirrou, khopri, from the root khoprou 
to become, devenir, to come into existence. 

3 The scarabaeus was once regarded as self-produced. It symbolises generation 
and a father, because it is engendered by the father alone. Khepr was said to form his 
own body continually from self-originated substance, and the father acts as if he were 
the gestator and bringer forth of the child before the time of lying-in. Taht the lunar 
God is called the self-created, the never born. The beetle was a lunar emblem before 
it was assigned to the solar god.—G. Massey, I. 119, 193. But we have already Diony¬ 
sus as lunar divinity with the horns.—Nonnus, ix. 

4 Zogreo (Zoe and ageiro) a word used of the resurrection of the dead. In Hebrew 
we have Zakar, the male principle of life, of which the Greeks made Zagreus. We see 
Iozachar.—2 Kings, xii. 21. 

5 Nonnus, xxxi. 203, places the Syrian AphroditS alone, deserted, sitting on the 
Lebanon. Compare her image of jealousy.—Ezekiel, viii. 5. 

6 Luaios. “ The first altar is of Dionysus, called Saviour ”... “ Dionysus SaotSs.” 
—Pausanias, Cor. xxxi. xxxvii. 


406 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


And him She restored to life : and to the long eyes 
Of the long-haired Redeemer allotted such youth— 

If ever mortal womb bore so youthful a form !—Nonnus, xxxv. 338-340. 
And about the southern isthmus of the heart-gladdening earth 
Unto the southern surf are sandy paths 
To the land of Sidon where the variety of garden trees 
And the grape-bunches adorn : and with spreading branches 
The thick-shaded strip extends for wayfarers that cannot miss the road. — 
Nonnus, xxi. 41-44. 

Alexander Balas, about 153, sent Ionathan the purple and 
the diadem and made him Highpriest. About the year 143 be¬ 
fore Christ the Highpriest Ionathan received the golden crown 
of Ierusalem from the Syrian king. In 142 the Jews began a 
new era ; and in 131 Hurkan rendered them for ever indepen¬ 
dent of Syria and conquered Edom. 1 From 143 to 130 the 
Jewish priests conceived hopes of increasing their territory. 
They then had a motive for writing Sacred Books which should 
lay claim to all Palestine and bring crowds from other cities 
to the Temple at Ierusalem. 2 Not far from B.c. 162 Judas 
Makkabaeus had marched against the Idumeans (Edom) and 
had destroyed Hebron and surprised Asdod.—Schiirer, Gesch. 
d. Jiidischen Volkes, I. p. 164. About B.c. 142-143, they dated 
records and contracts from the years of Simon, Highpriest and 
Prince of the Jews.—Schiirer, p. 191. 

At this time (b.c. 150-145 about) says Joseph Salvador, 3 a 
sect grew up which, setting out from the principle that the 
observances of the Law had for their object to serve as a ram¬ 
part to the Law, multiplied the practices in order to oppose a 
barrier to the moral influence of the strangers, and then in¬ 
creased its rigorism to grasp the power: it is the sect of Phari¬ 
sees. Another refuses to accept the mass of traditions that 
the Pharisees distributed, wishes to stay in the primitive doc¬ 
trine and repulses the foreign opinions admitted by the Phari¬ 
sees themselves : these are the Sadukeans. A third finding 
neither calm nor repose in the actual status of the nations 
throws itself into a spiritual world sheltered from the shock of 
armies, from intestine discords and from ravage: it is the sect of 
Essaeans or Essenes, principal source of Christianism. Sadok, 
disciple of Antigonus of Socho, had laid the foundations of 

1 Munk, Palestine, 504-511, 527. 

2 Micah, iv. 2 ; psalm, ii. 6. 

3 Hist, des institut. de Moise et du peuple Hebreu, II. liv. vi. chap. 111. 


BEFORE ANTIOGH. 


407 


Sadukeism towards the middle of the third century before the 
vulgar era, and his doctrine austere seems to present some pale 
reflections of that of the Stoics. 1 The Soferim (Scribes), under 
the Ptolemies, obtained gradually more and more influence 
over the country people in small places. The Scribes, 2 who 
strictly observed the regulations that they had amplified and 
spun out (vide Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), and their 
few imitators were called Chasidim (the Pious). Those who 
lived according to their own convictions and did not go to the 
same extremes did not like the Chasidim, partly on account 
of their great popularity with the people. The Chasidim would 
have nothing to do with those that refused to observe their 
laws regarding purification or failed to pay punctually the 
Hebe and tithes, and would not eat with them. Hence they 
were called Perushim (the Separate), but their opponents 
called themselves Zadikim, the Just. Later, when this became 
a Sectarian name, it was changed into Zedukim. 3 The Phari¬ 
sees fell heir to the laws, institutions, and views from Ezra 
down. 4 

Josephus, Ant. IV. 6. 2 lays down the principle that the He¬ 
brews were not concerned about other land, the God having 
forbidden (them), having got the land of (the) Khananites. But 
the land of the Khananites (Phoenicians) was what the Ghe- 
bers of Hebron had been hankering after, according to Gene¬ 
sis, ix. 26, 27 and Joshua. Josephus, being a member of the 
priesthood, laid down the doctrine that the God favored the 
Hebrews (of Hebron).—ibid. 6. 2. For (as at Delphi, Com¬ 
pare Jos. IV. 7. 2) Balaam had inquired of the Lord his inten¬ 
sions.—Numb. xxii. 8, 9, 12. Numbers, xxiii. 1, 14, 29 indicates 
the connection between Babylon and the Jordan in the wor¬ 
ship of the Seven Planets (on seven altars) under the subline 
government of One Divine Logos (according to the Mithrawor- 
ship) who was the Son of the unit or primal cause. Now this 
all looks late enough to be of the same date as B.c. 100. When 
Josephus, Ant. IV. 6. 4 declares that “the inhabited” (part of 
the known world) “ lies before you as a place of habitation in 
(all) time and you shall live both in islands and on the main- 

1 Eug. Gellion-Danglar, les Semites, 34. 

2 Schriftgelehrten, divines. 

3 Seceders (?), or 1 Those placed after’ (?). 

4 Vide Dr. L. Herzfeld, Gesch. d. Volk. Israel, pp. 399, 400. 


408 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


land in number and gathering more than the stars in heaven ” 
he not only had in view Numbers xxiii. 10, xxiv. 7, 14, 24, but 
also the existing Diaspora “ Iaudim ” in Egypt, Cyrene, Rome, 
the Isles of Greece, Antioch, Nisibis, East of the Jordan, Cy¬ 
prus, Assyria, Mesopotamia and Arabia. The prophecy does 
not seem to have preceded the fulfilment thereof. Such appears 
to be history. All agrees with the status in times posterior to 
the year B.c. 166; even the prophetic style of speaking is 
merely an oratorical device transferred from the usage of the 
priests to the pages of scripture and metamorphosed history. 
Moreover, it is a general principle that the latest edition of 
the oriental Sacred Books reflects the latest period of oriental 
thought before our era,—even in the case of some of the 
later Zoroastrian writings. 

The fourth book of Josephus gives the polity of the Sanhedrin 
(or the Government, Jos. IV., chapters vii., viii.); a regular Jew¬ 
ish orthodox polity (in which the goats had a better chance 
than the sheep) ad ultra against the outside neighbors. The 
Ghebrews or ’Hebrews were “ to be obedient to those whom the 
God wills you to follow, not to prefer another code of laws 
than the existing one, nor to change to another form of re¬ 
ligion.”—Jos. Ant. IV. 8. 2. They were well tied up. That is 
the only way the later Christian fathers held that the ol ttoWol 
could be kept within bounds—only by force. And the world 
has always kept them so. Because society can only protect 
its members in their rights of property by a due exercise of 
force. 

The fifth book opens with a miracle (in the priestly style). 
The Jordan is at times easily fordable. But Josephus, Ant. V. 
1. 3 says that the river became fordable as soon as the priests 
entered it, and after all had forded the priests let the stream 
go as usual. What is to be noticed is that the Khananites 
occupied the land (V. 1. 4) and that the Ghebers (Hebrews) 
harvested their grain ; also that Joshua kept the Seventh Day, 
showing that the Seven Planets were kept holy as in the year 
B.c. 100, the Seventh Day being sacred (Satur-day) to Saturn. 
This was late Sabian usage, as Chwolsohn testifies concerning 
the Seven Planets. Josephus, Ant. V. 2. prophesies according 
to the will of the God to deliver the Hegemone (leadership) to the 
tribe Iouda (the Iaudi) for the extermination of the race of the 
Khananites ; and not being at first able to take Iebus, they 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


409 


transferred their camp to Kliebron (Hebron). Unfortunately 
for this story, Dauid was king in Khebron (Hebron—2 Samuel, 
ii. 11; y. 1) and had not yet got possession of Iebus (Ierusalem). 
—2 Sam. y. 6, 7, 13. That is, they did not get Jerusalem for 
nearly 400 years ; and the Moabites (Jos. Y. iv. 1) were entirely 
independent of the Iaudi, being at war with them. But it was 
easy to describe the conquest of Khanan and the Transjordan 
districts, whether it happened or not. Almost anything can be 
put down on paper. 

We find in Arabia the name Aud, and the Audites. Judg¬ 
ing from their name, they worshipped the “ blood-besprinkled 
Aud.” Jews (Iandi) sprinkled the blood on the altars of 
(Audah or) Ieudah. 1 The Moabite Stone shows that Moab was 
independent of Judea in circa 900 before Christ. As a result of 
the successes of the Makkabee leaders of the native element 
(as opposed to the Hellenic party) among the Jews, they had 
acquired Ekron, Joppa and Asdod, and the Jewish State was 
(for the first time during a very long period) in a prosperous 
condition. Having been gaining in power since the death of 
Judas Makkabeus, this state of things was expected to con¬ 
tinue, and as might be expected preparations were made with 
a view to further aggrandizement. This is seen in the Jewish 
topography (extending to the parts around Tyre) as laid down 
in the Book of Joshua. It was politic in making further 
claims, to assert previous rights of possession. From this 
point of view the Books of Moses and Joshua become intelli¬ 
gible as an assertion of the Jewish right to as much more ter¬ 
ritory as they wanted (as far as Tyre, Sidon, Hamath), basing 
their claims upon a prior right of which evidence was offered 
in books written by themselves, and apparently at a very re¬ 
cent date. After Simon Makkabeus, (b.c. 142) the Highpriest 
and Prince of the Jews, succeeded his brother Jonathan, freedom 
from Syrian rule was obtained.—Schiirer, I. 191: “ The yoke of 
the heathen was taken from Israel.” This was the time, if 
ever, to substantiate the claims to independence by making a 
big biblion,—a 4 Record of the Past ’ to which all nations should 
turn for such information regarding its antiquity that Judaism 
or the Jewish State was prepared to give,—under the superin¬ 
tendence of a Highpriest. But, according to Schiirer, I. 211, 

1 Od was the name of an altar just beyond Jordan.—Joshua, xxii. 23-25, 27-29, 33, 
34. Od also means a witness. 


410 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


219, Judea’s independence of Syria was again substantiated 
after b.c. 128 ; and the conquest of Samaria was made between 
b.c. Ill and 107. Comparing the territorial claims in the Book 
of Joshua 1 with the political position in B.c. 107, the Penta¬ 
teuch and Joshua are not older than B.c. 100. With these con¬ 
quests we may connect the importance that the Jews attached 
to a conquering Massiach, king or leader. Zeal for the Mosaic 
Law had its vital source 2 in the expectation of a Messiah. 
Zeal for the Law (by a Legal course of life the effort was made 
to become worthy of the Grace of God which was the thought 
mainly to be manifested in future and further off) and Messianic 
hope are thus the two central points about which the life of the 
Israelites was in movement. 3 The doctrine of the Mediator and 


1 In 84-81 before Christ Alexander Iannaeus took on the east of the Jordan Pella, 
Dium, Gerasa, Gaulana, Seleucia, and the fortress Gamala. In the south, the Idume- 
ans were subjected and judaised. In the north, Alexander’s power extended to Seleu¬ 
cia on Lake Merom. The seacoast, on which formerly Joppa had been the first acquisi¬ 
tion of the Makkabees, was now nearly all under the rule of the Jews. All seacoast 
cities from the borders of Egypt to Carmel were conquered by Alexander, and he 
governed beyond Jordan from Lake Merom to the Dead Sea.—Schurer, I. 226, 228, 240. 
This is about the position described in Joshua, xii. 1 ; xiii. 5, 6, 9, 10-21, 25-28, 29-32 ; 
xix. 28, 29 ; xx. 7, 8 ; xxi. 6, 27, 30 ; xxii. 7 ; xxiii. 4, 6, 7. Is there any doubt that, as 
fast as Alexander Jannaeus’ conquests were extended on the north and northeast, the 
land carte of Joshua was kept up to the standard of his successes by the Temple scribes ? 
Probably not. 

2 Lebensnerv. The whole plan of the Books of Moses and Joshua is political. It 
is a scheme of further Jerusalem conquests in Phoenicia, Arabia and Philistia, and the 
word Hamath left the Government policy open, which of the two Hamaths, the nearer 
or the more remote, on the Orontes, it might be desirable to go for, at a future time. 
But the gnosis in Genesis is evidently of even date with the book itself,—not long prior 
to b.c. 100. The conquests by Aristobulus in Ituraea and Galilee were in b.c. 104- 
105.—Schurer, I. 219. Gadara (Gad), Amatlius, and Gaza had been taken by the Jews, 
by the year b.c. 96.—ibid. 222. Soon after, the Galaad and Moab were made tribu¬ 
tary by Alexander Jannaeus.—ib. 224. Had the Jews ever held Moab previously ? 

3 D. Emil Schurer, I. p. 4. Diogenes Laertius (Prooem. vi.) shows that the Magi 
held the doctrine of the two principles (good demon and evil demon), that the Gymno- 
sophists are descendants of the Magi, and that the Jews are (some say) derived from 
them. So u Mankind,” p. 451. 

The expectation of the Messiah, under frequently modified aspects, had formed a 
living part in the religion of Israel. Primitive Christianity, reviving and recasting 
this ancient hope, was only distinguished from Judaism, with whose worship it contin¬ 
ued in all points united, by a single doctrine, which did not in itself pass beyond the 
limits of the national religion : the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ, the 
promised Messiah. This was substantially the whole of its creed. The Synoptic Gos¬ 
pels, and more especially the first, are clearly a history of Jesus as the Messiah of the 
house of David so long announced and expected, and whose life and even his death 
and resurrection are shown to be the fulfilment of a series of Old Testament prophe¬ 
cies.—Supernat. Religion, III. 116, 117; Matthew, i. 1, 17, 18. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


411 


Reconciler was obtained from Persia, where Mithra had these 
attributes, whence arose the idea of a Redeemer of the world 
called Sosiosh, who will appear at the End of the times on a fiery 
horse. They said that he was a descendant of Zoroaster. Ac¬ 
quainted with the Persian-Zoroastrian religious system, the 
Jews first in the Book of Daniel exhibit more decided indica¬ 
tions of a future reign of the Messiah. Schottgen says : Who is 
not offended by the word Kabalah but considers the subject 
justly, will rightly say that many Kabalist passages are in the 
New Covenant. Landauer reminds us that just the ideas of 
the Sohar which appear to us now as Christian go to prove the 
high antiquity of its doctrines. They must have had their ori¬ 
gin at a time when they had not yet the Christian application, 
but belonged with others, that we now call Jewish, to the Jew¬ 
ish Secret Doctrine (the Hidden Wisdom).—Nork, Introd. to 
“ Rabbinische Stellen und Parallelen,” pp. iii.-vi. 

At Mithra’s birth the three Magi are present at the couch, 
also the ox and ass are there. “ Agnovit bos et asinus quod 
puer erat Dominus.” The ox and ass knew that the Boy 
was the Lord! The three Wise men bring presents to the 
new-born God. They bring gold (the Sun’s emblem) to the 
Christ. 1 Mithra was. represented with 7 rays and 7 altars.— 
Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 178, 180; Numbers, xxiii. 1, 2, 
14; Rev. i. 12, 13, 16. In the account of the birth of Zerdusht 
(Zoroaster), his mother has a frightful dream which an inter¬ 
preter of dreams (like Ioseph.—Gen. xl. 8) interprets that she 
shall bear a son who will be called Blessed Zoroaster. Luke, 
i. 31, has “ Thou wilt bear a son ; ” Matthew, i. 21, has “ She 
will bring forth a son.” It was the habit in those days to dis¬ 
cover in men remarkable for an unusual degree of wisdom and 
penetration traces of the supernatural. 2 Duranserun, head of 
the Magians, tries to kill the Infant, but could not. In Zer- 
dusht-Nameh, cap. 37, the Wise men get round Zoroaster and 
are astonished at his penetration and the answers he makes to 
the questions they put. The same story substantially is sug¬ 
gested in Luke, ii. 46, 47. Zoroaster walks on the water 

1 Nork, Myth. d. alt. Perser, 76, and titelkupfer; Matthew, ii. 11. 

2 In order to exhibit to the ignorant classes the appearance of a divine sanction to 
the priestly law and sway it was necessary to appeal to miraculous evidence. Compare 
the Giving of the Law on Sinai amid thunders and lightnings. Miracle was the recog¬ 
nised accompaniment of divine Law and rule.—Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy¬ 
self : I Iahoh.—Levit. xix. 18. 


412 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(Zerdusht-Nam. 16), the Healer does the same thing, Matthew, 
xiv. 25, 26. Zoroaster fasted a long time in the Desert before 
he carried the Law of Ahura-Mazda to the Arians ; the Healer 
was 40 days fasting in the Desert and hungry ; but he thrusts 
a text of scripture into the Adversary, and overcomes both 
hunger and the Devil. In Zerdusht-Nameh, 26, Zoroaster 
meets Aliriman in Hell, who says : Give up the Pure Law and 
you shall have in the world all that your heart can desire. 
Here we find the Persian Law; and the Jews too had their 
Law ; in Luke, iv. 5, 6 the Adversary (Diable) offers the Healer 
all the kingdoms of the world with all the power and glory of 
them, to tempt him. But the Nazorene (after Titus) expected 
the end of the world! The Adversary only offered him chaff 
and fire. Zoroaster came forth against the false Magians ; the 
Healer went out against the Pharisees} Blindness has partly 
happened to the Israel until the complement of the foreigners 
should come in, and so all Israel shall be saved, as is written : 
Prom Sion the Savior shall come.—Homans, xi. 25, 26 ; Ps. ii. 
2, 6 ; lxix. 35. This psalm has a late aspect. But the Christians 
and Jews of the Second Century could quote it against the 
Homans. The Nazorenes of the Jordan and Arabia were initi¬ 
ated into the Mithra-Mysteries, since they kept the Sacred 
Supper.—Compare Justin Martyr, I. 66 ; Hammer, 161; Dun¬ 
lap, Sod, II. 120. As representative of Ahura Mazda, Mithra 
taught in the Chaldean Mithriaca the resurrection of souls 
through fire-lustrations and water-baptisms.—Movers, Phoni- 
zier, I. 391. 

Budhist tradition is a comparatively late deposit of ances- 
torial wisdom. We know of no Medes without Magi. Already 
since B.c. 711 the Magi are connected with an old-established 
institution ; while in the Book of Daniel the Magi are identi¬ 
fied with the Chaldaeans. A considerable part of the Budhist 
legends transmitted to us by the most ancient Budhist litera¬ 
ture may be safely asserted to date back to pre-Christian 
times. Among these legends, says Ernest de Bunsen, pp. 
1-18, the most ancient are those which refer to the incarnation 
of Budha, as Angel-Messiah. The Divine Wisdom, personified 
by the heavenly Budha becomes man, according to Iranian tra¬ 
dition, and it had a pre-mundane personal existence according 
to Zoroastrian and Budhist records. Owing to this Divine 

1 F. Nork, My then d. alten Perser, 68-70. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


413 


Power in the incarnate Budha he can pray to the highest Spirit 
and be at one with him. In the assumed but uncertain year of 
Budha’s birth, B.c. 625, in the latitude of Benares, on the 25th 
of December, at midnight, the birth of the Anointed One was 
expected. The sign Yirgo was certainly rising on the horizon 
at midnight December 25th in the year b.c. 625, as seen in the 
latitude of Budha’s birthplace.—Bunsen, 20, 23. The symbol¬ 
ism of the sphere on Christmas-day points to Isis with the 
infant Horus, to the virgin Maya with her infant Budha, 1 to the 
Virgin Maria with the infant Healer 2 fleeing for safety into 
the Desert from the Serpent that on the sphere follows Virgo. 
—Bunsen, 24; Rev. xii. 1-6, 10, 13, 14. The prophet Hosea, 
xi. 1, said : For a boy (was) Israel and I loved him, and out of 
Mazraim I called to my son. Hosea uses the expression, 
“ son,” of the boy Israel. Matthew ii. 15, applies the word 
“ son ” not to Israel in Egypt, as Hosea does, but to the Healer 
Iesous. The Ebionite Nazarenes in the fourth century used a 
Gospel of Matthew which contained an account of the super¬ 
natural conception and birth of Iesou.—Library of Univ. 
Knowledge, V. p. 236. But Tertullian distinctly says that 
Ebion (Ebionites) considers Jesus a mere man, only a descend¬ 
ant of Dauid, not the Son of God. 

In ancient Osirianism as in modern Christianism, we find the 
worship of a divine Mother and Child, a doctrine of Atonement, 
the vision of the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the 
body of the mummy. These resemblances arise out of the 
evolution of Christianity from the Adonis-Osiris belief. The 
whole doctrine of modern orthodoxy appears but a transfor¬ 
mation of the Osiris-myth. Zoroastrianism and Osirianism are 
the missing links between Christianity and the past! Only in 
the moral spirit of Christianity is there a change, but this in 
no way affects the objective validity of the myths in which it 
is expressed. These continue to be but a language ; a language 
in which other sentiments were expressed before Christianity; 
and a language which, after Christianity, will still survive for 
the expression of ideal emotion . 3 The oriental doctrine was that 

1 called ‘ the great physician’—E. de Bunsen, p. 20. 

2 The Baptist Sabians or disciples of John (according to Bunsen, Angel-Messiah, 
114, 115) regarded Igsous as the incarnation of the Angel-Messiah. This is Christian 
Gnosticism. Compare Elxai and the Mandaites : That Christ is the spirit, transfused 
into many bodies ; and now in Iesus —Bunsen, 116 ; Hippolytus, x. 29. 

3 Stuart-Glennie, p. 377, 378. 


414 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tlie Bun is the Saviour (—Julian, Y. 173) the Raiser of Souls 
to heaven, and that there are Solar Angels.—ib. IY. 141, Y. 173. 

In the sacred hymns of the Osiris they call upon Him who is concealed in 
the arms of the Sun. 1 —delside, 52. 

The Sun sees the pure vault of heaven.—Cory, Ancient Fragments, p. 2G6. 

In sole tabernaculum suum posuit.—Vulgate psalm, xix. 4. 2 

In the sun He placed His tent.—Septuagint psalm, xix. 6. 

The festivals of the birth of Mithra and Christmas were cele¬ 
brated the same day. The Nazorenes were evidently a sect 
established in reference to the adoption of Essene morals and 
rules of life, communism and selfdenial. In their hope for 
the Messiah’s kingdom they were supported by Matthew, xvi. 
27, 28 : 

For the Son of the Man is about to come in the glory of his Father. 

Verily I say to you that there are some of those standing here who shall not 
taste of death until they see the Son of the Man coming in his Kingdom! 

Watch then, because ye know not in what hour your Lord comes!—xxiv. 
42. 

Gathering them together he directed them not to depart from Ierusalem but 
to await the summons of the Father which ye have heard of me. For Ioannes 
baptised in water, but you shall be baptised in Holy Spirit after not many days. 
Then they came and asked him, saying : Lord, will you reinstate the kingdom 3 
for the Israel ? 

In Rev. xxi. 23 the New Jerusalem has no need of the sun 
or the moon to light it, for the Glory of the God lights it, 
and its Light is the Lamb. But this idea is borrowed from 
the Mithra Mysteries, where the Glory of the Lord lights all 
with its radiance. Plutarch, de Iside, 45, 46, says that the 
most ancient opinion was Dualism, that is, two principles,— 
one the origin of evil, the other of good ; one called Demon, 
the other Deus. So Zoroastris the Magos held, who regarded 
Mithra as Mesites (Mediator) between Auramasda and Areima- 

1 Osiris and Mithra represented the Sun. The Mithra-worship was carried to Rome 
about B.c. 67.—Nork, Mythen d. alt. Perser, p. 80. 

2 So also Septuagint psalm xix. 4, and Numbers, xxv. 4. So that the Bible has the 
Osirian creed. 

3 The king of Israel, in Matthew, xxvii. 42, is a reference to the Jewish monarchy. 
The Jews were still harping on Jerusalem !—Acts, i. 4-8. It is clear that Acts, i. is 
posterior to Jerusalem’s destruction in a.d. 70. It results from Julian, Orat. IV. and 
V., and from the doctrine of Chaldaeans, Sabians, Samaritans and Jews that when 
Saturninus spoke of the Soter, or Salvator, he understood the Sun, the King, Massi- 
acha, and Saviour. According to Irenaeus, I. xxii., he does not mention Iesu. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


415 


nios. The Persians called Mithras the Mediator. He medi¬ 
ates between Light and Darkness. The later Mithras-Mysteries 
were celebrated, np to the time when they ceased, in dark 
caverns or temples where daylight never entered and only 
twilight reigned. Mithra is of double gender, by the image of 
fire exhibiting both sexes.—Jul. Firmicus Maternus, d'e Errore 
prof. rel. 5. Genesis, ii. 23 gives this division of fire (as, ash) 
into “ As ” and ‘ Asah,’ male fire and female fire, just as it ex¬ 
ists in the Adonis worship and the Mithra-worship. In the 
fight against Darkness (Rev. xx. 2, 3) Mithra gains the victory 
of the Kingdom of Light and quicker brings about the recon¬ 
ciliation between Auramasda and Ahriman; thus is a genuine 
Mediator to both. He is then Mithras and Mitra, procreative 
and birth-giving principle in One Person, the Primal Deity 
raised above Auramasda and Ahriman (compare, Job, ii. 1), the 
conqueror of death and of sin, and who follows him will go with 
him into the kingdom of light and peace, where no sun nor 
moon doth shine but the glory of the Lord lights all with its 
radiance. The ritual of the consecration in the Mithra-Mys- 
teries was the symbol of the contest which the worshipper of 
Mithra had, as Auramasda’s servant against Ahriman and his 
devils, to conduct. Therefore there was a gradation of trials 
increasing in severity until the consecration through the sym¬ 
bol of water baptism was the sign that the Mystae were now 
purified from all evil and worthy to enter into the kingdom of 
Light. — Nork, Mythen, p. 86. Compare Matthew, xix. 23; 
xxv. 21 : “ Enter into the kingdom of the heavens ” ; “ Enter 
into the joy of thy Lord.” Besides the water-baptism there 
was the Confirmation of the worshippers in the Mithra-Mys- 
teries (Tertullian says Mithras signat in fronte milites suos) 
and the celebration of the sacred supper, at which bread and a 
cup were set before the Mystae,—which is genuinely Persian. 
—Nork, 88. Since Antoninus Pius (about a.d. 138-160) built 
in Coelesyria the great temple of the sun at Balbeck, the wor¬ 
ship of the SUN at Antioch was still in vogue in a.d. 110-120, and 
the Mithra worship was along the Jordan and in Nabathea, 
when the Nazoria still continued to be the Nazorenes of their 
Mithrabaptist instructors, “ over the Jordan where IocAan was 
baptizing.” The Pharisees and the teachers of the Law had 
not been baptized by Iochan.—Luke, vii. 30. As the Sadukees 
were few in number, and the Pharisees were greatly in the 


416 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


majority, it follows that the multitudes at the Jordan must 
have been Jordan Mithra worshippers, as none of the Phari¬ 
sees were baptized. So that the Gospels and Codex Nazoria 
describe the Aramean Nazorines. “ From whence was the 
Baptism of Ioc/mn ” if it was so hostile to the Pharisees that 
IocAan had not baptized them ? It is more than probable that, 
after the destruction of Jerusalem, the power of the Pharisees 
was gone and the Jordan, Transjordan, and Nabathean Nazb- 
renes came to the front. By combining the Essene-Iessaean 
self-denial and morale with the Ebionite adherence to the Law 
of Moses and to the Prophets we arrive at the protoplasm of 
the Gospel of Matthew, v. vi. vii. 12 ; viii. 17. 

By adding Mithrabaptism (Matth. iii. 13,16,17) we connect 
the Apokalypse with Mithra and the Evangels. Mithra was 
regarded as closely connected to that Hidden Wisdom that, in 
Proverbs, viii. was before all worlds,—“ Mithra and Yaruna,” 
Mithra and Saturn, the God of the earth. Saturninus held 
that the God of the Jews was the Chief of the angels, for whose 
imperfect laws [the laws of Moses] the purifying principles of 
asceticism were to be substituted, by which the Children of 
Light were to be re-united to the source of light. Basileides 
favored a fusion of the ancient sacerdotal religion of Egypt 
with the ‘ angel and demon ’ theory of the Persians.—Milman, 
p. 210. The Persians when they conquered Egypt brought their 
Mithra with them. From the Mitlira-baptism (the Mithra- 
worship noticed in Persia and the Yedic hymns) in the Tigris, 
Euphrates and Jordan sprung such personages as John the 
-Baptist and the Southern Nazoria , as did the Christian Nazo- 
renes between Antioch and the Dead Sea,—two streams, that 
had their beginning in one 1 grand source, Chaldaea, Nabathea 2 

1 Chaldeans, Persians, and, more than others, the Sabaeans were addicted to the 
Nabathean Religion. The people of Saba, Chaldaeans, Nabatheans, and the people of 
Charran (Harran) are regarded by the Arabian writers as the same in their rites, cere¬ 
monies, and general superstition.—Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 28, 29, 82. Josephus, Ant. 
xiii. 5. 9, carries the sect of the Essenes to B.C. 145. 

2 Ebionites had the Opinion of the Nazorenes, the form of the Kerinthians (who 
fable that the world was put together by Angels) and the appellation of Christians ; and 
having been conjoined to the Nazorenes, each imparted to the other out of his own 
wickedness and decided that Christ was of the seed of a man.—Epiphanius, contra 
Ebionitas, xxx. 13. The Ebionites were instructed by the Nazarenes. And I am not 
sure whether our Nazarenes also were not disciples of the Gnostics. The name is 
the same. It is ancient, and the name of a nation. The name Nabatheans was added 
later: which was taken from the region thus named, situated between Syria and Egypt 
and a desert, and for a long period a spot sought by the Sect of the Ebionites and 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


417 


and tlie Jordan. This is the reason Justin Martyr (Dialogues, 
p. 87) was so much discomposed on account of the undeniable 
resemblance of the Mysteries of Iesua (the Saviour) to the 
Mysteries of Mithra, “ the king of the Glory, the Lord of the 
Powers.”—Justin, p. 50. The “ Magi from Arrabia ” found 
him in a manger, and Esaiah prophesied (so says Justin, p. 87) 

£ respecting the symbol of Him in the Grotto; ’ and Justin 
says that“ by these words those delivering the Mithra Myste¬ 
ries in a place called by them ‘ Grotto ’ are taught by them, 
and were put up by the Diable (Devil) to say it.” Here Justin 
admits that the resemblance between the Mysteries of Mithra 
and the Mystery of the Christ (as Paul has it) is undeniable ! 
Only he charges it to the machinations of the Evil Spirit, 
Satan. That was all he could say. Yet he could say (Trypho, 
p. 84) <e This saving mystery, that is, the suffering of the 
Anointed.” Were not the sufferings, the passion and decease, 
of Osiris too taught in the Egyptian Mysteries ? And was not 
the Mystery of Mithra known in Egypt also! 

A. Eranck says : We have no doubt that all important meta¬ 
physical and religious principles that make up the ground¬ 
work of the Kabbala are older than the Christian dogmas, to 
compare them with these is moreover beyond our purpose. 
Whatever sense one may connect with these principles, their 
form alone gives us the key to the explanation of a fact that, 
we consider, is of an important social and religious interest: 
a considerable number of Kabbalists have become converts to 
Christianity, among others Paul Eicci, Conrad Otto, Eittangel, 
the last editor of the Sefer Jezira, and the son of the famous 
Abravanel, Leo the Hebrew, the author of the “ Gesprache der 
Liebe.” Towards the close of the last century, Jacob Franck, 
a Pole, after he had founded the sect of the Soharites passed 
over with some thousands of his followers into the lap of 
Catholicism. Knorr von Eosenroth, Eeuclilin, and Eittangel, 
after he changed, have collected all passages of the Sohar and 

the Nation of Nazarenes, who have possession of it. They don’t differ. The cere¬ 
monies are the same. Their ancestors had the usage not to immolate victims, which 
their posterity also abstain from sacrificing : since evil Genii preside over the 12 Zodi¬ 
acal signs. Instead of sacrifice, the religion of Baptism was instituted.—Norberg, 
Preface to Codex Nazoria, v. Neither eat nor drink in reference to animals of the 12 
Zodiacal Constellations.—Codex Nazor. I. 34, 35,181 ; II. 253. The Nazarene Christians 
annoyed Paulus greatly about eating meat offered to idols Now there is a certain same¬ 
ness of ideas between the two prohibitions ; both being forms of idolatry at meals. 

27 


418 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the New Testament that have any resemblance between them, 
in the hope to break down the barriers that separate the Syna¬ 
gogue from the Church.—Gelinek, Franck, Die Kabbala, 249, 
250. Rabbi Simeon ben Iochai (about a.d. 90) delivered the ar¬ 
cana of divinity and distinctly and most clearly makes known 
the mystery of the divine trinity.—Petr. Galatinus, de Arcanis, 
p. xiiii. anno mdxviii. Simon ben Iochai died in the begin¬ 
ning of the 2nd century of our era.—Gelinek’s Franck, die 
Kabbala, p. 70. 

When the Kabbala says that “ no substance has come out 
of absolute nothing; (that) all which exists has had its ori¬ 
gin in an eternal source of light, in God ” it speaks the lan¬ 
guage and utters the cherished doctrine of the oriental gnosis. 
S. Munk has seen the Kabbalist ideas in our New Testament, 
traces the doctrines of the Kabbalah to the Exile, and, says 
(Munk, Palest. 520) : “ This science chimerical, which offers a 
sad spectacle of the bewilderments of the human spirit, has 
doubtless been drawn from the superstitions of the Orient dur¬ 
ing and after the Exile to Babylon; some of the Apocryphal 
Books of the Old Testament, as well as the Evangels, the 
Acts of the Apostles and the Talmud offer numerous traces of 
it.” It was not necessary for the distinguished author to have 
gone so far back as the Exile for the Kabbalist Tradition. It is 
in the Old Testament and pervades the Palestine Scriptures of 
the first two centuries of our era. But think of the preaching 
of this Kabbalist gnosis in the first centuries of Christianism, 
supported by Romanists, imported with the Reformation into 
Holland, England, and borne into New England and the New 
Netherlands—the East in the West. We now have an oppor¬ 
tunity to reduce a world of fiction to the world of fact,—a 
chance to upset the Alexandrian system of Allegorical Inter¬ 
pretation, to read again Moses as he was originally read at 
home, and to let the Light of the Gnosis clearly appear. Like 
Munk, we admit that the oriental speculation has all been 
wrong in Judaism, Philonism, Alexandrian Gnosis, Jordanism, 
Kabalist and Christian Gnosis. Let the dead bury its dead, 
and let us find out truth by a better study of the materials that 
Nature offers, and by rejecting equally gnosis and superstition 
and mere oriental imagination and baseless dreams. Human 
life has wandered down to us from among the Ages. Accept 
its progress, slough off its errors. The theological opinions of 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


419 


the past are no guide to the future, even if they help us to 
know the past and present errors. 

The Hindus had the tonsure (the shaving the sun’s circle 
on the top of the head) for the Brahman caste, the shaving 
all the head of the Kshatriya caste excepting a tuft , 1 the shorn 
head for the Yaisya caste, and the long hair for the coenobite, 
the fakir . 2 See the Arabian worshipper of Dionysus equally 
shorn with the other Aethiopians. “ The shaving of the hair 
of the Arabians is performed, they say, just as the Dionysus 
himself is shorn; and they are shaved Trepn-po'xaAa (round the 
sphere, or poll) shaving-around the temples (or heads).” 3 
Thus we have an agreement in this custom of the Dionysus- 
followers extending through Arabia from India to Egypt and 
Syria. The ascetics of India had the hair long, as did the 
Hebrew Nazers, or Nazarenes . 4 The Sanyassis kept their 
hair! The Hindus had their magic formulas, like the Chal- 
daeans and Jews, addressed to evil spirits; they believed in 
the being possessed by devils , 5 which belief is reproduced in 
the narratives of the evangelists. The Hindus had also the 
usage of marrying a brother’s widow to raise up seed to the 
deceased , 6 which is an Eastern custom derived directly to the 
Jews . 7 It seems, too, that, like the Arabs, Egyptians and Jews, 
the Hindus had the custom of circumcision 8 and the Sacrifices 
and Feasts of the dead . 9 

ceux qui ont ete circoncis et qui se trouvent ainsi rejetes dans la classe im¬ 
pure des tschandalas.—Jacolliot, Manou, p. 145. 

Every head shaven, every shoulder denuded of hair.—Ezekiel, xxix. 18. 

tVa j-vp-fiffovrai tV Ke(pa\4)v. —Acts, xxi. 24. 

This shaving (karcha, karecha), so common in Araby, was pro¬ 
hibited by the Temple . 10 

1 Apollo was represented at the winter solstice with his head shorn, and only a 
single hair left.—Mankind, p. 468 ; quotes Macrobius, lib. I. cap. xxi. Keres, the holy 
Virgin, gave birth to the youthful Bacchus of the Mysteries.—Mankind, p. 471. 

2 Jacolliot, Manou, p. 82. 

3 Herodot. iii. 8. 

* Numbers, vi.; Chassang, Apollonius, 38, 107. 

6 Jacolliot, Manou, 150, 151. 

«ibid. 148. 

7 Mark xii. 19 ; Luke xx. 28. 

8 Jacolliot, Manou, 107, 108 note. 

3 ibid. 141, 175, 176, 177; Psalm, cvi. 28 ; Sod, I. 47. 

10 Leviticus, xxi. 5. A compound of Karech and Adon would yield the word 
u Karchedonoi,” Carthagenians. 


420 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Hindus had a sect of Physicians or Healers, called 
Iatrikoi. The Physicians worshipped Mithra the Sun. 

larpiK^v AttoWuvos. —Philo, Leg. ad Caiura, 14. 

According to Philo, Therapeutae are so called from practising 
a better iatrike than that in cities , 1 for that cures only bodies, 
but this cures also souls afflicted with all the evils that the 
Nazoria escaped. The Physicians were a branch of the Hindu 
ascetics, a sort of Jogis who, because they were credited with 
a knowledge of divinity, practised medicine. They were pen¬ 
itents dwelling on the mountains and clad in gazelle skins. 
They carried sacks full of roots and medicaments and sought 
to cure by means of sorcery, incantations and the laying on 
of amulets. According to Megasthenes they were received 
into houses as guests and all was given them . 2 

to? airovvri <re 80 s.—Matthew, v. 42. 


Give to him that asks thee. And turn not away from one 
seeking to borrow from thee ! This is quite the Hindu Sham¬ 
anism ; especially since the Egyptian physicians , the ascetic 
Therapeutae, had their huts and villages in a circle 3 like the 
a grama mandala, the “ circle of hermitages ” of the ancient 
Hindus . 4 The Syrian and Arab physicians , the Essenes, pro¬ 
phesied, like the Hindu Semnoi from the signs in the heavens. 
There was in India a class of Sarmana that wandered through 
the cities and villages as prophets, and were acquainted with 
the ceremonies to be observed for the dead as well as with the 
addresses which have reference to them ; and another, more 
beloved of people, which knew the rules for a God-fearing 
and holy life and the traditions of the dead . 5 

The Budhists came from Kaslimere through Afghanistan 
to Babylon. The way was open by the Persian Gulf. They 


1 We find the modern doctor associated with the clergyman at every fatal sickness. 
But they usually differ about causes. 

2 Lassen, II. 714. After the forest hermits, the vanaprastha, the physicians were 
the most honored. 

3 ax iv kvk\u> enav\e 1 ? re koX kw/x<u. — Philo, Vita Cont. 3. 

4 Lassen, II. 714. 

3 Lassen, II. 714; quotes Megasth. Fragm. 40, p. 437, a. See Chwolsohn, I. 526, 
545, 546, 640. Num res necessaria sit uxor ?—Philodemus, de vitiis et virtutibus oppo¬ 
site et de rerum subjectis et objectis. In the museum at Naples. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


421 


were in Alexandria about the time of the Christian era. The 
monks of Sarapis and the ascetics of Mons Nitria near Alex¬ 
andria were already present. The treatise De Yita Contem- 
plativa was probably written by one acquainted with Greek 
philosophy who knew the contemplative\ life in the cells of 
Mons Nitria. P. E. Lucius in writing about the Therapeutae 
has disregarded the askesis of the Indian Gymnosophists, 
Arabia filled with saints, the eunuchs of Isaiah lvi. 3-5, the 
Persian Dualism, Lucian’s De Dea Syria with its eunuchs, the 
recluses of Sarapis, the cells of Mons Nitria, the Essenes, Bud- 
hists, and the Gospel of Matthew, xix. 12; Luke, xviii. 29. 
When we call to mind the oriental asceticism of the Brahmans 
or the Budhist wiharas for nearly five previous centuries it 
would be a piece of boldness to deny that Syrians, Egyptians, 
Jews were very well acquainted with the ascetic life in the 
first century of our era. The reference at the close of the 
treatise to Moses (Mosia=Saviour) and the Red Sea is no more 
than might be looked for from an Alexandria Jew living un¬ 
der the Ptolemies. The article may be regarded as an exhor¬ 
tation to Egyptian monastic life. Josephus in the first cen¬ 
tury met it in the desert where the Nazoria and the ascetic 
Banous lived, who, if he chose, might have made some mysti¬ 
cal allusion to the passage through the waters of the Red Sea. 
At all events, as a Baptist, he bathed frequently. The Egyp¬ 
tians had the doctrine of spirit and matter and Nazarene 
askesis had reached even the women. The Nazers are men¬ 
tioned in Numbers, vi. 2. 

Let him deny himself !—Mark, viii. 34 ; Luke, ix. 23. 

Not eat flesh, nor drink wine nor (do that) through which thy brother is 
grieved—Romans, xiv. 21. 

Josephus claims that the Jews are a Brahm-an sect, the adhe¬ 
rents of Kalanus, which thing implies dualism enough to fulfil 
all Lucius’s requirements. Finally, the Greek Philosophy 
in De Yita Contemplativa, § 1 is too early for the fourth and 
fifth centuries. The Christian monks at that period talked 
about mortification of the flesh, and not about the unit, about 
Christ come in the flesh, not about the Monad . When the 
treatise de Iside and Osiride was written there were abstinent 
sects. There were sects floating between Judaism, Sabianism 
and the gnosis in the first century of our era. 


422 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


I am the Great Brahma 1 that is eternal, pure, free, constantly happy, being 
without end. He who regards nothing else, who withdraws himself into a 
lonely spot, annihilates his desires and subdues his passions, he comprehends 
that the Spirit is one and eternal. ' 2 —Sankara Atma-Bodha. 3 

Lucius seems to liave entirely overlooked the Serapis 
monks before our era, and to have paid no heed to Eusebius 
(Eccles. Hist. Book Second, chap, xvii.) who claims the Tlier- 
apeutae (Healers) as Christians (because of their Essene self- 
denial and their rejection of marriage, drinking no wine, 
tasting no flesh) and regards Philo as the author of the treatise 
de vita contemplativa. Whether Eusebius was right or wrong, 
he stands in the way of Lucius, who seeks to drag ‘ semneion ’ 
and ‘ monasterion,’ in that treatise, down to the fourth century. 
Supposing Lucius to have got at the exact truth, what becomes 
of Eusebius and his view that Philo wrote the treatise ? It 
leaves Eusebius in a worse plight than usual. He was bish¬ 
op of Caesarea in 313, and must have known if the Therapeu- 
tae and Therapeutrides (females) were only a body of Christian 
ascetics in the fourth century. He died about 338. The tes¬ 
timony of Eusebius therefore refutes Lucius entirely, for he 
maintains that the treatise is an early one about the male and 
female Healers. Moreover, its being found in the same collec¬ 
tion with Philo’s writings affords a presumption in regard to 
its antiquity which the arguments of Lucius are not strong 
enough to overthrow. There is nothing in the treatise incon¬ 
sistent with its having been produced at Alexandria in the 
first or second century. Philo also wrote concerning the Es- 
saians (Healers). Then was the time when there would have 
been some reasonable motive for giving them a special dis¬ 
tinctive name, as constituting a new, or at least a separate 
haeresis or sect, which the treatise de vita contemplativa in 
some measure claims for the community of the Therapeutae. 
But what would be the use of giving the name Therapeutae to 
any body of Christian monks back of Alexandria in the fourth 
century % They were one of the ascetic communities of the 
first century. In the treatise de Iside et Osiride, 78, (ascribed 

1 The Sun is the Brahma. Brahma bore the world-egg. The Sun is the Breath of 
Life, the Spiritus.—Wuttke, II. 293-295. The moon is Matter.—Wuttke, II. 302. In 
Plato rb m ov means Matter. Here we come upon the Hindu doctrine of Maya, delu¬ 
sion. 

2 Colebrooke’s Essays, 217, 238. 

s Wuttke, II. 259, 260. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH . 


423 


to Plutarch) we find the statement that bodies and physical 
tendencies interfere with communion with the God! The 
notion resulted directly from the doctrine of spirit and matter, 
which preceded the gnosis of the Christian communities. 
Consequently the Therapeutae refused the body its claims 
regarding- it as the foe of the spirit. 

The word nazar 1 or nazarene means entire self-denial. 
Iesous is described as a leader of the Nazarenes, denying him¬ 
self, 2 and Paul, as beginning his address after long abstinence 
(so as to separate himself from his body). James head of the 
Jerusalem Church, is described as a Jewish Nazarite holy from 
the womb, eating no animal food, and drinking neither wine 
nor spirits. No razor touched his head, nor did he use a bath. 
The writer of Daniel seems to have been accustomed to ascetic 
ways, and Isaiah heeded no body when he went naked and 
barefoot, like Saul among the prophets. Such specimens of 
nature’s protoplasm have been sometimes seen in Damaskus 
during the present century. That flagrant mark of Judaism, 
the circumcision, is a sign of continence, a symbol of self- 
denial. 3 So in Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride, 2, the doctrine of 
an abstinent gnosis and continent, self-denying life is main¬ 
tained as essential to a desire for divinity, truth, and most of 
all, the truth concerning the Gods ! So that nazarenism began 
in connection with the Mysteries, and the verb, therapeuo, is 
used in the treatise de Iside, 2, to express the worship of Isis 
in Egypt. 4 Even the word monad is in de Iside, 10. 

The Mysteries of Dionysus led directly into Nazorene, 
Ebionite and Christian gnosis. According to Strabo, 5 Megas- 
tlienes, who lived about 315 before Christ, stated that there 
were worshippers of Dionysus 6 in the mountains of India, but 
that in the plains Herakles 7 was worshipped. And the phi- 

1 from zar, = abstinence. Nedarim are vows in ransom of souls. Whoever shall 
separate a nedar, in thy valuation are souls to Iahoh.—Leviticus, xxvii. 2. Vows are 
mentioned in 1 Samuel, i. 11. The Chasidim are spoken of in 1 Sam. ii. 9. Lucius 
correctly distinguishes between the Essenes and Therapeutae , who are not the Essenes, 
although, like them, ascetics. He recognises (pp. 51, 52, 54) the decided dualism of 
the Therapeutae, which necessarily leads to askesis, under an extreme spiritualismus. 

2 Matthew, xvi. 24; Luke, xxiv. 19; Acts, vi. 14; xxi. 24; xxvii. 21. 

3 1 Sam. ii. 22, 23. 

4 See de Iside, 5, 7. The word monad occurs prominently in de vita contempl., 1. 

3 Strabo, c. 711, 712. 

• Vishnu. 

7 Rama, perhaps Krishna. 


424 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


losophers dwell in a sacred grove in front of the city within an 
enclosure of due proportions, living simply, on straw mattresses 
and skins, abstaining from eating what has life and from the 
pleasures of love, hearing serious discourses and holding 
communication with those who desired it. The listener must 
not hawk or spit, else he is expelled the same day as intem¬ 
perate. They think that this life is, as it were, but a point in 
the conceptions or pregnancies, but that death is the being 
born into what is really life and blessed for those who have 
sought after wisdom. For which reason they use the most as¬ 
cetic discipline 1 for being ready for death. 

They believe many things through myths or fables; but, as 
regards many things, they think like the Greeks; for they 
too say that the Kosmos is come into being and is perishable, 
and that the sphere-formed God who created and inhabits it 
entirely pervades it. But the beginnings 2 of all things are 
different: of the creation of the world water is the beginning ; 
and beside the four elements there is a fifth nature , 3 from 
which came the heaven and the stars, but earth was established 
in the midst of the whole. 

And about sperma and soul he says things similar, and 
others in addition; but they interweave also fables, as did 
Plato too about the incorruptibleness of the soul and the judg¬ 
ments in Hades, and other such things. 

The most honored Sarmana, he says, are named forest- 
dwellers, living in the forests on seeds and wild fruits, their 
clothing the bark of trees, abstaining from the pleasures of 
love and from wine. They consort with the kings who inquire 
by messengers about the causes (of things) and through them 4 
serve and pray to the Divinity. And after the forest-hermits, 
the “ Physicians ” 5 hold the second place and are philosophers 
so far as concerns the man, being themselves plain but not rus¬ 
tics, feeding on rice and barley-groats, which everyone who is 

1 ao-nria Is, asceticism. 

2 dpx<u. 

3 Aither, the burning. 

4 The Bra’hman anchorites ; or perhaps the Djeins, as Jacolliot supposes. 

3 These are the lessaeans (Iessaioi) of Epiphanius, the New Testament Healers. 
Iaso and Ieso, I^somai, mean to heal; as does Iesua. To heal was, in the oriental 
reasoning, to save; ieso and iesuo mean “to save” and “ salvation,” in Hebrew.—Ig- 
natio Weitenauer, Seder Leshon, pp. 132, 133, Augustae Vindelicorum et Friburgi 
Brisgoiae, 1759; Bagster’s Concordance of Hebrew and Chaldee Script, p. 403 ; Isaiah, 
lxiii. 9, Hebrew text. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


425 


asked and receives them in hospitality gives to them; and they 
can make men have many children and males and make them 
the fathers of females by means of medicine ; and the cure 1 is 
brought about more by dietings and not by drugs. But the 
most esteemed of the remedies are the ointments and plasters, 
the rest have their share in a good deal of harm. And others 
are, some, diviners, and having magic powers and skilled in 
the matters and usages regarding the dead, begging in cities 
and villages; but the better educated and more polished of 
them do not themselves abstain from the common babblings 
about Hades such as seem to contribute to piety and holiness; 
and the women too philosophise with some, themselves also 
abstaining from connections with men. 

As regards the Indian Physicians of Strabo, Josephus says 
something similar about the Essenes or Jewish Healers, that 
they devoted very great study to the writings of the ancients, 
selecting especially those for the profit of soul and body. 
Hence for the therapeia pathon , or cure of sicknesses, medical 
roots and the properties of minerals are the subjects of their 
researches . 1 2 The religious mendicants of the Vishnu-Baktas 
in Ceylon, who always live by alms, are met in large bands on 
their religious “ Walks.” They spread themselves in the 
villages within reach of their route. Each inhabitant lodges a 
certain number of them, and they are thus relieved of the ex¬ 
penses of the “ Travel .” 3 The br&manacaraka are the travel¬ 
ling bra’hman-disciples, wanderers. 4 

The strangers that make their appearance, the travelling ascetics, dis¬ 
ciples, begging and pilgrim monks.—Lefman, Lalita-mstara , p. 57. 

Neither the gymnosophists nor the Semnoi allowed themselves 
intercourse with the other sex . 5 On account of this self-denial 
they regarded themselves as holy. They did not trouble them¬ 
selves about the future . 6 

1 Iatreia. 

2 Josephus, Wars, II. cap. 7. 

3 Jacolliot, Voyage au pays des elephants, 178. 

4 Lefman, Lalitavistara, p. 58. 

6 Lassen, Ind. Alt. III. 856. 

6 ibid. 356. The tract “ On a Contemplative Life,” 3, says that there are many 
such in many parts of the world, mentioning Greece, the foreign lands, and Egypt, par¬ 
ticularly around Alexandria. And twice every day they are accustomed to pray, about 
dawn and about evening, at sunrise asking for a good day that is really a good day, that 


426 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Then take no care for the morrow, for the morrow will take care for itself. 
—Matthew, vi. 34. 

Take no care for your life what you shall eat, nor for the body what you 
shall wear. Is not the soul more than the food, and the body more than the 
clothes ?—Matthew, vi. 25. 

their thought be filled with heaven’s light, and at sunset, for the soul, entirely freed 
from the weight of the external perceptions and what is apprehended by the senses, 
being in its own council-chamber and place of session, to pursue the traces of truth. 
And the entire interval from morn to eve is for them Askesis (discipline). For meeting 
with the sacred writings they philosophise their inherited philosophy, using allegorical 
interpretation, because symbols of literal interpretation they think are of a hidden 
character, which is levealedin covert meanings.—de Vita Contempl., 3. Here we have 
Egyptian Mysteries again ! Scriptural allegories ! This is the view of Origen and the 
Sohar.—Dunlap, Sod, I. 175, 170; Franck, die Kabbala, 119, 121; Sohar, III. 152. 
Lucius, Therapeutae, 18, 19, comes very close to proving the Therapeutae to have been 
Jews.—Philo, peri biou theoretikou, §§ 1, 3, 4, 5, 8; Lucius, 44, 49, 129. There was 
asceticism in Palestine. Compare Josephus contra Apion I. where he speaks of the as¬ 
cetic Jew of Coelesyria; also his account of his own instructor, Banous, in the desert. 
Compare the Sons of the Prophets, the fasts of the Jewish Adonis-worshippers, the 
bald-heads, the Rechabites, the Vows and nazers of the Talmud and Numbers, vi. The 
Therapeutae may not have been mentioned by any author before Eusebius (Lucius, 80, 
S4), but philosophical dualism led to asceticism.—Lucius, 54. Dualism was the all- 
prevalent philosophy for centuries before Philo Judaeus wrote. It called into existence 
Mazdaisin, Osirianism, Mithraisin, Budhism and Judaism ; also wiharas, convents, great 
dwellings in Egypt, Iatrikoi, Sarapis-healers, Sabian-healers, Baptists, Jewish healers 
and Christians,—all systems founded in the oriental philosophy, resulting in idealist coe¬ 
nobites and monasteria of the Levant. The tracts nazir and nedarim are but the fuller 
treatment of the asceticism cautiously intimated in Numbers, vi. 2-4, but plainly seen 
in Daniel, i. 8, 10, 12-15, 20. Genesis vi. 3, speaks of the flesh, intimating dualist 
gnosis. The Oriental Scribes were none too communicative ; they did not publish all 
they knew. But what was eunuchism but self-denial and asceticism ? Compare Isaiah, 
lvi. 3, 4; 1 Samuel, i. 11, 15 (shaving the head to Adonis-Adonai, and refraining from 
wine and spirits). The showing belonged to the Dionysus worship in Arabia, and Moses 
forbade it. The fasting to obtain grace.—2 Sam. xii. 22, 23. The doctrine of the soul’s 
resurrection is plainly indicated in verse 23. The reason why Eusebius claimed the 
Therapeutae as Christians is just because they were gnostic ; if they had been Chris¬ 
tians there would have been no object in singling them out to claim them. If Christian, 
the Therapeute very adroitly contrives 1 not to mention Christ at all! His worship of 
the Light-principle is Sabian and Egyptian, ascetic and perhaps Mithraite. Christ 
worshipped in the sun would be either Sabian, or Mithraic, or Serapis worship. Sa- 
bians partly adored the Sun, and a part worshipped Christ. The Therapeutae must 
have been a strange sort of Christians in the 4th century, to resemble Sabians, Sun- 
worshippers, Mithra-worshippers, Sarapis worshippers and Nazarenes; and yet the 
treatise on the Therapeutae never once mentions Christ or Jesus, or Judas of Galilee 
or Christian or Sarapis , nor even the Donatist and Circumcellion Monks. But it does 
speak of Anaxagoras and Dcmokritos ! These were heathen authorities, Greeks, known 
in Egypt, owing to Ptolemaic government perhaps. It refers also to Homer ! and 
dikaiosune ! It refers to Mons Nitria, inrep Maria, which, at a later period, after 

Philo's time, became a Christian coenobium. Its “ ancient men, the leaders (or foun¬ 
ders) of the sect ” may refer to Philo’s time, possibly, but are a singular denomination 
of Christians. Their sacred pervigilium was conducted under the leadership of Moses 
the prophet and Meriam the prophetess.—Compare de Vita Contemplativa, 11 ; also, 7, 


BEFORE ANT 10GIL 


427 


Your bodies a living sacrifice.—Paul, Romans, xii. 1. 

If any one wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his 
stake and accompany me. For whoever wishes to save his life shall lose it; 
but whoever shall lose his life, for the sake of me, shall find it. For what shall 
a man profit if he gain the entire world but lose his life (soul) ?—Matthew, xvi. 
20. 

When therefore they abandon their property without being- 
enticed by any one they flee without turning around, leaving 
brothers, children, wives, parents, numerous relationships, the 
companionship of friends, their native soil in which they were 
born and brought up . . . they live away from cities in culti¬ 
vated spots or lonely farms, seeking after a solitude. 1 If one 
comes to me and hates not his father and mother and wife and 
children and brothers and sisters and even more his own life, 
he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not take up his 
stake 2 and follow me cannot be my disciple. 3 

“We have left all and followed tliee.”—Mark, x. 29. 

“ Every one of you that does not forsake all his property cannot be my dis¬ 
ciple.”—Luke, xiv. 32. 

The man who leaves his family, quits his house, enters on 
the study of Supreme Reason, 4 searches out the deepest prin¬ 
ciples of his intelligent mind so as to understand that there is 
a law which admits of no active exertion, this man is called a 
Shaman. 5 

Aristotle mentioned a Jew of Coelesyria who was one of the 
descendants of the Hindu philosophers. And, as they say, 
the philosophers among the Indi are called Kallanoi; but 

where the expression “oi Mwo-ew? yi'ajpiju.ot,” “ the pupils of Moses,” occurs. A learned 
Jew, from B.c. 100 to a.d. 200, undoubtedly wrote the treatise on a contemplative life : 
and it is surprising that any modern author should venture to claim for Christian (as 
Eusebius had the temerity to do) a work professedly Jewish and exclusively Eastern in 
character. The single expression “the sacredest guidings (teachings) of Moses the 
Prophet” ought to show its Jewish origin. The allegorical method of exegesis em¬ 
ployed (de V. Cont. 10) is professedly Jewish, and Hellenist-Jewish. 

1 Philo, de Vita Cont. 2. 

3 digger, cross. 

3 Luke, xiv. 26, 27. 

4 Buddha was its incarnation. 

5 Sutra of 42 Sections. S. Beal, Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung Yun, p. 5. Lu¬ 
cius, p. 135, states that Christianity in the first times of its existence sought to regu¬ 
late the human life according to an ascetic ideal in the sharpest contrast to heathen¬ 
ism ! This really ignores the gnostic idealism of the Brahmans, Budhists, Sabians, 
Jews and Egyptians, to the profit of Christianity. The Egyptians believed in another 
world, as much as the Christian; but it was the resurrection in Osiris! 


428 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Ioudaioi by tlie Syrians! This man, being entertained by 
many persons and descending from the lofty locations 1 to the 
places by the sea, was Hellenic not alone in speech but in 
soul also. And as we were then staying in the Asia, venturing 
into the districts in which we were, he falls in with us and 
some other scholars trying our wisdom. And as many erudite 
persons were assembled, he rather delivered himself somewhat 
of what he held. And these things Aristotle said, from Klear- 
chus, and also relating in detail the great and astonishing 
endurance of the Jewish gentleman in diet and chastity . 2 Cir¬ 
cumcision is a flagrant symbol of continence, asceticism, and 
self-denial practised before Ia’hoh the God of life, the Arabian 
Dionysus. The world is crucified unto me, and I unto the 
world . 3 

i 

The serpent is the symbol of desire, as is shown, and the woman, of sensa¬ 
tion , but man, of intellect. 4 Therefore desire becomes the worst cause of sin 
and it deceives the sensation first, but the sensation carries away the mind. 

The scripture is proved, since we have as evidence what we have seen. 
But as regards such opinion it contains allegory. Since the serpent is symbol 
of desire, figuring a voluptuary ; for it creeps over the breast and the belly, 
filled with food and drink, is nourished like the water-fowls 5 by insatiable 
desire, incontinent in eating flesit, so that whatever pertains to food, all is 
something earthly ; on which account it is said to eat earth. But desire is nat¬ 
urally at enmity with sensation which it has symbolically denominated woman : 

. . . All these things 6 7 of every sort the woman suffers who shares the life of 
a man, not as a curse, but as necessary. But symbolically human sensation is 
subjected to cruel labor and pain, stricken and wounded mortally by domestic 
disturbances. But those sensations are servitude : sight of eyes, hearing of 
ears, the sense of smell in the nostrils, the taste of the mouth, the approach of 
touches. Since the life of a bad and wicked person is sorrowful and indigent it 
is necessary that, too, all things done in sensation 1 should be mingled with fear 
and pain. In regard to mind: sensation turns to a man, not as to a coadjutor, 
for it is subject, as being bad ; but as to a master, because it has chosen force 
rather than justice.—Philo. 8 

1 on the Lebanon and hills. 

2 Josephus, contra Apion, I. 

3 Galat. vi. 14. 

4 The earth connate with man is body, whose farmer is intellect.—Philo, Quaest. 
et Solut. I. 50. So 1 Cor. xii. 8. 

5 aithuiai. 

6 dissolution, paralysis, sicknesses. 

7 secundum sensum, according to sens$, sensation. 

8 Quaest. et Solut. I. 47-50. Compare Epistle to the Hebrews, xiii. 4; 1 Cor. vii. 
32-40. Therefore the Law of Moses required a girl to scream ; else she was a particeps 
criminis. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


429 


What is most interesting to modern Christians is that the 
worshippers of Serapis were Healers. Nazarenes are men¬ 
tioned, in Jeremiah, as Rechabi, who were strangers , and could 
not be induced to drink wine, living not in houses, but in tents 
and having neither vineyards, fields nor seed . 1 The Osirian 
rites, in their origin, had no immoral character; even the Isiac 
rites numbered many sincere and ascetic persons among those 
who were of this faith . 2 In the passionate interview between 
Mistress Phutiphar and Ioseph, the Hebrew gentleman be¬ 
haves according to the rules of the synagogue and follows the 
prescription : *E£a> at Tropvai / *E£a> oi kvvcs ! 3 *E£a> ot iropvoL ! 4 

Ioseph is here the type of the spiritual man, Mrs. Phutiphar 
representing the flesh, by Philo called Egypt . 5 This strict¬ 
ness of Nazarene conduct w T as recently required in Bokhara . 6 

If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they 
shall both of them die. ... So shalt thou put away evil from Israel. If a 
damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto a husband and a man find her in the 
city and lie with her, then you shall bring them both out unto the gate of that 
city and you shall stone them with stones that they die : the damsel, because 
she did not scream although she was in town (where she could be heard).— 
Deuteronomy, xxii. 22-24. When a man persuades a virgin who is not be¬ 
trothed, and lie with her, as a dowry he shall endow her to him for a wife. — 
Exodus, xxii. 16. 

From the period when Kapil a lived (when much that is now 
called budhist was not so marked a distinction as it became 
later, when the boundary lines between the two great sects 
were not so strictly defined, and the Aryan monk lived as a 
hermit) to the Hebrew Holy Men, seers and prophets, who 
drank neither wine nor strong drink and lived, some of them, 
in companies or colleges, as did the later Essenes, refrained 
from association with women, and lived on the Jordan as 
nazarenes in their abstinence, is but a single step in the science 
of religion. In India, Kashmere, Mesopotamia, Arabia and 
Egypt the ascetic doctrine was the source of devotion. To 
mortify the body John wore his dress of camel’s hair and 
Banous his bark of trees, and Isaiah wore no clothes at all 

1 Jer. xxxv. 8, 9, 10. 

2 Kenrich, Egypt, I. 393, 394; Liv. liber 39; Propertius, Eleg. 2, 33. 

3 Dogs = foreigners, those of a different church. 

4 Rev. xxii. 15. 

6 1 Cor. v. 9 ; vi. 13; Gal. v. 19. 

6 Vambery, Travels, 224, 225, 231 note. 


430 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(—Isa. xx. 3) for three years. Their God, the Sun, was a heap 
of fire from which the souls issued like sparks of life. By ab¬ 
stinence or dirt they expressed the soul’s contempt for matter. 
The rite of circumcision of the Egyptian priests indicated 
mortifying the flesh, pars pro toto. Why did Egyptians, Jews, 
Syrians and Phoenicians require continence to the God of fire, 
light and life, Adonis-Osiris-Ia’hhoh, before participating at 
the annual festivals in the solemn mysteries of the Syrian re¬ 
ligion ? Soul is the divine fire. Matter, body, are but sensu¬ 
ality! They had to become “a holy people.” In Palestine, 
Syria, Egypt and among the Kara or Peleti some made cut¬ 
tings in the flesh, in India and Phoenicia some became eu¬ 
nuchs. Lucian mentions the Holy Men. 

There are eunuchs that have made themselves eunuchs on account of the 
kingdom of the heavens.—Matthew, xix. 12. 

The Jogi (the ascetic) who is sunk in Cognition (of Brah¬ 
ma) looks neither up nor down, neither to the right nor to the 
left, he is calm and without emotion. Who like a blind man 
sees not, like a deaf man hears not, like a stick is without feel¬ 
ing and movement, know of him that he has gained the 
peace. 1 The soul is two-fold, pure, and impure, impure when 
deceived by the senses, and pure when free from desire. Now 
the soul is a cause to men of bondage and of freedom ; of 
bondage 2 when it depends on what is external, it is free when 
free from the external. Therefore, who seeks freedom, turn 
away the soul from what is exterior. When, turning aside 
from the external world, and turned away in the heart to itself, 
the soul forgets its very self, that know to be the highest 
grade! Hold it in until it in the heart is dead! That is 
knowledge , and that too thinking , all else is only book-knowl¬ 
edge ; so one reaches the Most High, Brahma. 3 Budha was the 
reputed founder of the Sabian religion, 4 Budhists, Egyptian 
priests, and Arab Sabians had the tonsure; but Leviticus, 
xxi. 5, 5 prohibits it. Paul shaved the head as a Nazarene 
ascetic. In the time of John the Baptist Babylon had be- 

1 Pra^ma-Upanishad.—Wutte, II. 366. Pax vobiscum! 

2 whom Satan hath bound. 

3 Amritavindu-Upan. See Wuttke, II. 376. 

4 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 798, 799, 134 f. 

5 a late book probably, as it stands. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


431 


come a veritable focus of Budhism 1 and Budhist mission¬ 
aries had, already in the 2nd century before Christ, pen¬ 
etrated into Asia Minor. 2 Compare the Budhist temples cut 
in the rock at Kenliari, whose celebrated chaityas resem¬ 
ble the Christian cathedrals in important particulars, and 
some of whose caves were made as long ago as the first cen¬ 
tury before Christ, 3 as early indeed as B.c. 214 and B.c. 252. 4 

When we find eunuchs forming a part of the “ Holy Men ” 
in the Jewish and Phoenician temples, Karians, Egyptians and 
Jews cutting their flesh until the blood runs, 5 the Jews be¬ 
coming hermits or monks, casti and circumcised to Adonis, 6 a 
holy people shaven, like the Arabian Bacchic worshippers 
and the monks, with the sun’s circle on the centre of the top 
of their heads, and nude, sometimes, like the Hindu Sanyassis, 
Samana, Yatis and Gymnosophists we perceive that they form 
an integral part of yogamonachism and are members of the 
oriental fraternities of holy men or saints. These are the 
Iatrikoi of India, the Iessaioi of Judea, the Therapeutai of 
Egypt, or Curate orders ; and they are mixed in with various 
Syrian, Arab, Jewish and Mesopotamian fraternities of Naza- 
renes with varied names ; at the same time that the kodeshim, 
kadeshas, sarisim, chasidim, isarim and other holy men and wom¬ 
en who adored Sarapis frequented the temples of Palestine, 
Syria, Arabia and Phoenicia. From the Kurdish Mountains to 
the Nile these fanatics slew the flesh, like the modem fakirs, for 
the saints came out from the East, 7 bringing with them the 
10 Commandments of the Budhists, Jews, Phoenicians and 
Romans. Ioannes Episcopos did not change the fasting, ab¬ 
stinence and pristine morals. 8 

The Indian recluses, called Samana, or Semnoi, went naked 
all their life ; some of the Budhists went and did likewise. 9 

1 Renan, Langues Semitiques, III. iv. p. 282; Movers, 191; Lucian, Menippus, 7. 

2 Weber, Akad., Vorlesungen, p. 267. 

3 Rousselet, l’lnde des Rajas, 58, 60, 73. These basilicas are evidently copies of 
wooden structures.—ibid. p. 58 note; The Academy, Oct. 30, 1880, p. 317 ; James 
Ferguson ; Cave Temples of India. 

4 The Academy, Oct. 30, 1880, pp. 315, 316. 

5 1 Kings xviii. 28. 

6 Adoni, the 11 spiritus.” Hieronymus calls his priests truncatos libidine in 
honorem Atys.—Movers, 683. 

7 Compare Matthew, ii. 1; Gen. xi. 2; Lucian, de Dea Syria, 16, 32, 33, 49. 

8 Assemani, II. 57. 

» Lassen, III. 356, 357, 373. 


432 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


A man left his wife and children for others to care for, and 
joined a Budhist community, 1 shaving his head and abandon¬ 
ing his property. He also shaved the superfluous hairs of his 
body, got a long garment, and dwelt in a wihara or convent. 
All day long they debated about religious questions, had 
stewards to manage the houses, ate rice, bread, apples and 
vegetables. When the Samana entered the great dining hall, 
on a signal given by the sound of a bell they all prayed. At 
the second stroke of the bell the steward 2 brought to every 
monk his own separate dish. The monks ate very fast. 3 

Resignation, the act of rendering good for evil, the temperance, probity, 
the repression of the senses, the knowledge of the sastras, that of the Supreme 
Soul, veracity and refraining from anger : such are the ten virtues in which 
duty consists.—Manu, VI. 92. 4 

The question being put which is the copyist ? Jacolliot replies, 
“ supporting myself on irrefutable documents : ” Christianity. 
And this is confirmed by turning to Lassen, Tndien, 1st ed. 
vol. III. pp. 380, 404. The higher antiquity of the Indian 
doctrines is undoubted. 5 And this Logos which they name God 
is embodied and clothed with a body outside of itself, just as if 
one put on sheep’s clothing; and that when the surrounding 
body is stripped off it is plainly manifested to the vision. But 
the Bra’hmans say that there is a conflict in their own body 
(and they think the body full of enemies to themselves) against 
which they contend arrayed as if against antagonists. 6 But 
the Bra’hmans putting off the body, like fish jumping out of 
water into the pure air, see the Sun. 7 Apollo is depicted nude. 

God is naked. —Seneca. 8 

They knew that they were naked. —Genesis, iii. 7. 

Naked is the Mind! —Philo Jud., legal alleg., II. 15. 

Thy prophets the Selloi with unwashed feet, sleeping on the ground.— 
Homer, II., xvi. 23. 

Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting or lying on the earth, 

1 ibid. 356. 

2 Compare the word Diakonos in Greek, deacon. 

3 Lassen, ni. 367, reminding one of the priests, who walk fast in the street. 

4 Jacolliot, Christna. et le Christ, 243. 

6 Lassen, III. 404. 

6 Hippolytus, 1. 24. p. 44. 

7 ibid., p. 46. 

8 Mankind, p. 159. Naked bliss in Adon’s Garden of golden apples. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


433 


not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless can purify a mortal wlio lias not 
overcome desires.—Budlia’s Dliammapada, 141. 

Saul stripped off liis clothes and prophesied. . . . He fell down naked all 
that day and the whole night; therefore they say : Is Saul too among the proph¬ 
ets f —1 Samuel, xix. 

Let him deny himself.— Mark, viii. 34. 

Clothes are the parts of the irrational and overshadow the intellectual. 
—Philo, legal cilleg., II. 15. 

The nature of flesh has no participation in Mind. — Philo, Quod Deterius, 

23. 

Spirit shall not always strive against Adam because he is also flesh.— Gen¬ 
esis, vi. 3. 

The pious soul, putting off the body and what is dear to it.—Philo, legal 
alleg., II. 15. 

The Jews then were Nazorians long’ before the Christian ap¬ 
peared ; Eusebius was near the truth. 

The Ebionim of Edom shall rejoice.—Isaiah, xxix. 19. 

Those called lovers of virtue are almost all persons of no renown, very de¬ 
spised, poor, in want of the necessaries of life, more unhonored than subjects or 
slaves, dirty, pale, reduced to a skeleton, exhibiting in their faces hunger 
caused by fasting, most unhealthy, anxious to die !—Philo, Quod Det., 10. 

The Essenes consider it honorable to be dirty. —Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 

Thy disciples eat bread with unwashed hands.—Mark, vii. 8. 

Renouncing baths and unguents, or disregarding the coverings around the 
body, or habitual sleeping on the ground and hard lodgings — then through 
these things counterfeiting self-denial. —Philo, Quod Det., 7. 

Every one of you that does not forsake all his property cannot be my disci¬ 
ple.—Luke, xiv. 32. 

When a Hindu dies, liis corpse is sprinkled with lustral water , 1 
and a small piece of gold 2 is placed in its mouth by the 
oldest son of the deceased to pay his passage when he shall 
arrive at the river of fire which bars the entrance to the realm 
of Yama, the King of the dead. The Hindus must die on the 
ground. The middle of the street is selected. They leave 
their rich men to die in the mud of the holy river Ganges. 
Greek Salvation came from the Orient; and, as regards Jewish 
relations with Chaldaea and India, we may suspect that there 
was some connection between the ascetic Physicians of Hin- 

1 Cette eau consacree par les prieres des brahmes pretres, dans laquelle ils mettent 
dissoudre une poignee de sel, un peu de poudre d’encens, de myrrhe et de sandal, a cela 
de bon quelle n’est pas chere; pour quelques sous vous pouvez largement en asperger 
votre cadaver et la place oil il va etre brfile, et en conserver encore pour l’usage de la 
famille.—Jacolliot, Voy. au pays des brahmes , pp. 279, 283. 

2 Two oboli for Charon. 

28 


434 


THE GUEBERS OF IIEBRON. 


dustan and the Semite Iatric sects, such as Essaians, Iessaians, 
and Therapeutes. At all events, Josephus carries the Essenes 
back to 143 before Christ. 

Divine is the tapas 1 which purifying our nature assures us of Brahma’s 
eternal bliss. The cultus of the Wise is the gate of happiness ; the Wise are 
those who have equanimity of soul, are calm, free from anger and virtuous ; it 
is these who have no other aim than the love for Me, and are not disposed to 
live as heads of families with a wife, with children and property, and who only 
live so far in the world as is absolutely necessary.—Tejovindu Upanishad. 

The body is the source of evil.—Tejovindu Upanishad. 

Let hot the eunuch say, lo I am dry wood; for thus says Ia'lioh to the eu¬ 
nuchs who keep my sabbaths and choose that in which I delight 2 and keep my 
covenant, And I will give to them in my temple and within my walls a place 
and a name better than sons and daughters, a name of eternity I will give to him 
which shall not be cut off.—Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, 5. 

The expansion of the ascetic life belongs not to the oldest 
time of the Yeda but to the period of about the fifth century 
before Christ. The nudeness of the ascetics is the external 
expression for turning away from all that is worldly and for 
complete indifference towards all emotions. Yishnu himself, 
appearing as an ascetic, gave a high type of the right self¬ 
torment : 

Naked, 3 the hairs tangled up, like a frenzied person, he went about as 
beggar, like one weak of mind, blind, dumb or deaf, wearing no clothes other 
than such as one throws away, always silent, even when they spoke to him. 4 
—Bhagavat Purana, V. 5. 

Be not over careful for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink ; 
not yet for your body what ye shall put on. Is not the soul more than the food, 
and the body than the clothing ?—Matthew, vi. 25. 

The Jainas (Gainas) or Arhatas go bare of clothing “ clad by the 
regions of space.” The less strict order of Swetambaras “ clad 
in white ” is of more modern date. 5 Iesous was described clad 
in long white garments like the appearance of Serapis. 

1 askesis, abstinence, selbstpeinigung, self-denial, burning. 

2 Celibacy of the Romish clergy. Rabbi means Wise man. The brahmans are the 
Wise. 

3 Isaiah, xx. 3. Josephus said that the Jews were descendants of the Brahman sect 
of Kalanus.—Jos. p. 1047. Coloniae, 1091. 

4 Wuttke, II. 370. Pythagoras and his followers kept silence. So did the munis 
and the Essenes. Let your word be yea, yea, nay, nay ; for what is more than these 
comes of evil. Matthew, v. 37. A man is not a muni because he observes silence, if 
he is foolish and ignorant.—Budha’s Dhammapada, 268. 

5 Colebrooke, 245. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


435 


The Sarmana do not know marriage or begetting of children ; like those 
now called Encratites.—Megastlienes, ed. Schwanbeck, p. 138. 

The Stoic Cliaeremon relates that the masses regarded 
Egyptian priests as philosophers. Some priests were directed 
to abstain from eating any animals; others were entirely pro¬ 
hibited from eating certain animals. 1 Siladitya, being a strict 
Budliist, forbade the eating of meat. 2 

And they are just like hermits, 3 social intercourse being performed only at 
the Congregations and the Festivals.—Porphyry, Abstinentia, iv. 6. 

They gave up all their life to the Contemplation of divine things and to 
seeing visions ; by means of this last procuring honor, safety and piety ; but, 
by means of contemplation, knowledge : and through both, a certain askesis 
of morals, mysterious, 4 time-honored ! For the being always occupied in the 
divine gnosis and inspiration puts (them) outside of all concupiscence, and puts 
down the passions, and quite wakes up the life to understanding. And they 
practised simplicity and moderation and continence and patience, and the 
JUSTICE in everything, and unselfishness. And the difficulty of reaching them 
rendered them Semnoi (Holy Men) !—Cliaeremon. 

And the semnon (Holiness) was visible in their condition ; for their walk 
was disciplined, and their look was practised calm, as if now they did not 
wish to blink : laughter is seldom ; if it ever happened it reached smiling ; and 
the hands always within the clothing! And each had a significant mark of his 
order of priesthood to which he belonged ; for the orders were many. The 
diet simple and coarse. Some tasted wine not at all, others only the least 
bit . . . they said that wine induced venereal desires ... at the purifications 
using no bread ; but if at any time they were not engaged in these they ate it 
cutting it up with hyssop; for they say that the hyssop takes away much of its 
power. And they abstained very much from oil; 5 the most abstained wholly 
. . . and many abstained from eating creatures that have life ; and at the 
purifications all did, when they did not permit an egg. 

“ Tlie Laws of Maim,” which Max Muller considers after our 
era make frequent mention of the Ascetics. 6 They imply the 
previous existence of the ascetic orders. 

In iniquity I was formed, and in sin my mother made me warm.—Psalm, 
li. 7. 

1 Porphyry, Abst. iv. 5. 

2 Max Muller, India, What can it do, 287. 

3 r]pep.aio is. 

4 K eKpvMiivr)v. Whatever was a mystery (arcanum) and to be regarded, as too great 
or too sublime to be understood by the vulgar, that the prophets veiled in more obscure 
figures, enigmas, allegories, proverbs and parables.—Origen c. Celsum, vii. p. 508. 

5 Like the Essenes.—Jos. Wars, II. 7. 

8 Dunker, Gesch. d. Alt. II. 95; Wuttke, Gesch. d. Heidenthums, II. 235. 


436 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Before the period assigned by Josephus to the Essenes there 
was a sect of Physicians that Megasthenes names Iatrikoi, es¬ 
sentially curative in their usages, chaste, ascetics, killing and 
eating nothing that has life, raising the dead, prophesying the 
future and exhibiting the usual indications that the kingdom 
of heaven was at hand, generally. They had ten command¬ 
ments and made travels, like the Iessenes, the Nazorian Ies- 
saians and Saint Paul. The Book of Manu was finished in the 
7th century before Christ, according to Dunker. 1 According 
to Wuttke, the latest parts of Manu are earlier than the fourth 
century before Christ. 2 Some things in the work are a com¬ 
plete parallel to Christian sayings. It is probable that the 
asceticism in India was at about the same time parallel in 
Iudaea. See Isa. lvi. 3, 4, 5. There was a Jesuit, who tried to 
prove that the Bhagavad-Gita was suggested by the writings 
of Clemens Alexandrinus and other Christians! The asceti¬ 
cism mentioned in Manu ought to be as ancient as that in the 
Book of Daniel or that of the Chasidi of Psalm clxv. 10, or 
cxlix. 1; these being the casti (chaste) and zadikim (just), conse¬ 
crated and initiated. 3 Movers identifies the kedeshim with the 
Galli (eunuchs), and Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, 5, sustains him ; while 
Lucian de Dea Syria, 50, confirms him. 4 The Hindu gnosis 
sustains the Hebrew! 

The fundamental practice which characterised the sect of 
John has always had its centre in Chaldea in the Mithrabap- 
tism. We find, says Benan, in the region over the Jordan sects 
floating between Judaism, Christianity, Baptism and Sabaism. 
The religion of the Sabians is essentially that of the Old 
Chaldeans. They were a people between Jews and Christians. 
Some were regarded as sectaries of the Jews and Christians. 5 6 


1 Dunker, II. 95. 

2 Wuttke, Handbuch der Christliehen Sittenlehre, p. 28. The completion of the 
work is to be set down as prior to the sixth century before Christ.—Wuttke, Ges- 
chichte d. Heidenthums, II. 235. The date of Manu’s law book is altogether unknown. 
—Max Miiller, Hist. Anc. Sanskrit Lit. p. 62. It was compiled 9 or 10 centuries B.c. a 
compilation of previously existing usages and laws.—Allen’s India, 866. 

3 Movers, Phonizier, 683, 688; Allen’s India, 366. Jennings, Jewish Ant., 262 ; 
Hieronymus, Comment, ad Hos. Tom. III. p. 1261 sq. The eunuchs who keep my sab¬ 
baths and choose that in which I delight (namely, chastity).—Isaiah, lvi. 3. See Gene¬ 
sis, vi. 3; Matth. xix. 12. 

4 2 Kings, ix. 32, mentions the eunuchs as common at that time. So 1 Kings, xv. 

12 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 7. 

6 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 633. 


BEFORE ANTIOCH. 


437 


In the eastern and southeastern parts of Palestine, all the way 
to Chaldea, there was a conflux of different races and religious 
communities. 1 The Sabians shaved the head as the Dionysus- 
worshippers and St. Paul did. At least, they shaved the 
middle of the head and deprived themselves of virility. 2 This 
sort of thing Mr. Jacolliot says still obtains in India. Jordan 
gnosis and that of the Ganges were intimately interwoven to¬ 
gether. Paul seems not to have been far behind the require¬ 
ments of his time in this respect, and Origen went beyond 
Paul. There were two sorts of Sabians. One kind recognized 
Jesus Christ and read psalms ; but the rest denied him entirely 
and worshipped the Sun. 3 They both ought to have been 
satisfied with the first chapter of the Apokalypse, which puts 
the solar symbolism in great prominence. 

1 ibid. I. 119. 

2 ibid, I. 187, 635. 

3 ibid. I. 192. Julian did. The Jewish Sibyl had long before said “ from the sun 
God shall send a King ” and psalm, xix. 4, had declared that “ Iahoh’s (Iao’s) tent he 
placed in the sun.” 


CHAPTER EIGHT. 


THE NAZARENES. 

“ rb PdirTKTfAa rov iwavvov irtdev ?jv ? ” 

“ The vow of a nazer unto Ia’hoh, continence.” 

“nazoria who have not eaten the food of the children of the world.” 
“fear not them that slay the body.” 

There was a wonderful activity in the Hellenist and Palestine 
exegesis from the time of Aristobulus down. 1 The Greek 
translators of the Bible could not withdraw themselves from 
the powerful influences that stretched out from the mother¬ 
land over all parts of the Jewish Dispersion. 2 And, like the 
Seventy, the later writers Aristobulus, Ezekielos, Philo stand 
in the same relations of dependence upon Palestine and its ex¬ 
egesis. 3 Some have preferred to date the Septuagint Version 
(which Munk says was made at different times by different 
authors) as made during the reign of Ptolemy Philometor b.c. 
225; and as the story of the Seventy’s labors is mythic and 
the able Josephus is authority for the Philadelphus-story, the 
suspicion increases on the mind that Josephus may have put 
things still more out of chronology than the substitution of 
Philadelphus for Philometor. At any rate, it is not suppos- 
able that the Septuagint was written all at one time; for it is 
not so much a translation as an in places independent work. It 
has been called a targum ; but it varies in the “ Prophets ” more 
than even a targum usually varies, and to a surprising degree 
sometimes. 

1 Compare J. Freudenthal, Hellenist Studien, 66-68. Alexander Polyhistor refers 
to Demetrios the Chronograph, while Alexander himself lived in the time of Sulla, born 
B.C. 138, and Crassus, B.C. 71, 70. He extracted from Eupolemos who may have lived 
near the beginning of the first century B.c. The Polyhistor therefore wrote in the first 
part of the first century before our era. See J. Freudenthal, 124, 125, 127. 

2 Diaspora. 

3 ibid. 66 ; Frankel, Yorstudien zu der Septuagmta ; Einfluss d. palast. Exegeseauf 
d. alexand. Hermeneutik; Ueber palast. und alex. Schriftforschung. 


THE NAZARENES. 


439 


Tlie Kabalah in Hermes Trismegistus agrees with that in 
Job. The gnosis is the same in both. Mariette and others have 
held that there is no evidence that the Egyptians believed in 
One God . 1 “ Nowhere do we find the one and indivisible God 
without name and without form, who presides from on high 
over the Egyptian pantheon .” 2 The Egyptian priests very 
likely had the doctrine, but it was not for the interest of any 
except the priests of Amen at Thebes or the priests of the 
’Jerusalem Temple to maintain it openly, and then at a late 
period : these last were anxious to draw away the public from 
worshipping at the Highplaces and gather them together at 
the Jerusalem sanctuary. Hence the doctrine “ One Temple , 
One God ” suited their particular case. But it is not prob¬ 
able that the philosophers even down to the time of Plutarch 
would have had to reason out the problem of to «/, if unitari- 
anism had been publicly avowed in Egypt and universally ad¬ 
mitted. 

The unit, the single and self-existent, the monadic, the really Good. 3 And 
all these of the names press on nnto the Mind. 4 Mind (is) then the God, a form 
set apart, 5 that is, the unmixed with any matter, combined with nothing sub¬ 
ject to passion.—Plutarch, de placit. phil. I. vii. 15. 

“ God is unity and uncompounded, and anything put together could not 
come out of him.” 

Here, then, we reach the philosophical base of the Hebrew argu¬ 
ment. 

Pythagoras [and Plato] and the Stoics (held) that the kosmos was produced 
by God; and corruptible, it is true, so far as depends on nature, for it can be 
perceived on account of the corporeal (element) : it will not however perish, 
through the providence and constraint of God.—Plutarch, placit. phil. II. iv. 

Aristotle (held) that the world was neither ensouled wholly through all 
parts, nor in truth endued with perception, reason, nor intelligence, nor ruled 
with providence. For indeed the heavenly bodies partake of all these. For 

1 In the Egyptian system of religion too, later philosophers claim to find a highest 
being, a kind of monotheism. Thus Plutarch calls Kneph, whom the inhabitants of 
the Thebais worshipped, a God without beginning and without end, and, according to 
Iamblichus, Osiris is the highest being (in Egyptian estimation), the other deities only 
his personified powers,—Amun his Allmight, Phtha the power of his Wisdom.—Chwol- 
sohn, I. 723; de Iside, 21; Iamblichus, de Myst. VIII. 3. 

2 Mariette, Monuments, pp. 24. 25. Pierret differs from him. 

3 Matth., xix. 17. Plutarch earlier than Matthew’s Gospel. 

4 eis t'ov vovv. 

6 rested, at rest. —Gen. 2. 


440 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


spheres contain ensouled and living (spirits); and the earthly bodies partake of 
none of them, but of good order by accident, 1 not by taking the control.—Aris¬ 
totle. 2 

It is a “fact that the idea of a highest Being, a God of the 
Gods and Lord of the Lords, ont of which a sort of Monothe¬ 
ism gradually was developed, taught by the philosophers of 
the earlier period, little by little spread itself, and during the 
first Christian centuries became common property of the then 
cultivated world.” 3 Plato speaks in innumerable passages of 
that highest Being, the Father of all things and the Creator 
of the Gods, whom he also calls “ Greatest of the Gods ” and 
“ the Governor of the whole; ” and Porphyrius defines, in his 
history of philosophy, the “ Only God ” of Plato to be such 
that no name and nothing human is suitable to Him, and all 
his appellations inappropriate. 4 Gnosis again! Saturn’s star 
among the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians and Greeks was 
called Phainon. In a temple at Charran 5 (Carrhae) in North¬ 
ern Mesopotamia the Sabians invoked the planets, celebrated 
Mysteries, worshipped idols, images, 6 and stars as divine be¬ 
ings, 7 as mediators. 8 Saturn was the first of the planets. 9 
“ Consecrated into the star of the Kronos.”—Philo, Sanchon., 
p. 42. The Egyptians and Chaldeans dedicate the Seventh 
day to Phainon.—Lydus, de Mensibus, p. 25. Orelli, Sanchon, 
42. 

The Augustan age became the heir to all the systems of the 
East. To the Pythagorean numerical theory were added Baby- 

1 “ as may happen.” 

2 in Plutarch, placit. phil. II. 3. Plutarch has all the arguments respecting “ Quid 
sit Deus.” The Sabians considered that the stars are deities, the planets deities of a 
higher grade, and the sun the highest god.—Chwolsohn II. 452; quotes from Maimon- 
ides, Text V. § 3. Hence, further on, the Egyptians are demonstrated by Khaeremon 
to have been Sabians. In the early time the Kopts were Sabians.—Abulfeda, Text 
VIII. § 7. Chwolsohn, II. 501. 

2 ibid. I. 718. 

4 Chwolsohn, I. 719 ; Euseb. pr. ev. IX. 12. I saw the Head of the days as He sat 

on the throne of his glory, and the books of the Living were open before Him, aud his 
whole army that is above in heaven and around Him stood before Him.—Henoch, 
xlvii. 3. The Kronos is the Lord of the spirits.—Compare Henoch, xlvii. 2. 

6 the Haran of Genesis, xi. 31. 

8 Chwolsohn, I. 200. 

7 ibid. I. 236, 684, 686. 

«687. 

9 Movers, 255, 260, 287, 315. The Chaldeans called the God Iao instead of Intelli¬ 
gible Light.—ibid. 265 ; Lydus de mens. iv. 38. p. 74. 


THE NAZARENES. 


441 


Ion’s unit and tlie Monad 1 from the one, the Mithra-worship, 
the Egyptian Wisdom, with all the forms and theories of dual¬ 
ism. Cicero, Philo and, later still, Josephus lived in this 
period of the gnosis and its tradition, when from the unit 
were derived all the power and Powers of the universe, when 
the notion of a Kingly Power 2 was reached in the Babylonian 
doctrine of the “ Pather ” and the “ Son,” 3 when Enoch had 
pointed to the Messiah-King (Henoch, lii. 2, 4; 1 Tim. iii. 16), 
and the idea of the trinity lay dormant in the three conceptions 
of Spiritus Creator, Father, and Son. Josephus beheld the 
divine manger in the skies, which the Magi had long before 
perceived, whence the Son of the Man was to come forth. The 
Son of the Man sows the good seed . . . the field is the 
world . . . the tares are the children of the Wicked One, the 
Adversary . . . the harvest is the End of the world. 4 Here, 
then, we have in Judea the dualism of the Persian Mithra- 
worship. The oriental was logical in his theory of causation, 
for he distinguishes between his Good God and the Eternal 
Cause of evil. 5 So did the Ebionites. 

The first one is the inactive, resting cause. 6 The second is 
the active cause which is conditioned by the first. 7 In the 
second, the first acquires f 07 * 771 . For the second sets itself 
forth out from the first and therefore is named (as among the 
Orphic philosophers) the one “that is his own father,” who 
produces himself. This is not the place to show in detail out 
of what parts of the oriental emanation-theory this form of 
doctrine has developed itself and how it stands in the nearest 
relationship not so much with the Neoplatonists, particular¬ 
ly Plotinus, but much more with the Neopythagoreans, the 

1 Jupiter Syrius vel Sol.—Movers, I. 182. Spartianus, Caracalla, c. 11. 

2 Massiach, Anointed. Such a being, carried into action (ii-epyeia.) by the Light, is 
subjected only to sight. And the Light is its form, as if matter were strewn beneath 
and extended beyond to the bodies.—Julian, in Solem, p. 134. The light is without 
body and the rays, its extremity, like a flower.—ibid. Compare Genesis, i. 3, 4. 

3 Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 181, 182; Cory, 253, 254. Compare Henoch, xlvi. 1 ; xlviii. 
2 ; lii. 4; Movers, Phon. 265 ; 4 Esdras, vii. 29. He is the Creator, the Revealed 
Saturn, the mystical Heptaktis or Iao of the Chaldean Philosophy.—Dunlap, ibid, 
p. 182; Movers, 265 ; Proklus in Tim. iv. 251. This Iao is the Hebrew m,T laoh, or 
Iahoh, whose sacred numbers are seven and four. 

* Matthew, xiii. 37, 38, 39; Rev. x. 6; xiv. 15-20. 

6 Job. ii. 4, gives Satan credit for wit. 

6 Gen. ii. 2. 

7 See Cory, Anc. Fragments. 253, 254 ; Dunlap, Vestiges, 181, 182; Movers, 265, 
266; Proclus, in Tim. iv. 251; naTpoye^es <f>aos —Proclus, in Tim. 242. 


442 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


worshippers of Moses, and Numenius. 1 In the Book of Mys¬ 
teries the doctrine is found as Hermetic Wisdom : 

Before the things really existing and the whole beginnings there is One God 
the First (in respect to the first God and King) unmoved, remaining in the 
unity of his own oneness. And from this unit, the God that is sufficient to 
himself caused himself to flash forth. 2 Wherefore he is both his own father 
and sufficient to himself. . . . 

These then, therefore, are the beginnings, the oldest of all, which Hermes 
puts before the aetlierean and empyrean and superheavenly Gods.—Iamblichus, 
viii. c. 2. 

These Hermetic doctrines are exact parallels to correspond¬ 
ing passages in Genesis and John’s Gospel, i. 1. Light (Aur, 
Horns) appears as Logos, Son, Word and Life, and Chaldeans, 
Sabians, Jews, Egyptians and Syrians held to the doctrines of 
Hermes. 

There is heaven’s Great God, a Moving Word, exceeding great and ever¬ 
lasting, undying Fire, at which all trembles, earth and heaven and the sea, the 
depths of hell and shuddering demons.—Harlesz, agypt. Mysterien, 19, 22: 
the Oracle. 

The Father of all things consists of life and light. Holy art Thou that hast 
created all things by thy Word.—Hermes, I. 21, 31. 

All was one light. 3 Then arose in one part a Darkness which separated 
itself from the Light and tended downwards. This Darkness became changed 
into a moist and inexpressibly confused chaos, and giving out a smoke as if from 
fire and a certain sound resounding, unspeakable, mournful. Then a discordant 
voice was emitted from it, so that it seemed to be the voice of the Light.— 
Hermes, I. 5. 

Doth not Wisdom cry (—Proverbs, viii. 1, 23, 24). From eternity I was 
effused, from the beginning. 

Atliana springing upwards shouted with an exceeding great cry : and 
Heaven and Mother earth shuddered at her.—Pindar, 01. vii. 

For in the construction of all things from the beginning heaven and earth 
too had one form, their nature having been mingled. And after these things, 
the bodies seceding from each other, the world assumed all the arrangement 
which is visible in it, and the air acquired continuous agitation, and the fiery 
part was massed towards the most elevated parts, such an element as this being 
borne up owing to its lightness. For which reason the sun and the remaining 
multitude of the stars remain in the whole whirl ; but the earthy and dark 
part of the composition, with the waters, took position in one and the same 
spot : and, being whirled round on itself and continually revolving, made from 
the waters the sea, but from the more hard the earth muddy and altogether soft. 


1 Harlesz, Egyptian Mysteries, 12, 22. 

2 Genesis, i. 3. 

3 Gen. i. 3. 


THE NAZARENES. 


443 


And this in the first place, the fire of the sun radiating upon it, acquired con¬ 
sistency.—Diodorus Sic. I. 7. 

And the air being of light weight followed the spirit 1 which ascended up 
to the fire from the earth and water, so as to appear to be hanging from it.— 
Hermes, I. 5. The earth and the water remained so mixed up together that 
the earth was not visible on account of the water ; and they were set in motion 
by the spirit word that was borne upon them, so that they were heard.— 
Hermes, I. 5. Out of the light a Holy Word moved upon the chaos, and fire un¬ 
mixed issued from the damp chaos and rose up on high. — Hermes, I. 5. 

Best of all things is Water.—Pindar. 

The water and the earth are separated one from the other.—Hermes, I. 35. 

The earth (was) made firm and the heaven spread out.—Hermes, xiv. 68. 
And God spoke through his Holy Word : Increase in growth and multiply.— 
Hermes, I. 18. 

The Mind ' 2 which is male-female, life and light, brought forth by a word 
another Creative mind, who, being God of the fire and spirit, created Seven 
Procurators that surround the perceptible world in circles.—Hermes, I. 9. 

This is the early gnosis; and a careful translation shows that 
it is the model from which verses of the first chapter of Gene¬ 
sis were taken verbatim. 

Mysticism is not at this epoch the spirit of the orient solely; 
it becomes the spirit of the entire world. If the central fire is 
in Egypt and in the great oriental countries, the rays spread 
themselves and penetrate everywhere, in Greece, Gaul, Italy, 
Spain, Africa. It is because one same domination and the 
common misery bring together and unite all the peoples. 
Everywhere the old society dies of exhaustion and fatigue ; 
everywhere it thirsts for repose and despairs to find it in these 
wretched cities agitated by anarchy and ruined by conquest. 
The tendency of intelligent minds towards the ideal world be¬ 
comes universal, so too souls were carried away by a longing 
for the solitary and contemplative life. All those not ab¬ 
sorbed by the cares or the passions of material existence, all 
elevated, free and generous natures, all the great spirits and 
noble hearts of this society in decrepitude took refuge either 
in the contemplation of the eternal and divine truth or in the 
expectation of a better world. This sentiment doubtless did 
not descend at once from the schools to the peoples and gov¬ 
ernments. It penetrated to them only by the favor of the 

1 Gen. i. 2. 

2 Adam primus. I am the Light, the Mind, thy God . . . the Logos that proceeds 
from the Mind, the Son of God.—Hermes, I. 6. Compare the beginning of St. John’s 
1st chapter. 


444 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


great religions revolution that was to end in the triumph of 
Christianity. The new spirit gathers, develops, fortifies, and 
exalts itself in solitude and in silence. It animates all that it 
touches. Is it in truth the religion of Homer and Hesiod that 
Julian and his priests Maximus and Chrysanthus practise, 
when they give themselves up to all the rigors of asceticism ? 1 
It is the grand light of idealism that illumines all the doctrines 
of the schools ; it is the great voice of mysticism that presides 
over all the chants of the temples. All philosophy becomes 
the science of the pure spirit , all religion its adoration. 2 

Those initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries were shown 
the two principles of darkness (Ezekiel, viii. 12, 14) and light 
in successive scenes. There were several enclosures, as in the 
temple at Jerusalem, which were only entered by degrees. A 
great veil separated the different species of pictures and pre¬ 
vented certain classes of the initiated from seeing the objects 
exposed to view in the interior of the sanctuary. Certain stat¬ 
ues and certain pictures in the temples in which the initiated 
met could be seen by everyone ; but others were concealed in 
the interior which were forms that the Gods assumed in the 
magical apparitions. These were only known to the initiated, 
and the great advantage of initiation was to be able to enjoy 
those mystic exhibitions, and to behold the Divine Lights. 
It was for them that the veil fell which concealed the sanctu¬ 
ary of the Goddess from others and that the sacred robe was 
removed which covered her statue, and which a divine light 
suddenly surrounded. This ceremony, which was called pho- 
tagoge (the light-bringing), announced the epiphany of the 
Gods. The sanctuary was filled with the divine light, the rays 
of which struck the eyes and penetrated the soul of the initi¬ 
ated who were admitted to behold this beautiful vision. They 
were prepared for this moment of bliss by fearful scenes, by' 
alternations of hope and fear, of light and darkness, by the 
flashing of lightning, by the terrible noise of imitated thun¬ 
der, and by apparitions of spectres and magical illusions which 
struck simultaneously both eyes and ears. 3 

The God of day was at his birth confined in a dark place 
until he reentered his empire of light. This is why Chris- 

1 E. Vacherot, Hist. Crit., I. 116. 

2 ibid. 117. 

3 Mankind, 636, 637. 


THE NAZARENES. 


445 


tos and Mithra, or the winter sun, receive the worship of men 
in a dark subterraneous place which represents the lower por¬ 
tion of the universe, in which the sun at that time was held to 
reside. 1 Elysium only existed for those that were Initiated. 
Mark Antony was initiated in the Mysteries of Osiris. The 
profane were excluded from the ceremonies of the Initiated. 
The same was done by the Christians. “ Withdraw, profane.” 
“ Let the catechumens and those not yet admitted depart.” 
The author of “ Mankind ” clearly identifies the Apokalypse 
with the Mysteries of Mithra. 2 So, too, in the Ram of Aman 
(or Amen) at Thebes, may be found the Amanuel “ associated 
to the perfect spirits of Manu who are beholding* thy beams in 
the morning.” 3 The God appears from the eastern heaven 
“ in his form of the Living Ram.” 4 The Codex Nazoria, I. 98, 
mentions Amonel (Omonael) as the name of’life-giving Iesu, 
the Messiah mendax who will call himself Iesu that gives life. 
Compare John’s Gospel, v. 26, 27; xi. 25 ; xiv. 19 ; and the 
Gospel Infantiae. It is clear that the Codex Nazoria knew the 
claims of the Christians at some period before a.d. 1040. 

“ The aim of all initiation is to connect man with the order 
of the universe and with the Gods. Who does not know that 
the mysteries and initiations have for their object to withdraw 
our souls from this material and mortal life, to unite it to the 
Gods, and to dissipate the darkness which impedes it by 
spreading divine light in it ? ” An archangel presided over 
each planet according to the Kabalists. “The seven towns 
in the Apokalypse are not chosen indiscriminately, but are 
arranged in a continuous and circular form, which includes 
the whole of ancient Lydia. Ephesus is the first because 
nearest to Patmos and sacred to Diana the moon. If we look 
on initiation as a real institution of Freemasonry, which had 
several lodges, we must presume that the number 7 determined 
the number of these lodges, and that each of them was put 
under a planet. Thus the lodge of Ephesus was called that of 
Diana the Moon. The number 7 5 is often taken to signify the 
universe, and consequently the universality of the Church as 


1 ibid. 503. 

2 ib. 521 et passim. 

3 See Records, vi. 50. 

4 Rec. viii. 95. 

5 says Isidore of Seville (Orig. VI. cap. xvi.). 


446 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


John has done in the Apokalypse where the universal Church 
is represented by the seven Churches, throughout which her 
universality appears to be distributed.” 1 Those who assert¬ 
ed the gnosis were given to mystic astrology in many cases. 
“ Those who denied the authenticity of the Apokalypse and re¬ 
jected this work as not written by St. John the Apostle based 
their denial on the fact of there being no Christians at Thya- 
tira at the time that John addresses them, the religion of that 
town being at that time the Phrygian sect. If, then, Thyatira 
belonged to this sect, the other towns which are addressed be¬ 
longed to it also, and the whole work must belong to the 
Phrygian sect.”—Mankind, 528. But if we date the Apoka¬ 
lypse circa 130-136, there were Christians there then, some 
sort of Christians, half Jews, perhaps. 

The genius of Light, clad in a dazzling robe, who appeared 
to Priscilla, or the prophetess, 2 strongly resembles the genius 
glowing with light who appears to John. The attitude of ex¬ 
pectation in which the seven virgins awaited Christ resembles 
exactly that in which the faithful and the friends of the Lamb 
are when the prophet John announces to them that Christ is 
about to appear and is at hand: See he is coming with the 
clouds, and every eye shall see him and those who slew him, 
and all the tribes of the earth shall bewail him. 3 Now, as the 
theology of the Priscillianists countains the account of the 
travels of the soul through the sphere, we cannot hesitate to 
recognize here an allusion to the spheres in the addresses to 
the seven lodges of initiated persons who were subordinate 
to them. We shall now, after having followed the enthusiastic 
spirit of the hierophant in this journey, pass to the eighth 
heaven, the heaven of the fixed stars, which is immediately 
above the seven planetary layers, 4 and which forms the cele¬ 
brated Ogdoad 5 which designated mystically the universe, 
earth, Jerusalem, etc. 

Clemens Alexandrinus, 6 explaining the passage in the tenth 
book of Plato respecting the path of the souls over the meadow, 
which arrive at their destination on the eighth day, says that 

1 Mankind, 525. 

8 Epiph. 1. II. cap. xlix. 

3 Rev. i. 7 ; xxii. 12; See, I am coming quick. For slew read pierced. 

4 orbits, circles, districts. 

5 Irenaeus, I. cap. i. 

«1. Y. 


THE NAZARENES. 


447 


the seven days correspond to the seven planets, and that the 
road they take afterwards leads them to the eighth heaven, 
namely the heaven of the fixed stars, or the firmament. We 
have also seen the eighth door in the cave of Mithra, which is 
on the summit of the ladder on which are the seven doors of 
the planets, through which the souls pass. We have now ar¬ 
rived at the eighth heaven or the firmament. This, therefore, 
is the picture we have to look upon. 

After the soul of the prophet has passed through the seven 
spheres from the sphere of the moon to that of Saturn, or from 
the planet that corresponds to Cancer, the gate of men, to that 
of Capricorn, which is the gate of the Gods, a new gate opens 
to him in the highest heaven, and in the Zodiac, beneath which 
the seven planets revolve; in a word, in the firmament or that 
which the ancients called crystallinum primum, or the crystal 
heaven. After this, I looked, and, behold, a door was opened 1 
in heaven, and lo the first voice I heard was as a trumpet 
talking with me, saying : “ Come up here and I will show thee 
the things that must be hereafter.” This door is an expression 
borrowed from the Mithra religion, in which each planet had 
its door, and the same expression is used in the vision of Eze¬ 
kiel. This is the astrological sphere fixed on four centres, four 
Zodiacal signs. 1 

The religions of the oriental Thiasoi, Eranes and Orgions 
were the old religions of Asia Minor and Syria. 2 If compared 
with the Christians or Serapis worshippers there was at least 
one point in common. It was the adoration of the Yirgin hold¬ 
ing in her arms the Child, the little Horus, Adonis, or Apollo. 
These oriental communities were a sort of collegia, churches 
or congregations worshipping Adoni (Adonis). We can see 
their status when the adoration of Serapis took a larger hold 
upon the public, and, even in Judea, his image appeared as¬ 
sociated with his divine Nurse, Isis, Aishah, Hue. What an 
opening they afforded for persuasions of the preacher, who 
should leave them their elements while expanding their creed! 
The erane or thiasos was a religious corporation, collecting 
assessments from its members and devoted to the adoration of 
the oriental Attis or Serapis and the Mother of the Gods. 3 


1 Rev. iv. 1; Mankind, 524-527. 

2 Foucart, p. 127. 

3 ibid. p. 89. 


448 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The sectateurs and charlatans of the Mother of the Gods 
and Serapis were a low, ribald and wandering* tribe who made 
oracles for slaves and the women of the people. 1 What, how¬ 
ever, seems to indicate a connection with the Jews and Chris¬ 
tians is their abstinence from women, pork and garlic. 2 They 
were Hagnoi, chaste; jnst as the Jews were! Holy Chasidim ! 
“This is the Gate of Ia’hoh, let the Zadikim enter through 
it! ” The Zadikim are the Chasidim, the Casti. 3 

If the collection of New Testament writings had been the 
work of the earliest period of Christianism there would have 
been no uncertainty which were canonical. A. D. Ionian’s 
argument is that there was a real Paul in history for whom 
the Ebionites had great respect, but that he was not the Paul 
of our New Testament canon whose epistles are late; that we 
have in our canon no epistles of the time and from the hand 
of the Paul of history (Quaest. Paulinae, II. 99); that the op¬ 
position to the admission of the epistles of Paul canonicus 
was made not only by the party of Jew-Christians (the Old- 
Christian salvation-men) but also, from wholly different mo¬ 
tives, by the Encratites connected with Markion. The Old 
Katholic party sought to canonise the products of the post- 
apostolic time as Apostolic writings, then there existed an old 
tradition of Paul as a highly esteemed Apostle in Nazarene, 
that is, in Jew-Christian or Old-Christian circles; conse¬ 
quently, the external proofs of the genuineness of the epistles 
standing in the name of Paul are of the same intrinsic value 
as those for the apostolic origin of the Fourth Gospel. The 
Book of Acts is unreliable and unhistorical, and is later than 
the Epistle to the Galatians, and that no conclusive proofs for 
the existence of this Epistle can be obtained from the Old- 
Christian literature prior to the last quarter of the Second 
Century (pp. 99, 100). He regards this as an apocryphal work 
proceeding from a Church party that followed what at that 
time was the usual way of signalising their opinion of Chris¬ 
tianism as the true Pauline, and we discover that against this 
effort to find more general reception for the new ideas through 

1 ibid. 170, 179 ; Plutarch de Pyth. orac. 25:—a set of cheating vagabonds, beg¬ 
gars and vulgar mendicants ! Compare with these the mendicant eunuch priests of 
Adonis, the mendicants on the Jordan, the mendicant Jews, and later, the mendicant 
orders in Rome, even to this day. 

2 Foucart, pp. 123, 147. 

3 Dunlap, Sod, I. 41; Jennings, Jew. Ant. 262. 


THE NAZARENES. 


449 


the authority of an old name an opposition immediately ap¬ 
pears in the circles of those who are distinguished for their 
adherence to the Old Tradition ; then the difficulties in ques¬ 
tion disappear and the other known facts and phenomena be¬ 
came immediately explicable. Pseudonymous writers have 
been taken into the canon (such as Paul, Peter, Jacobus, 
Judas, Johan) in case they were found worthy of it. The 
whole literature of the time was pseudepigraphic among 
Heathens, Jews, and Christians; there was a lack of the sense 
of truth among the very best of this time ; Origen did not fear 
to bring an intentional plea for the cloaking of the truth, 
where the interests of religion and Christianity depended on 
the game. Somewhat earlier Celsus is mentioned who already 
had revealed the secret of the “ working over ” of the evangels 
for the demands (needs) of the cause. Loman then describes, 
p. 108, Eusebius as a thoroughly dishonest historian of an¬ 
tiquity. To this may be added that Irenaeus I. xxv., xxvi., in 
his curt accounts wears anything but the appearance of an en¬ 
tirely credible witness. Loman (p. 110) takes the ground that 
the New Testament writings represent, for so far as their gen¬ 
uineness cannot be proved, the Christendom of the post-apos- 
tolic period. What have we to do with the New Testament 
Paul in the pre-hellenic period of Christianism ? If it is 
shown continually clearer that the answer must be in the neg¬ 
ative, so much the livelier will the demand be felt for a review 
for our idea of the Principal Epistles.—Loman, p. 113. The 
question then arises whether Galatians, ii. 2 , 6, 9, with the irony 1 
attending the use of the expression dokountes einai ti and 
dokountes stuloi, could not have been written in an animated 
argument in an apocryphal epistle in Paul’s name, as well as 
by Paul himself, and with as much natural feeling against the 
Ebionite adherence to Judaist observances, without any re¬ 
gard to the date of the epistle. In fact prior to a.d. 66-70 is 
too early, apparently, for the conflict between Greek Chris¬ 
tianism and Jew-Christianism to have arisen, for Josephus 
mentions no Christians at Jerusalem when the war broke 
out just before the City’s destruction. If the Christians at 
Pome could write apocryphal works, like the Book of Acts, it 
would give them very little trouble to insert the names Iesous, 

1 1 consider that in nothing am I inferior to the overmuch apostles.—2 Cor. xi. 5 ; 
xii. 11. 


29 


450 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Christos, and Iakobos the brother of Iesous who is called 
Christos, in the last books of the Jewish Antiquities in the 
Manuscripts of Josephus. 1 At any rate, Justin Martyr (c. 145- 
167) does not mention Paul at all. But Justin belonged to the 
Petrine or Jewish Christians. How would the date 125-140 
answer for Paul’s four epistles considering that Markion men¬ 
tions ten of them ? 

If ye conversed with some that are called Christians but do 
not acknowledge this and dare to blaspheme the God of Abra- 
am and the God of Isaak and the God of Iakob, and who say 
there is no resurrection of the dead, but when they die their 
souls are taken up into the heaven, do not suppose them Chris¬ 
tians.—Justin, Trypho, p. 89. This is, seemingly, the opinion 
that Josephus, Wars, II. 8. 11 ascribes to the Essenes. Justin 
follows the Apokalypse, i. 5, in regarding Iesu Messiah as first¬ 
born from the dead. So that Justin and the Apokalypse are 
one with Matthew, i. 1; ii. 1, 20, 23. The doctrine was settled. 2 

1 The interpolation in Josephus, Ant. xviii. 3. 3, actually interrupts the narrative, 
having no connection with the events that led to the War with the Romans, nor with 
the bringing into Jerusalem images on the Roman ensigns. Josephus, xx. 8. 5 gives as 

* a reason why God rejected Jerusalem the murder of the Highpriest in the Temple by 
the Robbers, the temple being rendered impure. Josephus calls them Robbers ; for 
they robbed Romans and neutrals. Justin charges the destruction of Judea to their 
crucifying Iesous. 

2 Matthew, vii. 15 ; xxiv. 24 ; 2 Peter, 1 ; Justin, Trypho, p. 89. Justin, 86, 87 has 
the beginning of Matthew about the Magoi, the beginning of Luke, about Kurenios and 
the first registration, about the Mithra Mysteries in the cave, the children Herod slew ; 
and seems to have got near the fountain head of all the stories in the Gospels that the 
study of the Old Testament could suggest to an oriental rhapsodist. “ Leaving the God 
and placing hope upon a man, what safety is yet left,” says Trypho. Then he recom¬ 
mends the Jewish Law, and suggests that the Messiah is, anyway, yet unknown until 
Elias coming anoints him and makes him visible to all. And you glorifying a mere report 
figure up for yourselves some Messiah and for the sake of him inconsiderately utterly 
destroy the things of the present.—Justin, p. 37. We here have a reference to the re¬ 
port of the Resurrection , which the Jew denounces as a foolish rumor, and the abandon¬ 
ment of their worldly goods (as in Acts, iv. 34, 85 ; Philo, On the Essenes or Iessenes) in 
the expectation that the Anointed would be soon Comingon the clouds of heaven ;—which 
would make them all brothers and sisters. Justin sneers at the 4 fleshly circumcision ’ 
of the Jews, while “ Paulus ” professes to live only for him who died and was raised 
from the dead for all; so that we all died to the flesh in him, and therefore are a new 
creation. The old has passed away, the new is born ; and 1 although having known 
Christos in the flesh we do so no longer ; ’ 4 from the present moment we know no one in 
the flesh .'—2 Cor. v. If that was a fling at the heads of the Ebionite presbyters in 
Judea (as some have thought) it was dressed in angelic colors. For somehow it leaks 
out that to know the Anointed in the spirit is better than to be related to him other¬ 
wise (xara crapKa. ■yuwfceu'); but the Crucifixion of the flesh belongs to the gnosis be¬ 
tween the Ganges and the Jordan. 


THE NAZARENES. 


451 


So with Paul’s Crucified Messiah and his Justification by Faith. 
Justin has it. Thus we see three great strides taken. The 
first is from Essenism and Jordan Mithra Baptism to the 
establishment of the Nazarene sect of Iessaeans. The second 
is from Nazarenes or Iessaeans at Antioch to Christians, in 
which the Messiah as a Divine Person takes the lead of the 
“ beggarly elements ” along the Jordan and in Nabathea. The 
third is the formation of the Homan Church. Now Justin had 
not thrown the Old Testament overboard, and he still adheres to 
the God of Abrahm, Izchak and Iaqab. “ Paul ” goe& from the 
Law to Faith as Redemption. The alliance with the Hebrew 
Christians is now about to be broken, and “ Paul ” rejected as 
an apostate from the Law of Moses. Then the Roman Catholic 
Church is bound to take him up; for Constantine finds out 
that Christianism in his day was already a great political 
power. Justin, p. 38, says: Our hope is not through Moses 
nor through the Law. I recognized that there would be a final 
Law and a Covenant most Lordly of all, that all men should 
now keep, who lay claim to the inheritance of the God. A 
Law eternal and final was given to us, the Messiach and the 
faithful Covenant, after which comes neither law, nor ordi¬ 
nance, nor command. Justin, here, like Paul, has gone out¬ 
side of the Jewish Messiach. “ This is the New Law and the 
New Testament ” . . . “ the fleshly circumcision from (the 

time of) Abraam was given as a mark to separate you from 
other nations and from us.”—Justin (circa 155-165), p. 42. 
“The blood of that circumcision is done away with.”—Jus¬ 
tin, p. 47. None of you can set foot in Jerusalem.—Justin, 
p. 42. “ Paul ” opposes the Christians still under the Law of 

Moses. 

The Church in the contest with Gnosticism first fixed the 
idea of haeresy. It was a contest against a Gnosticism that 
affiliated with Heathenchristianism, rejecting the God of the 
Old Testament. This is what is meant by Simon Magus, Me¬ 
nander, and Markion being placed together in Justin’s Suntag- 
ma. All three broached ideas adverse to Jewish Old Testa¬ 
ment gnosis. The two former claimed to be Gods ; the last 
(Markion) announced another God greater than the God of the 
Jews, the Creator of all things, and, in like manner, another 
Son than the Christos proclaimed through the Prophets.— 
Harnack, Zur Quellenkritik d. Gesch. d. Gnosticismus, 19, 27; 


452 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Justin, Apol. I. 26, 58. Justin mentions Markion in his First 
Apology before Markion liad yet come to Borne.—Harnack, 24, 
25, 26. Irenaeus has a different order of succession in his list 
from Justin, who lets Markion follow Menander.—ibid. p. 23, 
30. Justin apparently knows only two haeresies, Gnostics and 
Markionites ! Traces the Gnostic haeresy to Heathen specu¬ 
lations into which gradually Christian distorted ideas came. 
And Justin could not have regarded the Ebionites as haereti- 
cal Gnostics (—ib. p. 34) his position towards them being differ¬ 
ent from that of the later Churchfathers. Harnack, p. 41, holds 
that Justin’s Suntagma contained the haeretical leaders in the 
following order: Simon (Kleobienites, Dositheans, Gorathe- 
nians, Masbotheans), Menander, Markion, Karpokras, Valen- 
tinus, Basileides, Satornil. The order of succession in Irenaeus 
is apparently not chronological.—See Harnack, p. 52, 53, who 
considers Basileides placed too early by Irenaeus. Harnack’s 
idea of the succession in the Suntagma of Justin is Simon, Me¬ 
nander, Markion, Karpokras, Valentinus, Basileides, Satornil. 
This would put Kerinthus 1 so late that he might have known 
the Gospel of the Hebrews and been acquainted with Nazo- 
raioi, Ebionim, and Nikolaitans, at least by hearsay. Irenaeus, 
I. xxx. xxxi. mentions Simon and his followers with Markion 

1 Karpokrates and Kerinthus are said (Supernat. Rel. I. 421) to have made use of a 
form of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Coming from Epiphanius, in the last 
half of the fourth century, it does not amount to much ; for if a knowledge of the con¬ 
tents of the Gospel of the Hebrews were brought home to Kerinthus, this would not 
prove that gospel to have been accurate or true ; and if it was so, why was it dropped 
by the Church which has held on to the Four'Gospels ? Besides, Irenaeus says, Kerin¬ 
thus, like Karpokrates, believed that Iesu was the son of Joseph. Daniel, ix. 26, men¬ 
tions the Messiah’s death; and the tradition is that Kerinthus was an Ebionite Judaist, 
adhering to the Law of Moses. If Kerinthus lived about 115-125 it might be difficult to 
prove that the Gospel according to the Hebrews was in existence so early. Twenty years 
before the Christian era it was one vast field of gndsis from the Ganges to Antioch, Jeru¬ 
salem and possibly Alexandria. From the date of Daniel vii. 14, 18, viii. 18, ix. 25, 26, 
to a.d. 80 there was Persian-Babylonian Messianism and Jewish Messianic gnosis. The 
fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 gave a further impulse to Jewish Messianism and Samarian- 
Antiocheian gnosis. It makes no great difference whether we date Kerinthus about 
115 or about 125, as to his Messianism. If he was a Judaist he must have known that 
Messianism was all around him. Basileidian opinion might rather predispose one to 
adopt the last of the two dates for Kerinthus just given, in accord with the views of the 
later Gnostics, who denied the flesh to the Christos. At all events, the connection be¬ 
tween Christian Messianism and the National Party to which Judas the Galilean be¬ 
longed is seen (Acts, i. 6) in the question: Lord, wilt thou restore the (Jewish) king¬ 
dom (the monarchy) to the Israel at this time ? Such Christians asthese Messianists 
were not extinct at the end of the first century.—Josephus, Ant. XVIII. I. 1, 6 ; Daniel, 
ix. 20. Perhaps in 135 they had not all died in the time of Bar Cocheba. 


THE NAZARENES. 


453 


and Saturninus all together, considering the last two as Nazo- 
rians, opposed to marriage. Irenaeus and Tertullian, both, used 
Justin’s Syntagma.—Harnack, 66 f., 70, 71, 72. The Karpokra- 
tians were Christian Gnostics, regarding the body as a prison. 
—Irenaeus, I. xxiv. pp. 122, 123. They said that actions were 
good or bad, as men thought.—ibid. 122 ; Harnack, p. 73. 
Tertullian, De Anima, 35, connects (anschliesst) Karpokras to 
Simon, pariter magus, pariter fornicarius. Justin has in his 
Syntagma copiously and accurately handled only Simon, Men¬ 
ander and Markion, while the rest are treated as “ all impelled 
by these.” The systems of Valentin, Basileides, Satornil must 
have just come out when Justin wrote his Syntagma and his 
Apology, and had not yet acquired their subsequent impor¬ 
tance ; while the systems of Satornil and Basileides were later 
than that of Markion, which last preceded the period of the 
great Gnostic system.—Harnack, 78. The Jews from Daniel 
down had proclaimed a Messiah in the flesh ; and the Sohar 
together with the gnosis and psalm ii. had (like Philo) ac¬ 
knowledged the Angel Logos and King,—Metatron the Angel- 
king. Compare Matthew, iii. 16,17 ; iv. 11. The Jews had the 
Persian Mithra always in mind. 

The Nazoria on the Jordan, beyond the Jordan, in Naba- 
tliea, at Bassora, or the Magi in Arabia were, like the Iessenes, 
well versed in the names of the Angels. Philo Judaeus was 
well versed in the doctrine of Angels, Aeons, Powders, and the 
Logos of Plato. So must the Jews, very numerous in the 
Grecian city of Antioch, have been versed in the traditions of 
the Lebanon, Jordan, and Idumea. The Jews then were in 
communication all the way from Antioch to Alexandria. The 
Old Testament recognised the gnosis, kabalah, and the Angel 
manifestations. When the Ebionites or Nazoria (Nazoraioi, 
Nazorenes) had their aeons and the Essenes their Angels, the 
doctrine of the Unknown Father and the Powers or Angels 
must have been well represented among the Samaritans, Si¬ 
mon Magus, Menander, as well as Saturninus, Karpokrates, 
Kerinthus, Basileides, and Oualentinus. The doctrines of the 
Jewish gnosis seemed heretical at the end of the 2nd century 
to Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and, later, to Epiphanius. Justin 
Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus were in strong opposition to 
Menander, Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerinthus, not only on 
account of their substituting an angel or seven angels in the 


454 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


place of One Supreme God as creators of the world, but also 
because they were the predecessors in certain forms of spiri¬ 
tual gnosis which (as in Philo Judaeus) concerned themselves 
only with such purely spiritual beings as the Salvator, the 
Angel Iesua, and the Christos as entirely distinct from any 
being of flesh and blood. Matter could not inherit the king¬ 
dom on high! The idea of a Jordan Nazarene in the flesh 
being the Christos was not a view likely to be taken in the 
first century; and only to be accepted by some Ebionites, 
Syrians, Asians, Greeks and Romans.— Mark, xii. 35-37; 
Matthew, xx. 30. Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius are 
constantly befogging the real views of the gnostics by using 
the words Christos and Iesus indiscriminately one for the 
other. Saturninus does not use the word Iesus at all! Con¬ 
sequently, when we find it in systems (in Irenaeus) later than 
Simon, Menander, and Saturninus, it is a puzzle to imagine 
how it got there ; for Karpokrates and Kerinthus evidently 
do not consider Iesus to be the Christos, and as we approach 
140-150 neither Markion nor Apelles accept a human Christos. 
Turning back to Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9, and to Philo Judaeus, and 
to the Jewish £ Angel Iesua,’ we find a Saviour Angel, but no 
human being, no flesh mingled with the spirit of the Saviour 
Angel. Therefore no real gnostic was likely to entertain the 
idea. It is possible that a Greek of Antioch or an inhabitant 
of Asia Minor may have conceived such an idea ; but from the 
account given by Irenaeus of the opinions of Karpokrates and 
Kerinthus neither of them recognised a man of flesh as the 
Christos. If the Christian story in the Gospels of Matthew, 
Mark, Luke and John had been the original one, there could 
have been no contest on the part of the so-called Gnostics in 
the years from 140 to 160, if they had to spring out of one 
original account like that in the Four Gospels. The haeresies 
had Chaldean, Samaritan, or Essene gnosis for a basis, not the 
life of a man, as given in our Four Gospels. Just because 
prior to a.d. 140 Palestine was only gnostic, for this reason we 
find so many Gnostic systems. The gnosis of the Christos 
had got to come first, from Daniel and Philo Judaeus to Kerin¬ 
thus, before the thought could spring up of applying the 
adjective Christos to any human being except a king in Isaiah. 
This adjective later expresses the addition of a quality of 
being, a mode of superhuman existence, a manner of the 


THE NAZARENES. 


455 


beings on high, to a being of flesh. The apostle of Antioch 
fully expressed this idea, as follows : 

And this I say, Brothers, that flesh and blood is not able to inherit God’s 
kingdom !^1 Cor. xv. 50. 

Christos is an adjective added to the noun Iesua. The ‘ Chris¬ 
tos in heaven ’ preceded the Nazarene on the Jordan. “ Neither 
shall the corruption inherit immortality.” 

The name of the Messiah is Iahoh (God of Life).—The Midrash Echa 
Rabba, folio. 59 b. 

My NAME in the midst of him.—Exodus, xxiii. 21. 

The king Messiah is called by the Name of the Holy One, blessed be he.— 
The Sohar, I. folio 69, col. 3. 

He will let his Christos reveal himself—whose Name is from eternity.— 
Targum to Zachariah, iv. 7. 

The Kingly Power is called Kurios (Lord).—Philo ; Tischendorf’s Philonea, 
p. 150. 

The Jewish gnosis, the kabalah and Philo gave to the Jews at 
Antioch the idea of a Christos in heaven ; and Karpokrates, 
Kerinthus, the Ebionites, the Nazoria, Markion and Apelles 
followed it. They said with the Antiocheian : Flesh and blood 
cannot inherit God’s kingdom ! But Antioch or the Ebionites 
contrived a view in opposition to Jews and Jewish gnosis, 
interpreted the Old Testament in a way that the Nazorian 
gnostics had, probably, never done, holding two natures, the 
flesh and spirit, united in one disciple of the Jordan Baptist. 
Saturninus does (in Irenaeus, I. xxii.) use the word Christos, 
and Soter, Saviour; which means the Angel Iesua, literally 
Salvator. When Lipsius (Quellenkritik des Epiphanius) for 
the ‘ Unknown Father ’ in Irenaeus, I. xxv. substitutes other 
expressions such as the ‘ Ungenerated Father ’ (agenneton) and 
for agnoston also ‘ ton ano theon ’ (assuming that agnoston is 
a corruption of the original text) it is impossible (no matter 
what Hippolytus may have written) to accept any other than 
the idea that * Unknown Father ’ was the actual expression of 
the Gnostics (—Irenaeus, I. xxi. xxii. xxv.); for Menander, Sa¬ 
turninus, and Kerinthus all three employ the expression Un- 
Jcnown Father (according to Irenaeus). In the case of Kerin¬ 
thus particularly, Irenaeus charges him with using this 
expression which is not so very different from Philo’s to or, the 
primal unit of existence from which the 6 wv, the Monad from 


456 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the unit, issues.—Compare Dunlap, Yestiges of the Spirit- 
History of Man, pp. 179-183, where the passages from Baby¬ 
lonian gnosis are collected from Cory, Anc. Fragments, and 
Proclus, in Tim. iv. 251, and from Hindu philosophy and Aris¬ 
totle. Philo after his fashion accepted these results of the 
oriental philosophy. The so-called Gnostics followed, and the 
Jewish writers in the Kabalah and the subsequent Midrashim. 
So also Matthew, xi. 27. “ Saturninus, like Menander, dis¬ 

closes One Father Unknown to all, who has made Angels, 
Archangels, Powers, Authorities.”—Irenaeus, I. xxii. Menan¬ 
der (I. xxi.) says “A primal Power Unknown to all.” In 
Oualentinus (I. vi.) we find in the Unknown Abyss (Buthos) a 
sort of primal Father ; in I. vii., “ But many fight also, among 
them, concerning the Saviour.” 

But the Book of Daniel plainly asserts that the Messiah 
shall die. To sustain themselves against Markion and his 
followers it appears to have been a clear case of necessity for 
the Roman Christians to take up the theory that there were 
two natures in one man,—the holy spirit and the human flesh 
born of a virgin. Hence, heirs to the Gnosis and decided to 
the uttermost against Markion and Apelles, our Four Evangels 
had to be written against Markion,—but not by any means free 
from the Gnosis prior to Markion. The virginal birth looks 
like a Christian compromise with the Gnosis in a.d. 177-180. 
Irenaeus, III. xxxii. says that they are in error who say that 
Iesu took nothing from the virgin, so that they may reject the 
inheritance of flesh and reject besides the similitude. The 
note to this on page 300 (Irenaeus, ed. Lutetiae, 1675) says 
that the followers of Simon Magus, Saturninus, Oualentinus, 
Kerdon and Markion held that the Christos either did not 
receive real flesh or was not conceived and born from a virgin: 
and hence that the Anointed did not come in the substance of 
flesh, Christum in substantia carnis non venisse. — Kerdon. 
An examination of the account of the doctrine of Saturninus 
(in Irenaeus, I. xxii.) shows that the word Christus does appear 
there, and his other words are Salvatorem autem innatum 
demonstravit, ‘ he demonstrated that the Saviour was unborn 
and incorporeal and without bodily form, but seemed man in 
appearance only.’ Saturninus then (if he used the word Soter, 
Salvator) could only have had in view the Jewish Angel Iesua. 
See Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9 ; Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Yerfassung d. 


THE NAZARENES. 


457 


Juden, II. pp. 191, 192. This Angel was also called Metatron 
(Mttron).—ibid. II. 191. Consequently Iesua is Metatron who 
stands before the Throne, called Gabriel in Luke, i. Among 
the Gnostics, Gabriel took the place of the Logos (who is 
Mithra) while the Angel Iesua was Mediator and Saviour. 
Like Saturninus, Basileides is represented as holding that the 
Saviour was the Man on high (Gabariel).—Luke, i. 19, 26, 35 ; 
Metatron may also have been a name of the Archangel Michael 
(—Milman, p. 49) not a human being. The date of Saturninus 
is perhaps a.d. circa 105-110 or 110-125. At this period the 
Saviour was not yet, apparently, regarded as anything else 
than the Mediator and Redeemer of souls in the presence and 
sight of the Iahoh, like Metatron and Mithra. If Kerinthus 
is dated c. 115, or later, it is obvious that according to Irenae- 
us Saturninus must be placed before him, perhaps before the 
Nazoria were first called Christians at Antioch ; but Adolf 
Harnack gives, as Justin’s order of succession, Simon, Menan¬ 
der, Markion, Karpokras, Yalentinus, Basileides, Satornil. If 
this were a chronological order, it leaves out Kerinthus 
entirely, and places Saturninus after Basileides and Yalentinus, 
an order the reverse of the one that Irenaeus prefers. 

’A pxq 5e ayivrjTov. —Plato, Phaedr. cap. xxiv. The Beginning 
is Unborn ; the Father, Unknown. But the spirit has its be¬ 
ginning from the God of all things.—Clem. Horn. xi. 24. 
Menander was in Antioch, and the Gnostics shared the name 
Christiani.—Justin, Apol. I. 26. pp. 144, 145. Saturninus held 
that the Christos was the Supreme Power of the Unknown 
Father, that the God of the Jews was one of the Angels, for 
whose imperfect laws the purifying principles of asceticism 
were to be substituted, by which the Children of Light were to 
be reunited to the source of light. Lipsius (p. 144, note 3) seems 
to notice that Ebionism arose (according to Homily II. 17) after 
Jerusalem’s destruction. Menander persuaded his followers 
that they would never die (—Justin, p. 145). Compare with 
this Lucian’s statement that the Christians in the Second Cen¬ 
tury believed that they would be entirely immortal and would 
live through time forever.—Lucian, Peregrini, 13. The Kar- 
pokratians were avowed eclectics. All three copies of Hippo- 
lytus agree in bringing the doctrine of Kerinthus into not 
merely external connection but expressly into inner relation 
with that of Karpokrates. Yet weightier is the circumstance 


458 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


that all three strongly emphasize the Judaism of Kerin thus!— 
Lipsius, 116. Jewish gnosis had then sided with the Jordan 
party (with John and the Nabatheans, and against the sect of 
the Pharisees); Greeks like Justin Martyr joined themselves 
to this new party (to the religion of the Jordan) and proceeded 
to show that the Messiah had been foretold by Isaiah and the 
Prophets, extracts from whose writings they produced as evi¬ 
dence, and in some cases (Matthew, ii. 15, 23 ; Hosea, xi. 1; 
Isaiah, xi. 1) perverted and misapplied their meaning. Both 
Pseudotertullian and Epiphanius assert that Kerinthus had 
the conception that the Law was given by Angels (the Angels 
that made the world) but that the Lawgiver or ‘ God of the 
Jews ’ was one of these angels.—Lipsius, on Epiphanius, p. 
116. Compare Philo, Leg. Alleg. III. 62. It was the well 
known late Jewish view that not God, but an Angel of the 
Lord, appeared to Moses in the ‘ burning bush,’ and also to 
Manoah.—Judges, xiii. 22. Thus Justin, the School of Kerin¬ 
thus, and the earlier two Targumists are brought closer to¬ 
gether, particularly when we recall the fact that Justin was 
himself from Samaria. The Ebionites in their Christology 
were related to Karpokrates and Kerinthus. — Lipsius, zur. 
Quellenkritik d. Epiphan. 60, 61, 121. Lipsius, 128, 129 recog¬ 
nises an Essene-Ebionite Christology and also the existence, 
in the last part of the 4th century, of a Jew-christianity that 
continued untouched by Essene elements. Essene influences 
were intimately connected with Nazarene self-denial, from the 
time of John the Baptist and earlier down to the Iessaeans at 
Antioch. “ The Nazarenes were before Christ, and knew not 
Christ.” —Epiphanius , I. 121. Pseudotertullian names Ebion 
(the Ebionites) a successor, Philastrius (calls him) a disciple 
of Kerinthus.—Lipsius, p. 138. In all Judea and in Samaria 
were the Nazoria. — Acts, i. 8 . And in Antioch. — Acts, xiii. 1 . 
Galilean and Nazarene were nearly synonymous. 1 Compare 
also the gnosis of the Codex Nazaraeus, the worship of Angels, 
and the “ more than twelves legions of angels ” in Matthew, 
xxvi. 53 with the Jewish kabalah and its angels. Colossians 
mentions enough angels to make out the gnosis. 

In the theory of the traditional kabalah and gnosis, the 

1 Dunlap, Sod, II. vii. 40; Matthew, xxvi. 69, 71; Lucian, ed. Lipsiae, 1829. vol. 
IV. 359. 


THE NAZARENES. 


459 


Concealed Father, 1 who dwells in light, has a Son; this is the 
Anointed (the Messiah, Christos) or Heavenly Man. 2 But Christ 
descending into Iesous, he began to perform the miracles 3 and 
to cure, and announce the Unknown 4 Father, and to openly pro¬ 
fess himself to be the Son of the First Man. 5 Some Ebionites 
held that a higher power was united to Iesous at the Baptism 
on the Jordan, others, from the beginning; and some held 
Adam to be the Messiah. 6 Some Ebionites held to the Messiah 
as a man, the Gnostics held to the Logos, a God. 7 Early in 
the second century the Gnostics shared the name of Christians, 
as Justin 8 bears witness, and were teachers of the new Revela¬ 
tion long before him. Justin saw in Simon Magus and his 
disciple Menander, both of Samaria, a land of mixed Jewish 
and heathen population, a rival to the Christos. Justin knows 
of a contemporaneous sect of Simonians and another of Mark- 
ionites, both of them bearing the common name of Cliristiani. 9 
In Samaria the Healers found the Samaritan gnosis and Naza- 
rene faith in the expulsion of demons from human bodies and 
the raising of the dead. 10 The vision of Simon Magus and his 
disciple Menander engaged in casting out devils and raising 
the dead haunted the consciousness of the disciples in after 
years, as, engaged in similar work (Mark, xvi. 17, 18), they 
visited the lost sheep of Israel and healed diseases ; for while 
they were on the “ travels ” Simon was in Samaria declaring 
himself among the ignorant people to be that Power of the 
God which was called the “ Great Power.” This is what the 
Alexandrian Jew identified with the Logos, which is the Second 
God, the Word of the Other. Elsewhere we have exhibited 
Gabriel as the representative of the Logos, and in Daniel, viii. 
15, 16, he represents the Mighty Vision which he serves, and 
in whose service he again appears in Luke, i. 26. 11 


1 In Egypt Amun was held to be the Concealed One. 

2 Franck, Die Kabbalah, 254, 255. so Colossians, i. 14-17. ‘ The Anointed of the 

God.’—Luke, ix. 20. 

3 Matth. xii. 28 ; xiv. 2: Powers. 

4 Matbh. vi. 6. 

5 Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. p. 137. 

6 Hagenbach, Dogm. p. 137; Epiphanius, I. 126; Lipsius, 144. 

7 Hagenbach, p. 88. 

8 Apol. I. 26 ; Origen, c. Cels. 5. 

9 Antiqua Mater, 47, 214. We find Simon Magus in Acts, viii. 9, 10, 28, in Samaria 

0 Matthew, xxvi. 32. Heal the sick, raise the dead.—ibid. x. S. 

u gee Ezekiel, i. 26-28 and Exodus, iii. 2. 14. In fact the Bible is full of Jewish 


460 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


The reference to Archelans in Matthew and to Tiberius in 
Luke indicates a late date for both gospels, since both writers 
wrote after the period to which they refer. If Luke’s gospel 
belongs to the 2nd century he could have got his ‘ encamp¬ 
ments * of Vespasian (Luke, xxi. 20) out of Josephus 1 who died 
about 103. Luke’s prophetic utterance (xxi. 20) merely repeats 
Josephus’s narrative. 

The framework of philosophy, alluded to in Gen. i:, existed 
in the beginning of the first century before our era, and some¬ 
what earlier, perhaps in b.c. 160. Philo, and probably others, 
criticised it fifty years before the army of Titus entered Jerusa¬ 
lem. Moreover, Philo (Legis Alleg. III. 2) writes of the God 
(Exodus, xvii. 6): I stood before thee. Simon the Gittite must 
have taught the baptism by fire! It was the land of the fire- 
gods Herakles, Aqbar, Gabariel, Gabriel. Simon held that 
there were two offshoots of all the Aeons, having neither begin¬ 
ning nor end, coming from one source (root) which power is 
invisible silence, incomprehensible: one of which appears on 
high, which is a Great Power, Mind of all things, governing 
all things, and Male ; the other, underneath, the great idea, 
Female, producing all things. Then standing opposite each 
other they have union, and exhibit the interval in the centre, 
air incomprehensible, having neither beginning nor end. And 
in this is a father lifting all things and feeding all that has be¬ 
ginning and end. This is he who “ stands,” “ stood,” “ shall 
stand,” being male-female, in the preexisting boundless power 
which has neither beginning nor end, being in unity. For, 
proceeding from this, the idea in unity has become two. (A 
very good account of the Adam and the Mighty Mother of all 
that live.) And he was One ; for having her in himself he was 
solus, not indeed primus although preexisting, but being mani¬ 
fested to himself from himself, he came into being Second. 
But he was not called father before She named him father. As 
then himself, producing himself by (through) himself, made 

Gnosis. The Philonian and New Testament Gnosis resembles the Babylonian Gnosis 
of the Father and Son (like the unit and the Monad from the One). Some of the 
Ebionites believed that the Healer was born a man, like other men. Luke, i. 35, thinks 
differently. Matthew holds that the holy spirit (not Joseph) was his source of being. 
Some held that the holy spirit came to him at the Jordan at his Baptism. All this be¬ 
longs to the gnosis. The Hindu Iatrikoi prophesied, healed the sick, and Krishna 
raised the dead. So did Aeskulapius.—Pausanias, II. 27. 3. 4. 

1 Wars, IV. 9. 1; 10. 2. Jerusalem was encircled by Vespasian’s encampments. 


THE NAZARENES. 


461 


manifest his own idea to himself, so too the appearing idea 
dicl not do, but seeing him hid in herself the father, that is, the 
Power, and the idea too is male-female, whence they stand be¬ 
fore ona another (for power differs not from idea) being a unit. 
For from the things above (comes) power, from those below, 
idea. It is then so, and the appearance from them being a 
unit is found to be two, the male-female having the female in 
himself. So Mind is in idea, what are separate, being a unit, 
two are found. From the combination of these two primal off¬ 
shoots Eua (Hue) claims to have gotten or possessed a Man 
who is Ia’hoh. 

If anything were needed to prove the late date of the second 
chapter of Genesis the last extract would supply it; for here 
we have the bisex Adam of Genesis and the Clementine Homi¬ 
lies, the darkness of the Babylonian and Jewish gnosis, the 
logos-idea of the Osirian philosophy, the aeons of the Chris¬ 
tian gnosis (Hebrews, i. 2, 3) and the Powers of Colossians, i. 16 
and of Philo Judaeus. Simon held the intelligible and visible 
nature of fire; that the beginning of all things is boundless 
power. The seventh Power existed before all the Aions (ages) 
in the boundless power. 

The Nikolaitans were a shred of the falsely named gnosis. 
—Lipsius, 102. Irenaeus, I. xxx., states that the Nikolaitans 
were gnostic. From Simon down we find thirty-two sects 
(mostly gnostics) from whose midst (some of the gnosticism 
having been weeded out) Roman Cliristianism appears, coming 
to the light of day. Philastrius seems to have borrowed out 
of Epiphanius those (as descendants of Nikolaos) designated 
“ Gnostics.” Epiphanius joins the “ Gnostics ” on to the 
Nikolaitans. 1 The Nikolaitans in the list precede the Naaseni 
(Ophites), Sethianites and Peratae or Kainites. The original 
writing, the foundation of the lists of Philastrius (a.d. 380) and 
Epiphanius (376-7), placed the Ophites, Sethianites and Kain¬ 
ites before, as if not Christian but heathen sects or parties. 
But Lipsius 2 lets the Nikolaitans (in the original list) immedi¬ 
ately precede the Naaseni, Peratae, and Sethianites. When, 
then, in the Apokalypse, ii. 6, 15, we find the Nikolaitans at 
Ephesus we know that they were a gnostic sect, 3 and have 

1 Lipsius, Quellenkritik des Epiphanios, 17. 

2 ibid. 6, 18, 48. 

a ibid. 11, 17, 45, 65, 105, 108. 


462 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


reason for dating in the second century the book which men¬ 
tions them. This supports our argument elsewhere that the 
Apokalypse is the work of the second century. We must re¬ 
member that the Greek Mysteries at Athens and those of 
Serapis continued in full sway into the fourth century in the 
time of the emperor Julian. These 32 sects and the Mysteries 
ran along, keeping step with the Sarapis-worship into the 
fourth century, when Julian in his fourth Oration said : 

One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, is Sarapis. 

“ That which has preceded them is also that which has created them.”— 
Havet. 

Irenaeus mentions in succession Kerinthus, Ebionites, Niko- 
laitans.—Lipsius, 7, 44. But his order is not chronological. 
The Ebionites and Nikolaitans seem to have been before or 
about the time of Kerinthus, as far as Christianism is con¬ 
cerned ; in the times of Iessaian ascetics. They were not all 
Galileans.—Compare Mark, iii. 7, Luke, iv. 14, xiii. 1, xxiii. 6, 
xxii. 59, Mark, i. 39, xiv. 70, Matth. iv. 12, 23. When Lucian 
speaks of the Galilean walking the air up into the third heaven, 
baptizing the people, and ransoming them from the sinful re¬ 
gions (compare the resurrection doctrine, and Menander’s 
promise that his disciples would never die) we may be sure 
that the Nazarenes, Iessaians, and Ebionim were proximate to 
John the Baptist and to the Galileans. The statement in Acts, 
viii. 9, about the Samarian Magus was not put there for noth¬ 
ing ! Justin Martyr (cap. 85, page 91. Tryplio), who lived in or 
near Sichem in Samaria, says that the demons yielded to the 
name Iesua used in Exorcism. 1 —Acts, v. 16 ; x. 38 ; Mark, v. 13. 
They surrendered to the Iessaean name, as Josephus says the 
devils did to Essenes. The temples of Asklepios the healing 
god in these times were thronged by the sick. Salvation 
meant cure of body and soul. In the temple of Asklepios the 
sick awaited the nightly visits of the god. Lucian the Syrian 
knows that the strongholds of the Christiani are in Syria, 
Palestine and Asia Minor. Justin the Samarian mentions two 
villages of Samaria, Gitton and Kappateia, the homes of Simon 
and Menander his disciple, both ‘ magicians.’ The latter prac¬ 
tised his art in Antioch. He knows, moreover, one Markion of 

1 Of course the Magus had the repute of casting out demons; but what need to 
bring him in unless to direct attention to the Magus, or to the Healer ! 


THE NAZARENES. 


463 


Pontus. The disciples of all these are called Christiani. And 
we know not how to resist the conclusion that the definite 
statement gives the only historical clue; that the Gnostics of 
the half-heathen Samaria were in fact the first Christiani ; and 
that Simon Magus is the legendary representative of their 
mysteries and their theosophy. Simon Magus is represented 
as the Great Power of God ; but in Hippolytus, vi. 19, the rep¬ 
resentation is of him as Son, so that it would seem that Simon 
the Magus had (as a Gnostic) claimed for himself the very 
position that the New Testament assigns to Iesoua and the 
Logos.—Antiqua Mater, 254-258 ; Trypho, 85. It may be sup¬ 
posed that old Samaritan beliefs about the- Messiah were in 
some way blended with that current of Gnostic teaching of 
which the fountain head was Simon the Great One. It was 
admitted (by Dr. Edersheim) that Samaria was in many re¬ 
spects a soil better prepared for the divine seed than Judaea. 
Justin testifies to the existence before and during his time of 
Christiani who held the doctrines of Menander, the disciple of 
the ‘ Great One.’ If, as on the evidence before us, we believe 
our present Gospels and the Acts date from the period between 
Justin and Irenaeus (or after a.d. 160), then their pictures of 
Samaritans and Syrophenicians acquire a new and peculiar in¬ 
terest. 1 It is clear that Tertullian has no liking for Paul and 
his third heaven. 2 Combining the representations of Lucian 
with what is known of the mixed religious life of Syrian Pales¬ 
tine he seems to have his eye upon that form of Christianity 
which was earlier than the orthodox Christianity of Justin and 
the Church Fathers, a Hellenic, Gnostic, Gentile Christianity, 
in which there was little but the mere name Christus to remind 
of the current beliefs of Judaism. Originating amidst heathen 
and Jews the new doctrine contemned the faith of both and 
aimed at the establishment of a new mystery. It spread 
through Samaria and Galilee, the Decapolis, the coasts of Tyre 
and Sidon; and at the time of Lucian Antioch was the great 
centre of its propagandist activity, whence it had spread through 
Asia Minor. So bold an innovation must have been accom¬ 
panied with many extravagancies and with a boundless en¬ 
thusiasm, which sufficiently explains the strictures of Lucian. 
It is, we must believe, Gnostic apostleship that he had in view 

1 Antiqua Mater, 258. 

2 Ant. Mater, 236, 237. 


464 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in liis description,—that apostleship which was to be dignified 
with the name of Paul, and from which that of Simon Magus 
was finally dissociated. 1 Before a.d. 150 no book of the New 
Testament was termed ‘ scripture ’ or believed divine and in¬ 
spired. 2 Lucian, born about 120 writes (after a.d. 165), men¬ 
tioning the Christians, that their leader, who was at all events 
the Great Man, was crucified in Palestine.—Lucian, Peregrinus, 
11. This statement has the effect of a date which there is no 
going back of. But Lucian does not mention, the time w 7 hen 
the crucifixion doctrine was put forth. His mention of it 
shows that it was probably not very ancient. With regard to 
the apostles and their memorabilia , this means (considering 
that the Saints took Messianism out of Isaiah, xi. 1, Dan. ix. 
26, Zachar. vi. 12, Micah, v. 2 and the earlier treatises in the 
Kabalist work Sohar 3 ) nothing more than that the words cited 
formed part of that floating mass of tradition and of doctrine 
brought forward at the worship of the First Day of the week, 
and which was assigned, for want of any ascertained author¬ 
ship, to the propagandists of the new order of things. The 
rite of the loaf and the cup was used in the rites of Mithras.— 
Antiqua Mater, 119. Dunlap, Sod, II. 120, refers to the iden¬ 
tification of Christ with Mithra and the Sun, while Justin 
Martyr and Tertullian found the Eucharist in the Mysteries of 
Mithra. 

Behold, I show you a Mystery!—1 Cor. xv. 51. 

‘ Antiqua Mater ’ thinks that early Christianism partook of the 
sentiments of the initiated in the Mysteries. See Antiqua 
Mater, 113-117. It is the Apologist himself, then, who in his 
ignorance of a ‘ Luke ’ or a ‘ Paul ’ and of any source but cer¬ 
tain anonymous note-books, points the historical inquirer to 
the Mysteries of Mithras for the origin of the rite in question. 
—ibid. 119. But where Mithra was (at the beginning of the 
Christian era) there came the Budliist Missionary proclaiming 
the loveliness of Budha’s teaching and a Christianity identical 
with that in Matthew, v. 39-48; vi. 19-34; vii. 12. Whether 
our Evangelists borrowed from the description of Apollonius 
of Tyana, or not, there \s no reason to doubt that to the readers 

1 Ant. Mater, 260. 

2 Davidson, Intr. to New Test. II. 520. 

8 parenthesis insertion, not by the author of Antiqua Mater, 118. 


THE NAZARENES. 


465 


of Pliilostratus such an incarnation of the Divine in Asia Minor 
two centuries before was as credible as the analogous incarna¬ 
tion in Palestine at a like distance of time to the Christiani. 1 

Justin Martyr had read (Justin, p. 100) something very like 
our Evangels, and (p. 94) has ‘ justification by faith.’ He got 
this idea from Genesis, xiv. 6. He has (pp. 102, 103, 105, 140, 
141) Matthew in the main, especially the first chapters. He 
apparently quotes Luke, i. 35, x. 22 and Matthew, i. 21, on 
pages 148, 161, and Matthew, xxvii. 42, on page 149. Justin in 
his first Apology (B), p. 151, says: David one thousand five 
hundred years before Christos, being born man, was crucified. 
Jules Oppert (—Salomon et ses successeurs, p. 96) makes 
David’s reign begin b.c. 1058. So that Justin rather expanded 
a little! Then, again, Justin uses the word “graphai” with 
but one exception of the Old Testament scriptures. 2 The books 
of the New Testament were not generally quoted as scripture 
(graphai ’) until after the time of Justin Martyr. The three 
words Ecclesia, Graphai, Eucharistia certainly do not suggest 
the earliest period of the Christian community, for institutions 
require time to create. In fact nothing in first and second 
Epistles to the Corinthians suggests anything other than a 
completed Church or a large number of separate Christian or 
Ebionite synagogues in all the Eastern Mediterranean from 
Rome and Achaia to Syria. Paul’s entire style and purport 
of his Epistles would make one think that the evangels had 
never yet been known, or left far behind. Paul’s subjects and 
his way of treating them appear in some things suited to a.d. 
150; for even Justin felt the need of some proof that Iesous 
was the Messiah, while Paul feels absolved from everything of 

1 Antiqua Mater, 263. 

2 Justin, p. 159, has ev yap rals Mo)trews ypa<f)al s. The ‘ memoirs,’ he says p. 164, are 
called “ euangelia.” Justin, p. 47, uses the expression v ypo-<t>h <n\p.aLvei of Abrahm’s jus¬ 
tification by his faith. 

Gnosis was before Christ, and Simon was not the first of the kind. Jewish gnosis 
was a part of the tradition (kabalah) older, at all events, than Simon. Irenaeus has 
this order : “ Simon, Menander, Saturnin, Basilides.” Irenaeus called Simon the source 
and root of all the haeresies (sects). Karpokrates, in Irenaeus, follows Basilides ; then 
follow in succession Kerinthus, Ebionites, Nikolaitans, Kerdon, Markion.—Lipsius, 47. 
Karpokrates was a gnostic.—ibid. 109. Kerinthus was like Karpokrates ; and held the 
Christos on high ; the world made by angels ; the adherence in part to Judaism; that 
one of the angels that made the kosmos gave the Law.—ibid. 115. Kerinthus is closely 
connected with Karpokrates, and his Judaism or Ebionism strongly emphasised.—ibid. 
116. The gnosis is with Kerinthus and Karpokrates.—ibid. 117, 118, 119. Matthew, 
iii. 16, 17. 


30 


466 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the sort! The work had been done by others ! Henceforward, 
he could expatiate upon the effects and results of the ‘ Cruci¬ 
fixion of the Saviour.’ But what faith can be put in writings 
that claim that “Paul” saw Iesous outside theDamaskusGate, 
long after the Crucifixion, which “Paul” admits had taken 
place ? The strongest evidence against the commonly received 
date of Paul’s epistles is the use of the word 1 graphais’ But 
the Paulinist writer had before him the prospect of an enlarge¬ 
ment of the Jew-Christian’s sphere of action,—a translation to 
a broader mission, a transfer from Sion’s hill at Jerusalem to 
the Capitol or the trastevere at Borne. “ The enlarged con¬ 
ception that Paul had formed of the mission of Jesus neces¬ 
sitated an enlarged conception of his nature ” (Jesus of Hist, 
p. 366). The central point in Justin’s theology is the deified 
Logos who was the Son of God.—Antiqua Mater, 158. 

The orient has always possessed individuals preeminent 
for their intellect. At Antioch, in Iturea, Bashan, Galilee, or 
Kokaba, Messianic evangel or evangels must have been in ex¬ 
istence before our evangels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, 
and perhaps afforded suggestions on which the later gospels 
could have been based. This seems to follow from what we 
find in the writings of Justin Martyr who knows much of what is 
found in Matthew, yet never mentions Matthew's Gospel. Prob¬ 
ably because it was written about the time of the circumcision 
controversy or later. The inference is obvious ; since Justin 
uses the word ‘ euangelion ’ and Matthew never uses the word 
circumcision. Now we have from a.d. 160 back to a.d. 115 a 
period in which may have appeared the Gospel of the Naza- 
renes, the Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Egyptians, 
Gospel of Peter, and other forms of the Gospel of the Hebrews 
and ‘ the numerous gospels current in the early Church.’— 
(Supernat. Bel. I. 272). The Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews, with modifications certainly, but substantially the 
same work, was very widely circulated throughout the early 
Church,—among the Nazarenes, Ebionites, Hegesippus, Pa- 
pias, (and according to the best critics) the author of the. 
Clementine Homilies, Karpocrates, and Kerintlius.—Supernat. 
Bel., I. 420, 421 quoting 30 authorities to support its opinion. 
There were native Palestine Messianic narratives carrying an 
Eastern stamp, an Eastern bias and flavor of the marvellous. 
Take all the ‘liaeresies’ that Lipsius mentions (say, about 


THE NAZARENES. 


467 


thirty-five £ haereseis,’) they first sprung from the Jewish gno¬ 
sis, not from the Christianism of the Four Gospels. No one 
could have derived the Gnosticism of Basileides and Oualen- 
tinos from the Christology of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. 
When the learned Jews, such as Philo and the writers of the 
earliest books of the Sohar, ceased to believe the Hebrew bib- 
lion literally (Origen and Justin used the allegorical interpre¬ 
tation, not understanding the words in their literal meaning. 
—Contra Celsum Y.) the gnosis encouraged to the publication 
of gnostic utterances, that, starting in Philo’s time (perhaps 
even earlier), proceeded to the lengths attained in the Gnosis 
of Simon Magus, Menander, Basileides and Oualentinos. But 
from that the Church had less to fear than from the views of 
the Ebionites, Saturninus, Karpokrates and Kerinthus ; for 
the Roman Church could not get out of these last precisely 
what it desired, and the spread of Christianism in ‘ Asia ’ w r as 
so great that the Roman Party foresaw the advantage that 
would accrue from an organized control of Christian religion¬ 
ists in the countries subject to Rome. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, 
Tertullian, Epiphanius, Philastrius and Theodoret wHte at 
them. But the Christianism of Palestine continued to be pe¬ 
culiar down to the death of Hieronymus in 420 ; and the sect 
of the Markionites was not entirely extinct in the tenth century. 
That Iesu was the son of Ioseph and Maria appears (?) to have 
been the old belief.—Antiqua Mater, 217; Irenaeus, I. xxv.; 
Clemens Alex. Strom. 3. 2. 5. But this is not so certain. The 
Saviour was primarily a spirit, not a man. The Iesseans were 
communists, made no swords, had neither gold nor silver; but 
they healed the diseased (—Philo, The Virtuous also free, 12). 
In Acts, iii. 6, Peter denies having any silver and gold but 
Peter heals the lame and sick.—Acts ix. 33. The Essenes 
were “ those who free the possessed with devils from their hor¬ 
rors, so clearly expelling apparitions by enchantments. And 
I need not mention these things, but all know the Syrian from 
Palestine, the Sophist (i.e. cheat) in these things, how many 
Avith epileptic fits and rolling their eyes towards the moon he 
has taken and Avith their mouths filled Avith foam he yet raises 
up and sends (them) away well delHered from the horrors for a 
great sum.”—Lucian, pliilopseudes, 16. By the name of this 
very Son of God, first-begotten of all creation, every devil is 
exorcised and overcome.—Justin Martyr, Trypho , 85, p. 91. 


468 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Four thousand Iessenes were in the Desert living* in Eastern 
Monacliism, “ curing* the sick, curing* the sick ” (as the Codex 
Nazoria says). Using the properties of herbs and mineral 
substances, they were called the Asaioi (and Iessaioi) the 
Healers; from Asia or Asaia meaning physician. Josephus 
mentions demon-expellers that exercised their art among the 
Jews. So does Justin, p. 91; Matt. ix. 12. But the Nazoria 
who continued to be followers of the Great Baptist were 
still at Basra in the year 1042, and (like the Disciples of John 
mentioned in Acts, xix. 2, 3) knew nothing about Iesu the 
Nazoraios; or else regarded him as a false Messiah. The 
identification of Iesu the Nazorene with the sect of the Baptist 
Nazorenes (Matthew, iii. 13, 16) carries along with it the in¬ 
convenient consequence that the Nazarene followers of John 
seem to have not recognised him, and in some cases (see Co¬ 
dex Nazoria) to have rejected him. Moreover, when Apelles 
denied that the Christos had a human body, but supplied him¬ 
self from the elements (in sidereal orbs) with a real body he 
negatives the man Iesu in toto disbelieving his very existence. 
Apelles and Markion both deny the nativity and the human 
nature of the Christos.—Harnack, Apellis Gnosi Monarchica, 
p. 81. The older the Gnosis so much the more ‘ doketic ’ its 
idea of Christos.—ibid. 81; Zahnii (Ignatius v. Antiochien) p. 
399. The descent of Hermes (the Logos) taking on a human 
form, the death of the Adon, the death of Herakles, the death 
of Krishna, the avatars of Seth, were so many suggestions to 
the Evangelist authors. The real Sabians (of the Koran) were 
a Christian sect that dwelt in the marsh districts.—Chwolsohn, 
I. 141, 142. Aeschylus, Choephorae, 1, addresses Hermes as 
Saviour ; and Saturninus regards the Salvator as incorporeal, 
merely appearmg as if a man. 

A Latin writer has said ‘ nemo repente turpissimus fuit.’ 
No entire change is apt to be sudden. When the Nazarenes 
were called Christians at Antioch first, it was not their first taste 
of the gnosis. That they brought along vnth them to Antioch ; 
for the Nazoria of the Jordan, the sect of John, believed in 
Eons, and the Old Testament in “ us ” (Gen. i. 26 ; iii. 22 ; xi. 7) 
includes, by implication, all the “ Powers,” thrones, domin¬ 
ions, rulers, and “ Archai.” So, too, in Irenaeus, I. xxii., Satur¬ 
ninus lets the Seven Archangels say: Faciamus hominem 
ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram (in our image and 


THE NAZARENES. 


469 


similitude). Dan. x. 13, points to these principes of Angels. 
But Saturninus said the word Saviour : this was the turning 
point at Antioch; for he lived there, and there they were first 
called Christians ; Kerinthus was there also ; he too speaks of 
the Christus. We have now got back to where Saturninus does 
not mention Iesu at all, because he demonstrated that the 
Saviour is Unborn.—Irenaeus I. xxii. Gabriel belonged to the 
Seven Princes or Great Archangels of the God of the Jews; 
which was not completely what Saturninus wanted; so he in his 
system lets the Saviour Christos, on account of the hostility of 
these very Principes to his own ‘ Superior Father,’ come to the 
“ destruction” of the God of the Jews and the saving of the 
good. We have a remarkable confirmation of this portion of 
the theory of Saturninus in the Codex Nazoria which handles 
this point just as it was treated in the first century and by 
Saturninus: 

Woe unto you Nazoria whom Seven Planets have undermined (clused to 
waver) in the world.—Codex Nazoria, III. 66, Norberg. But Rev. i. 12, 16, v.6 
likes the Seven Planets. 

Other passages to the same effect are I. 104 ; II. 256 ; III. 42, 
46, 56, 64, 67 ; and Matthew, xxi. 25, 26, 32, Syriac ; where the 
question is put to the Jews : 

The Baptism of John, was it from the heavens (shemin) ? 

All held John himself as a prophet!—Matthew, xxi. 25, 26. 

I go through the water, mine Elect, come near. Who has 
denied the Name of Life (Ahiah, chaiah, Iachi, Iachoh, Iahoh) 
shall undergo the second death. This is the word of the Mes¬ 
senger of Life, who, preaching, thus explicitly addressed his 
lovers : My Elect, submit your heart, attend, wash, cleanse, 
and recreate your mind by Justice. —Codex Nazoria. 

“ John came to you in the path of Justice.” —Matthew, xxi. 32. 

The place which the Lords occupy is the place in which the 
good abide ; and in the place which the Lords possess there is 
nothing, there is nothing vicious or untrue, neither does its 
own sun set upon this place nor are the rays of its own Light 
darkened (obscured). Life was in the land of light, from Life 
water 1 existed, from water splendor came forth, from splendor 

1 Genesis, ii. 10. Water was in the Garden of the Adon. “ From the Sun comes 
rain,” the water of life. All oriental Gnosis ! 


470 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


issued light, from light the Angels sprung, the Angels who 
standing, celebrate the Life. Life has not built the house in 
which you now stay. And the Seven Planets who now dwell 
in it shall not ascend into the land of light.—The Codex Na- 
zoria. 

The Chaldaeans and Phoenicians, besides the Old Bel (the 
Father, Atliik iomin, or Ancient of days), had the doctrine that 
this Ancient had a Son (Bel-Mithra, “ Belus Minor,” called 
also Iao, which was his mysterious Name, and called the Seven, 
Sabaoth). His emblem in the Jewish Temple, in the adytum 
or holy of holies, was the Candlestick with Seven Lamps which, 
according to Philo Judaeus, were symbols of the Seven Wan¬ 
dering Stars. The Seven Planets therefore (planeta being 
feminine) have the feminine plural ending in oth, Sabaoth, 
the Seven, in the right hand of the Mighty Fireangel Gaba- 
riel (Gabriel).—Eev. i. 13, 16. Another name for this hidden 
Power of God was ‘ Intelligible Light ’ (Mind-perceived Light), 
and still another name Ihoh (Iahoh), the Jewish ineffable 
Name (in 4 letters), meaning Life ! The Old Father (according 
to the Chaldean gnosis) has a Son who is the Light and Life of 
the world, the Logos of Philo and St. John. And this Nazo- 
rene King, this Saviour Christos, Saturninus saw in the spirit, 
4 ascending on high (<mo) and lifting the souls up to the Intel¬ 
ligible world ; 1 ' the Unspoken Mystery about which the 
Chaldaean raved, bringing up the souls through him.’ They 
burned incense to the Sun, Moon, and Planets.—2 Kings, xxiii. 
5. For a short time they were called Iessaei (Essene Healers), 
—before the Disciples began to be called Cliristianoi.—Epi- 
phanius, I. 116, 117, ed. Petavius. For before the Sun rises 
they utter none of the uninitiated but certain ancestral pray¬ 
ers, as if beseeching him to ascend!—Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 
Another name for the Saviour Power was Iesua! Life con¬ 
sidering in secret with itself determined in secret to call forth 
a Son, and him when begotten He placed in Jordan of Living 
Water sprung from Life and endowed him with Justice.—Codex 
Nazoria, II. 116, 117. The Christians send Iesu to John to be 
baptized in the ordinary way. And there is a question whether 
our Bassora Nazarenes were not the disciples of the Nazoraioi 
and Ebionites. The name is ancient and the name of a peo¬ 
ple. More recently the name Nabatheans was added. The 
Ebionites and Nazarenes for a long time inhabited a place 


THE NAZARENES. 


471 


between Syria and Egypt, a desert; it was called Nabathaea.— 
Preface to Codex Nazoria, p. 5. And the Baptist was in the 
deserts until the day when he showed himself unto Israel.— 
Luke, i. 80. Further, at the Baptism of the Iesu the earliest 
gospel lets Jordan roll a sheet of fire between its banks. 

Quid est quod arctum circulum 

Sol jam recurrens deserit 

Christusne terris nascitur 

Qui lucis auget tramitem.—Christian Hymn, in Rambach, I. 

The very thing which is now called religio c Christiana ’ the 
Ancients had.—St. Augustin. This is the gnosis. The seed of 
life is much and superabundant in the mind-perceived (world). 
—Julian, iv. p. 140. The Logos of the God is the Salvator om¬ 
nium (as in the Apokalypse).—Irenaeus, III. x. p. 254. Now 
the Nazorenes held that the Sun’s nature is of the nature of 
the Seven Planets (—Codex Nazoria, II. 34, 35); and Saturni- 
nus agrees with them. The Sabians venerated the number 7, 
the number of the Sun, Moon, and five wandering spheres of 
heaven of which the Deity is the Spirit. The Sun-god ap¬ 
pears as a Youth with the ring of eternity in his hands. In 
Revelations, he appears in the midst of the Seven Planets, 
standing like a son of man, holding in his right hand Seven 
Stars. His visage was like the Sun shining in its strength.— 
Bev. i. and Creuzer, p. 350. See the “ incorporalem Salva- 
torem sine figura, putative autem visum hominem ” of Satur- 
ninus. 

The first, and the last, and the Living One.—Rev. i. 18. 

This is the Christos of the time of Saturninus; because the 
Seven Stars are the Seven Angels who made the world, and 
this Christus or Iesua holds the keys of death and life in the 
view of Saturninus ;—the keys of death and hell, Rev. i. 18. 
Irenaeus does not charge that Saturninus or Kerinthus held 
that Christus died. Consequently, here at about a.d. 130-135 
the line must be drawn between the Nazoria of John the Bap¬ 
tist and (not the primal Iessaians, or Saturninus, but) those that 
assumed that the man Iesu was the divine Christos. When Ire¬ 
naeus, I. xxii., writes of Saturninus he writes with a dicit (he 
says), thus giving the doctrine of Saturninus himself; but 
when, in I. xxiv. he speaks of Karpokrates he writes with a 


472 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


clicunt (they say), meaning the doctrines of the followers of Kar- 
pokrates, his successors, his school,—or else common report. 
But the statement of Karpokrates that the soul of Iesoua (son 
of Joseph) was under the protection of a Power sent down (e 
coelis x ) in order that it might escape those Seven Angels (mak¬ 
ers of the world, one of whom Saturninus had previously said 
was the God of the Jews), that it passed through all of them (per 
omnes transgressa 2 ) and in all respects freed (from the stains of 
matter) ascended to the God, is to be particularly noted! But 
they say (dicunt) that the soul of Iesn brought up in the cus¬ 
tom of the Jews despised them (eos, the 7 Angels) and there¬ 
fore received powers (virtutes) through which it cancelled the 
passions inherent in men. The doctrine therefore must have 
been that the soul is a permanent vitality originally retained 
with the God (—Wagenseil, Sota, 72, 73) and that its resurrec- 

1 The word shemaim (heavens.—Gen. i. 1), shemin (Syriac Matthew, xxi. 25; 
coeli), affords evidence of Gnosis, for the different heavens were peopled by various 
gnostic Powers, Angels, and Lives. And there is every reason to regard the gnosis ex¬ 
hibited in the Hebrew biblion as only part of that which was then current. Karpo¬ 
krates and Kerinthus were decidedly Jewish. 

2 We follow the reading of Irenaeus ; ea means ea anima (that soul). For the Iesu 
of Karpokrates, in Irenaeus I. xxiv., Hippolytus substitutes rod XpurroO, thus tamper¬ 
ing with the passage. The point is whether, like Kerinthus, Karpokrates distinguished 
between the divine hypostasis Christos and the man Iesu. To substitute, as Hippoly¬ 
tus does, ‘ the Christ ’ for Iesu, upsets the distinction on which the gnostics insisted, 
and to which both Karpokrates and Kerinthus adhered. The reading of Irenaeus is 
therefore followed here. Hippolytus, in the part relating to Karpokrates, uses Christ's 
name twice ; but Irenaeus (uses the name Christus) only once. Matthew, iii. 16, im¬ 
plies that the Christos idea preceded the expression Jesu-Christos in point of date. 

The Ebionites agree in opinion that the world was made by him who is in very 
truth the God, and about the Anointed (the Christos) they tell such untrue things as 
Kerinthus and Karpokrates. They have Jewish customs, saying that they are justified 
according to the Law, and that the Iesu was justified doing the Law; wherefore he 
was named Christos (Anointed) of the God, and Iesu, since none of the others observed 
the Law: for if any other performed what is prescribed in the Law he would be the 
Christos; and that those who do as he did are able to become Christoi (Christs) for 
they say that he too is a man the same as all —Hippolytus, vii. 34. Karpokrates was 
then a Jewish Gnostic of the 2nd century and Platonist. His gnosticism was for the 
most part founded on Platonism. Kerinthus taught circumcision and to observe the 
Sabbath. When Irenaeus I. xxv. says that those called Ebionites do not, in what 
concerns the Lord, think like Kerinthus and Karpokrates, we should observe that 
very many Jews, perhaps most, followed psalm 2nd. There were, however, two 
divergent views among the Ebionites, some being little different from Jews ; the others, 
per contra, used a gospel containing an account of the supernatural conception and 
birth of Iesu. Some regarded him as Joseph’ sson.—Comp. Lipsius, Epiphan. p. 123, 
138. All according to Hippolytus, held Iesu to be the son of Ioseph and Maria.—ibid. 
138. But Irenaeus served as a guide to Hippolytus and Epiphanius, who followed 
him with partisan strictness. 


THE NAZARENES. 


473 


tion unto the God could only be accomplished by stripping off 
matter with all its passions and stains,—when the purified 
spirit returns to its God, like the soul of Iesu. This is Essen- 
ism ! The soul therefore (ea igitur) which like as that soul of 
Iesu 1 (quae similiter atque ilia Iesu anima) can look down upon 
the Archons Creators of the world (potest contemnere mundi 
fabricatores archontas) can in like manner receive powers for 
operating like results (similiter accipere virtutes ad operan- 
dum similia). Now here Iesu appears simply as a superior 
man, like the prophets, like John, Pythagoras, Plato and 
Aristotle,—but carrying out to fulfilment in his own person the 
doctrine of the Resurrection. It is evident (from Irenaeus) 
that Karpokrates had heard the story of his Resurrection 
(apheken to pneuma.—Matthew, xxvii. 50). But he was not 
yet reunited to the Power, the Yirtus, the Christos, according 
to Karpokrates (Touch me not ; for I am not yet ascended to 
the Father.—John, xx. 17). He w^as liberated from the stains 
of matter! Markion was pleased because he never married. 
Even the lower order of the Iessene monks must not touch one 
of the higher order. It communicated a stain to his purity! 
Thus, as it seems to us, the step from the Essene or Nazorene 
purity to not merely the Messiahsliip but the Christosship (if 
we may use the expression), was taken by Philo in the first 
century of our era. As a result thereof, behold the Ebionites, 
from whom the Church of Rome felt itself compelled to sepa¬ 
rate, and to class them among the heretics. In a statement 
about Karpokrates, why does Irenaeus drag in an illustration 
of his own apparently ? After relating in the name of Karpo¬ 
krates and his sect that “ indeed some say that they are like 
Iesu ; but some in addition, that they are in something stronger 
than he ; who are more distant (from him) than his disciples,” 
(Irenaeus adds) ‘ ut puta quam Petrus et Paulus et reliqui 
apostoli,’ as for instance Peter and Paul and the other apostles. 
This is an intimation on the part of Irenaeus that these 
apostles were really existent in the first century amid all the 
terror and confusion in Palestine from the death of Archelaus, 
the formation of the ‘ sect,’ of Judas of Galilee and his succes¬ 
sors, down to the year 60. In the midst of his dissertation 

1 The word Christus does not belong here. Irenaeus has Iesus. The fathers 
write as if handling the ‘heretics’ was for the fathers decidedly uphill work, difficult 
labor to successfully get round or discredit them. 


474 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


upon the opinions of the followers of Karpokrates, regarding 
the ‘ soul of Iesus,’ Irenaeus introduces a sarcasm implying 
that these apostles were ‘there all the while,’—taking for 
granted the very point at issue, namely, whether they were any¬ 
where, from A.D. 30-60. We want to know the truth about 
Karpokrates; but the (doubtful) statement is in Irenaeus, I. 
xxiv. that the Karpokratians had (calling themselves Gnostics) 
certain painted images and others fabricated of other material, 
calling them the figure of Christ made by Pilate at the time 
when Iesus was among men, and these they crown ; but as he 
connects this with a certain Marcellina who came to Rome in 
the time of Aniketus (a.d. 157-168) it is of no value concerning 
the opinions of Karpokrates himself, while it indicates the 
partisan animus of Irenaeus. In the first place, Karpokrates 
lived too long before Irenaeus for the latter to have learned 
much about him and his doctrine except mere hearsay testi¬ 
mony in regard to the Karpokratians of a later period, and, if 
he was so fortunate as to have learned much about him, he 
tells us very little of what he may have known. As to the 
‘ dicunt ’ (they say) of Irenaeus this means the Karpokratians 
or anybody. It cannot be Karpokrates, for then Irenaeus 
would have written dicit. If Saturninus speaks of a Christos 
and a Salvator (Irenaeus, I. xxii.) he mentions no Iesus. He 
does not recognise the man Iesus at all, although from Jewish 
gnosis he must have known the theory of an ‘ Angel Iesua.’ 
It therefore is open to question (considering that Karpokrates 
and Kerinthus may have lived from 125 to 145) whether Iren¬ 
aeus argued from the Karpokratians of the time of Anike¬ 
tus back to Karpokrates himself. The distinctions we have 
pointed out enter into the progress of the dogma, into the 
very essence of the controversy. There was, perhaps, a time 
when the names ‘ Angel Iesua ’ and Christos and Messiah 
were known, and the name Iesous yet unspoken; it is not 
probable that any one would have added to Iesous the title 
Christos or Messiah unless these names and titles had been 
known from an earlier period; and the time of Saturninus 
and Menander (to judge from the accounts in Irenaeus) has a 
weird look as if at that time the name Nazoria was well 
known, but not the name * Iesu Nazori.’ There is Iesi (Jesse) 
David’s father, and Iesi in Isaiah, but no Iesi Nazoraios or 
Nazori there. But (for all we know) the name of the ‘ Angel 


THE NAZARENES. 


475 


Iesua ’ coupled with that of the Iessaians (Healers) may have 
aided in giving rise to rumors of a man Iesu who was a 
Healer and saved others (Matthew, xxvii. 42), who was reported 
in the excitable and gnostic orient to have risen from the 
dead and fulfilled the popular belief in the doctrine of the 
Resurrection. The Sibylline Books, Astrology (the Star seen 
by the Magoi), and Revelation, xii. 1, 2, show that a prophetic 
intimation of the man bom. of a Virgin , was found in the 
heaven^, inscribed among the stars for the benefit of the 
Sabians, Christians, and astrology. 

Irenaeus, I. xxvi. says of his (late) Ebionites that they use 
only the Gospel of Matthew and adore Jerusalem as the 
House of God. Matthew, xxiii. 37, Luke, xiii. 34, sufficiently 
identify Matthew’s Ebionim as the Ebionites of Irenaeus, I. 
xxvi. There is a wide gulf between argument and proof as the 
author of the Pauline Epistles shows. This famous writer ar¬ 
gues upon the basis that Iesu was crucified. He brings no 
proof of the existence of Iesu or the ‘ crucifixion of the Chris¬ 
tos ,’ thus openly acknowledging that (as Luke said) others had 
preceded him in this, others had done the work already. 
Therefore it is argument alone, not proof of the alleged facts ; 
and, more than all, it shows that the Paulist was a witness 
from the second century, like the Four Evangelists, Papias, 
and Hegesippus. So much for argument ! The passage in 
Colossians, i. 16 mentions that ‘ in the Christos were all things 
created in the heavens and on the earth, the seen and the un¬ 
seen, whether Thrones, or Lords, or Archai or Powers, all of 
them mentally-perceived Gnostic Powers. ‘ For even if there 
are what are called Gods whether in heaven or on earth, as 
there are Gods many and Lords many.’— 1 Cor. viii. 5. Colos¬ 
sians, ii. 18, warns against the “worshipping of Angels.” This 
was warning enough to the Nazoria of the Codex Nazoria. 
Now the Pauline writer is on a basis of ascertained facts. The 
Codex Nazoria, I. 282 reads, ‘ Abel Mana most splendid of all 
the Autara ’ (Genii, Angels), and again: The place which the 
Lords occupy is the place in which the good abide.—Cod. 
Nazoria, II. 56 ; II. 304. ‘ Adore the Lords.’—Codex Nazoria 

III. 46, 47. The Great King of Glory is Lord of all the worlds 
of light, higher than all the Autara (Genii, Powers), Aloha over 
all of them, King of Kings, and Supreme Lord of all the 
Kings. . . . Codex Nazoria, I. pp. 6, 19, mentions the Au- 


476 


THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tara (Powers, Genii) and Kings. The Kings are created from 
the Exalted King of Light their Lord.—ibid. I. 18. The King 
rejoices in the Sons of Light.—ibid. I. 20. Gabriel the Mes¬ 
senger is called Abel Ziua (see zio = fulgor; Greek Zeus, 
Sios).—ib. I. 22. Some of them will worship Angels of fire 
(Malaka di nura).—ibid. I. 114. Not only does the Codex 
Nazoria confirm 1 Corinthians, viii. 5, in regard to the Naza- 
rene belief in and worship (Colossians, ii. 18; i. 16) of Angels 
and Lords on high, but it suggests that the original source of 
the Codex Nazoria was perhaps as early as the last part of the 
third century and that possibly it may or may not have re¬ 
sembled the “Hebrew Matthew"’ which St. Jerome found 
among the Nazarenes of Palestine in the last part of the fourth 
century and seems to be shy of it, as something destructive. 
In some degree this description (coming from a partisan of the 
Homan Katholic Church) tolerably fits the first two of the three 
volumes of the ‘ Codex ’ Nazoria (‘ Nazaraeus ’) published by 
Norberg in 1815. These Nazorians claimed John the Baptist 
as their founder, and were, very likely, Ebionites who lived in 
the Transjordan districts as far as the Euphrates. They ad¬ 
dressed the Messenger of Life as ‘ Malcha di Autara ’ just as 
the Jews addressed in the Sohar the Angel Metatron as 
‘ Malcha di Malacliim,’ King of the Angels. Angels came and 
ministered to him.—Matthew, iv. 11. All the Autara having 
been called, the Lord of Greatness descended with the Messen¬ 
ger of Life into the Jordan to administer baptism to the Mes¬ 
senger of Life; the Lord Jordan becomes excited. Then the 
Lord of Greatness says : Be quiet Jordan, that the Messenger 
of Life may be baptized in thee. Jordan of living water rested 
still, while Abel Ziua (Gabriel) was baptized in him, and his 
two brothers, and also four others called Lords.—Codex Nazo¬ 
ria, I. 242, 246. Abel Aeon is the most splendid of all the 
Autara (Angels).—ibid. 282. Abel Ziua, the prince of all gen¬ 
eration, the Messenger of Life, by the power of the dove (the 
spirit-emblem) enters the place of darkness.—ibid. 246. The 
author of Codex Nazoria, III. 144, was a gnostic ; for he holds 
that the body will not ascend into the house of Life! He 
preaches John the Baptist, the Jordan, the King of Light, the 
Aeons of the King of Light who knows what is first and last, 
and what has been and what will be! Codex Nazoria, I. 102, 
104, mentions the destruction of Jerusalem, and says that the 


THE NAZARENES. 


477 


captives of the Messiah will call themselves religious and just 
and Kriztiana (Christians). The Codex, I. 116 mentions Ma- 
hamad bar Bazbat as the fourth prophet. The Elchasites had 
the doctrine of the spirit (detested in the Codex Nazoria), and 
believed in devils.—Theodoret, Haeret. Fab. II. vii.; Hippoly- 
tus, x. 29. There are many resemblances (as we have seen) be¬ 
tween Jordan sects and the author of the Codex Nazoria. 
Elchasites used baptism and had belief in a Christos in the 
year 101, the third year of Trajan. There were many credulous 
fools then.—Hippolytus, ix. 13, 17. The Elchasites held that 
there was One Unborn God called the Creator of all things. 
But they acknowledged one Christos on high who appeared 
many times in many bodies (compare the succession of Bud- 
has), at one time as the spiritus, and last in Iesu.—ibid. x. 29. 
It is not clear whether the followers of Elxai had the idea of 
Iems &s early as a.d. 101. But they might have had a concep¬ 
tion of Metatron the Iesua, and the Logos of Hermes, also the 
idea of a Christos, out of Isaiah lxiii. 8, 9, even earlier. Philo 
Judaeus had written concerning the Oldest Angel as Logos 
about a.d. 40 or earlier. Gabriel in the Jewish Kabalah was 
the Oldest Angel, and in the Codex Nazoria was the first of 
the Aeons (—Codex Nazoria, I. p. viii. preface) and in Luke, i. 
19 replaces Metatron who stands before the Throne. 

I am Gabriel that stand in the presence of the God.—Luke, i. 19. 

Gabriel, Salicha, called, delegated and sent.—Codex Nazoria, I. 164. 

The Codex Nazoria, I. 120, mentions Apostles. ‘ Anti qua 
Mater ’ supposes that to such missionaries and saints the New 
Testament Nazarene sect owes its origin. The Sethians held 
three principles, light, darkness, the spirit; and the spirit (a 
sort of odor, scent) is between the light above and the darkness 
beneath; but the power of the pneuma and the light enters 
within the darkness underneath: the darkness being terrible 
water, into which the light with the pneuma has been drawn 
down and changed into such a nature. The darkness has mind 
and knows that if the light should be abstracted from it the 
darkness remains desert, invisible, unilluminated, etc. ; and so 
it strives with intelligence and plan to keep within itself the 
lustre and the spark of the Light with the fragrance of the 
pneuma. From water was the first beginning born, a wind 
vehement and swift, cause of all generation, effecting a certain 


478 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


agitation (or boiling) and movement for the world from the mo¬ 
tion of the waters. And this produces a something very like to 
the hiss of a serpent. This they say is the pneuma of wind 
which is born a perfect God from the fragrance of the waters 
and that of the spirit and the lustrous light; and that Mind 
(Nous) of the female is generation. The face of a man is an 
image of nature, the pupil of the eye darkened from the sub¬ 
jacent waters, lighted up by the pneuma (spirit). The darkness 
maintains possession of the light so that it may have the ser¬ 
viceable spark and see, just as the light and the pneuma main¬ 
tain possession of the power of themselves; and they hasten 
to recover unto themselves their mingled powers into the dark 
and dreadful water. All the infinite Powers of the three 
Arcliai (principles) are each according to its own nature en¬ 
dowed with mind and intelligence. . . . Then all thought and 
care of the light is from on high somewhat as from the death 
of the evil and darkened body the mind is freed from the father 
that is underneath which is the wind in agitation and disturb¬ 
ance raising waves and generating perfect Mind its own Son, 
not being its own according to essence (or nature). For a ray 
of that perfect Light from on high was held down in that dark 
and dreadful and bitter and foul water, which is the light-giv¬ 
ing spirit borne over the water. . . . The perfect Logos from 
on high in the likeness of the Serpent entered into the unpuri¬ 
fied matrix (of creation, or matter). The form of this animal 
is that of a slave and this is the necessity for the Logos of the 
God to go down into the matrix of a virgin.—Hippolytus, Y. 
19, On the Sethians. Seth, the Setlii^ns say, is a certain divine 
power. They held that there is a Christos, but different from 
the lesous. Their Christos came down from heaven upon the 
Iesous the son of a virgin.—Theodoret. Haeret. Pab. I. xiv. It 
is this view of the Iesu that Matthew, the Greek writer, com¬ 
bines with the doctrine of the Chiistos , into one supernal be¬ 
ing. The name Iessai would naturally suggest a Iessene 
Heale.r; so would the name of the Iesua or Saviour Angel of 
the Divine presence. Consequently, if the narrative was once 
written , the person need not have ever existed, and the story 
would require no confirmation. In fact, in the 2nd century no 
confirmation would be possible. The doctrine verified the 
book to all intents and purposes,—the doctrine of a Christos, 
the resurrection of the dead, and a general belief in demons 


THE NAZARENE8. 


479 


and miracles once admitted. If the Christos is already proph¬ 
esied in Isaiah (Acts, xvii. 2, 3) then it follows that the descrip¬ 
tion there given has to be strictly followed, and that such a 
personage as Isaiah subindicates must have lived nearly 130 
years earlier than Justin ! Instead of proving that what they 
-said was the fact, they argued that the Hebrew Bible, in their 
idea foretold the event. Justin Martyr strikingly agrees (in 
the gnosis) with Mark, xvi. 19; Acts, i. 11; x. 36. 

Learning his being risen from the dead.—Justin, p. 106. See Mark, vi. 14, 

16 . 

Justin Martyr’s knowledge of Iesu was indefinite. He is the 
first who tells us that the punishment suffered by him was cru¬ 
cifixion (—Ant. Mater, 40; Justin, p. 54). Lucian who lived 
about the same time as Justin, calls him the impaled one, 
(—Ant. Mater, 46 ; Lucian, Peregrinus, c. 11). Acts, v. 30, says 
that he was hanged on a tree. This diversity of testimony 
shows the value of popular evidence. Irenaeus held that 
Kerinthus had knowledge of the story of a resurrection and a 
crucifixion. That depends on when the story was started, when 
Kerinthus lived, and whether Irenaeus could prove it as true 
of Kerinthus. Matthew is more definite, for he connects Iesu 
at once with an attempt upon the crown of Judea by the ex¬ 
pression, £ King of the Jews; ’ while Josephus defines crucifix¬ 
ion as the punishment of the two sons, Simon and James, of 
Judas the Galilean. Iesus, the Nazarene prophet (Luke, xxiv. 
19), was also a Galilean, according to Acts, i. 11; Matthew, ii. 
22 ; iv. 23; xxviii. 7; Mark, i. 28. The name of a certain false 
prophet, a Jew, who was a Magus, in Cyprus was Bariesou 
(Son of Iesou). Acts, xiii. 6. It was a great temptation for a 
writer of that period to use the materials before him. 

The Elkesaites used astrology, magism, incantations, invo¬ 
cations of demons, and also baptism. Antiqua Mater (pp. 282, 
284-5, 292-3-4, 295, 299 ; see Matthew, xxii. 30) holds that the 
Gnostics were the first Christians. The Nicolaitans were 
Gnostics. The Ebionites and Nazarenes were Gnostics. Gno¬ 
sis was before our era as well as after it. The Old Testament 
has gnosis. In fact there was gnosis enough in Samaria and 
in connection with the Mithra worship on the Jordan; gnosis 
was rife from Nabathea to the parts around Tyre and Sidon. 
Simon Magus indicates Gnosis, Magism and the casting out 


480 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of demons from the sick. The Essenes were engaged in this 
business. The words Magoi, Herod, Essenes, Iessenes, Naza- 
renes, Elchasites indicate the scene of the New Testament nar¬ 
rative. The Magoi give the character of the country people 
as superstitious, under the influence of gnostical teachers like 
Simon and Menander, such characters as Lucian and Acts, 
xxii. 24 describe; Herod dates the period sought to be de¬ 
scribed ; the Essenes, Ebionites, Nazarene Healers (and the 
Therapeutae) supply a description of the religious tendencies. 
It is the movements of* the Nazarene apostles or Healers 
(Iessaians) that the New Testament describes, as they went 
through the villages healing the sick, casting out demons and 
raising the dead.—Matthew, xvii. 15-21. Simon, Menander, 
Kerinthus and the Nikolaitans come in with their gnosis to 
complete the picture, while over the whole tl^e last hours of 
Herod and the ruin of Jerusalem were made to shed a lurid 
light. To this must be added that the Coming of the Messiah 
was looked for as imminent after Jerusalem fell. Now if we 
are right, the point, before the earliest of the gospels was 
issued, was the Coming of the Messiah. At that time most 
people expected the Christos to appear immediately. The 
Coming was what was hoped for, not the past. It is the pres¬ 
ent and the future that men look at! It might prove difficult 
to immediately supply the popular want; but much easier to 
describe his previous incarnation (in accordance with the gno¬ 
sis, goodness, mercy, healing, the Homan arms, the crucifixion, 
and the doctrine of the Resurrection of the dead, all popular 
subjects of interest) while retaining the advantage of the popu¬ 
lar interest in the Coming of the Messiah. That this interest 
was still strong the rising of the Jews under Bar Cocheba 
demonstrates to a certainty. Therefore, between a.d. 90 and 
132, the hope of the Coming of the Messiah was never extin¬ 
guished. The writer of the Apokalypse partook of this expec¬ 
tation. At least, he has written the words Erchomai tachu, “ I 
come quickly.” Now the Gnostics (Matthew, xxvi. 53 ; Tischen- 
dorf’s Philonea, p. 150) were the first Christians. Kerdon and 
Markion lead on to Justin Martyr. Markion could “deny him¬ 
self ” as much as Matthew, xvi. 24 required; and the ascetic 
doctrines of the Nazarenes crop out in the three Synoptic 
Gospels. The introduction of Herod on the scene reminds one 
of Josephus’s history and lends effect, but otherwise needs not 


THE NAZARENES. 


481 


be connected very intimately except with the astrology. Cer¬ 
tain references to Jerusalem Destroyed indicate that our Four 
Gospels are later than the happening of that event; and an ac¬ 
count of Christianism has to be first sought for in Justin 
Martyr (a.d. 165, or later), unless we go back to Simon, Kerin- 
thus and the Nikolaitans. But the doctrine of the Jewish 
Messiah originally was connected with the leadership of 
troops, so that it took time to disabuse the Jews of that idea; 
while Greeks like Justin Martyr might be brought to a differ¬ 
ent view, that quite a century earlier the Messiah had come. 
Mithra was regarded by the orientals as the Word of the God, 
in the gnosis. Kerinthus taught circumcision which means 
self-denial. 

Justin Martyr as the earliest Christian author who has come 
down to us (about 159-170 years after the reputed birth of 
Christ—Justin, Apol. i. 46) mentions at the first page of his 
‘ pros Trypho ’ rrjs yvaxrecos ra vrrjs by which Gnosis he means 
“ whether one or also many Gods.” Many Gods were a char¬ 
acteristic of the Gnosis; and self-denial (eyKpdreia) was charac¬ 
teristic of Essenes, and Markion’s followers ; and at the same 
time one of the first things Justin mentions. On his second 
page (edition 1551. Lutitiae p. 33) he speaks of the noeta 
(things mind-perceived), 4 the thorough knowing* of the things 
without body ’ and of the c vision of the ideal forms that ex¬ 
cited his perception,’ a very tolerable substitute as a prepara¬ 
tion of the mind to receive gnostic fancies of any sort. He 
hoped to immediately have a view of the God! For this was 
the purpose of the Platonic philosophy: ‘ To display the 
Logos ruling all things! ’ Science is the something (Justin, 
Trypho, p. 34) that supplies Gnosis of human things and of 
divine things. Supplies epignosis (complete knowledge) of 
the divinity and righteousness of these. The eye of the mind 
can see and was given us for this, so as to behold that very to ov 
(living unit), distinguishes by that very thing which is the 
cause of all the noeta, not having skin, nor form, nor size, nor 
anything that the eye sees, but some “ ON ” (unit) this very ov 
(being) of all being (essence), unnamed, unutterable, but alone 
beautiful and good, suddenly born in the well-being souls 
through what is connate and through love of knowing. —Justin, 
p. 35. Trypho. ‘ The bath of the repentance and of the Gnosis 
of the God.’—p. 40. 

31 


482 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


This is Greek platonism, idealism, mere imagination'. 
Nothing real, nothing true ever could be added to religion by 
it. But it is sympathetic with the gnosis, kindred to it. This 
is hardly what the public would expect of Christianism. But 
in its inception it was perhaps a composition of Greek, Jewish 
and Nabathean gnosis. Justin mentions the gnosis, the Kingly 
Mind, the Christos, the Powers, the Graphai, the war in Judea, 
when the dialogue was going on; states that Trypho had read 
the precepts in what is called the evangel, precepts so wonder¬ 
ful and great that he would not suppose any one could keep 
them, mentions setting your hopes on a Crucified Man, and 
the expression of Justin, p. 39, c In the name of him the cruci¬ 
fied Iesous Christos.’ In Justin’s time there was one evangel 
at least. So in Markion’s time. But Justin, p. 41, mentions 
the Second Coming of Christ, when in glory above the clouds 
he will be present. 

The Nazarenes were to cast out demons, speak with tongues, 
take up serpents, drink deadly poison without injury, lay 
hands on the sick and heal them.—Mark, xvi. 17, 18. The Jews 
cast out demons.—Matthew, xii. 27. So did Ebionites. 1 —Luke, 
xi. 19. Justin speaks of the water of life. Justin’s Baptism 
from anger, nature and passion (p. 40) is gnosis in the Essene 
style of Matthew, v. 22-29, 44. The doctrine of being perfect, 
in Matthew, v. 48, must have been one of those precepts so 
wonderful and great that Trypho (p. 38) supposed no one able to 
practise them. Matthew’s proposition that the “ Children of 
the Kingdom” (of the Jews) “will go forth into the darkness 
that is further away ” 2 was more likely to have been brought 
forward after the year 70 than before; for the Pharisee party 
was strong before Jerusalem fell. It is just the Pharisees and 
Sadukees (Matthew, iii. 7) that the Jordan Nazorenes hated. 
Therefore the time for the Gospel of the Jordan (with its more 
pretentious title, Gospel of the Hebrews, etc.) to have been 
brought forward was after the year 135. Justin Martyr takes 


1 Matthew, x. 1. 

2 What you alone now justly suffer; and that your lands should become deserts and 
the cities consumed with fire and foreigners eat up the fruits before your face, and none 
of you set foot within the Jerusalem.—Justin, p. 42. Here Justin sets forth, by im¬ 
plication, that the Jews were punished because they did not believe in the Crucified 
Messiah. “ No one of you, as I think, will dare to say that the God was not and is not, 
too, a forelcnower of the things about to happen and prepares beforehand what are de¬ 
served by each.” Justin, p. 42; Matth. xxi. 43. 


THE NAZARENES. 


483 


tlie ground that Jerusalem was destroyed in return for the 
Messiah’s Crucifixion. It is well known that Jerusalem was 
destroyed because the masses took upon themselves the con¬ 
trol of the administration, preferring war to submission to 
Roman sway. If Jerusalem had had a king the city would not 
have been destroyed. Josephus said that God rejected the 
City on account of the murders the Sicarii committed. He of 
all men knew that the Jews by their insane patriotism brought 
destruction on the city. But the false Messiahs, the robber 
politicians, and the mob bore sway, and that finished Jerusa¬ 
lem ! 

The great point was the Messiah , in Jewish circles. Then 
if the Crucifixion of a Messiah was the cause of Jerusalem’s 
overthrow, which one was it? Some one was found in the 
Prophetical Books, Isaiah’s remarks in reference to Galilee 
answered the necessities of the Jordano-Nabathean-Baptist- 
Nazorenes at Antioch, and it remained only to find a Galilean 
Martyr for the occasion. Political necessities are usually sup¬ 
plied. Books have been written with this object in view. But 
not only a Galilean was needed, but. one so long before the 
Fall of Jerusalem that the temple’s destruction might seem to 
be in punishment of the nation for the Messiah’s destruction. 
Iuda the Galilean might have been thought of. Any Jordan 
man was not quite enough. It was an Essene Healer that was 
required, one who had made the “travels” through the vil¬ 
lages, like the Essenes or Iessaeans casting out devils ; and a 
Nazarene, like Old Banous in the Desert. An ascetic Re¬ 
deemer, baptised by John, and Crucified : One whom the Ro¬ 
mans slew, a Iudah or a Bar Abbah,—as long as the Destruc¬ 
tion of Jerusalem could be explained. 1 Clementine Homily 
II. 17 mentions ‘ a true evangel after a destruction of the holy 
place.’ 

Does Justin satisfy our demands ? He speaks of the Resur¬ 
rection of the Only blameless and just man, by means of whom 
is the cure of wounds (p. 42), and his ascension into the heaven, 
i as the Prophecies foretold he would be born, etc. On p. 41, 
he calls him the sole blameless and just Light. But Justin is 


1 You slew the Just One, and prior to him, the Prophets of him, and now you re¬ 
ject those looking for him and the God ruler and Maker of all, who sent him, whom 
you insult, cursing in your synagogues those that believe on the Christos.—Justin, p. 
42. 


484 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


possibly a witness for one of tlie gospels, and is not the source 
from which to learn anything of the person of Iesou except 
what they may tell. He quotes what we find in Matthew, xxi. 
13. Justin knows the thunderbolt flung in Matthew, xxiii. 
against the Scribes and Pharisees ; so that if genuine some 
gospels belong possibly to a time before Justin, before Ker- 
don and Markion. Kerinthus was in Antioch, Caesarea, Asia, 
and Egypt. 

Bilanx is the balance (scales): Bilanx is Male and Fe¬ 
male. The Male is here called Adam, and Adam is the in¬ 
terior formation in which the spirit consists.—Liber Mysterii, 

1. 2; Kabbala Denud. II. p. 48; Aidra Rabba, § 1128. The 
Adam was the Bilanx.—See Gen. ii. 22, 23. The Kabbalist 
Scribe who wrote Genesis, xviii. 1, 2, represents the Three 
Heads of the Ancient (which three make but One) in the form 
of three men.—Franck, 138; Sohar, III. 288 b. Gen. xviii. 

2, 3. 

Similar gnosis to that exhibited in the three oldest tracts of 
the Sohar existed already in the first century in connection 
with the name Metatron. Moreover to be a Gnostic, looking 
always to the spirit and despising matter, one had to be a 
Nazorene ascetic crucifying the body. As to the relation that 
Iesu bore to the Christos, Karpokrates gives us a status of the 
doctrine just one degree earlier than that of Matthew. Kar- 
pokratians held that Iesous was begotten from Ioseph; al¬ 
though like other men, yet more just than the rest, but that 
his soul (life) being powerful and pure remembered the things 
seen by it when it was borne round with the Unbegotten God, 
and on this account power was sent down by him to it (the 
soul of Iesu), in order that he could by means of it (the power) 
escape the (Angel-) creators of the world, which (power) having 
moved on through all things and in all having been set free 
ascended to Him clinging to what are like to itself. And they 
say that the soul of Iesu having been trained according to the 
Law in Jewish observances despised them and for this reason 
received powers by which he annihilated the passions that 
men have for punishments. That soul then, that, like the soul 
of the Christos (Iesu), is able to despise the world-making Ar- 
clions, receives power to do similar things.—Hippolytus, vii. 
32. Karpokrates held that the different Angels and Powers 
emanated from One God and the lowest of these made the 


THE NAZARENES. 


485 


world. He denied the resurrection of the body, because the 
doctrine of the transmigration of souls is evidently hostile to 
it (See Hippolyt. vii. 32. Lipsius, Zur Quellen. d. Epiphanios, 
111) but admitted the resurrection of souls. Irenaeus, I. xxiv. 
does not let Karpokrates say that Iesu is the Christos ; the 
word Christos is the insertion here of Hippolytus or Epiplia- 
nius. 

The Sethians, the Ebionites, Kerinthus (according to Ire¬ 
naeus) and Theodotion distinguished the Iesou from the Chris¬ 
tos. Theodotus called the spirit Christos and considered Iesou 
a man (born of a virgin) on whom the spirit fell at the Jordan. 
Epiphanius seems very much perplexed in his mention of the 
Nazorenes. He admits that these for all he is able to say, 
may have been before the Kerinthians, but were at all events 
contemporaneous with them; and that all Christians at that 
time were equally called Nazoraioi (Nazorenes).—Epiphanius, 
I. 117. What troubled Epiphanius was that Kerinthus in a.d. 
115 or 125 or later was a Messianist Christian; and believed 
only in the Christos. Consequently, Epiphanius’ testimony 
shows that the Nazorenes (who were called Iessaeans. —Epi¬ 
phanius, I. 120) were not called Christians at first, but Nazoria 
and Iessaeans. At first they merely held to Iessene (Essene), 
and Nazorian doctrines and believed in Messianic doctrines. 
Whether they at first had only these doctrines the gnosis and 
Mithra baptism is not so clear. If they had the belief in 
Mithra one would think that this would have entitled them to 
be called Christians like all the other Christians who were 
equally called Nazorenes. If we admit that Kerinthus was a 
Nazorean or Ebionite (See Lipsius, 44, 45) and did not confess 
Iesou to be the Christ, it may have happened that the great 
body of the Nazorenes, like Kerinthus, did not admit at that 
time that Iesu was more than an inspired man in whom the 
Christos dwelt for a time. Hegesippus knew the so-called 
relatives of the Lord, and they are mentioned in the Four Gos¬ 
pels, which seems to confirm the idea of his received humanity. 
Who is the liar if not he (Kerinthus, or Kerinthians) who de¬ 
nies that Iesou is the Anointed 1 —1 John, ii. 22. Now, as 
Iessenes, the Christian Gospels adhere to the Essene charac¬ 
teristic, Healing the sick ; but who was the Iesous ? Until the 
Nazorenes had filled their minds at Antioch with Kabalist 
gnosis, they might not assume the name Chi'istians. For a 


4S6 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


short time they were called Iessei (which Epiplianius, I. p. 
117 derives from Iesse Dauid’s father) before the Disciples 
began to be called Christianoi. Essaioi and Iessaioi are the 
same word, meaning Healers; like the Essenes (from Iaso, 
Ieso, Iessaioi, the Healers) monastic ascetics who dwelt in 
the Desert. Some, Josexjhus says, lived in cities and towns, 
others made the Travels! These last appear in the Gospel. 
In the Desert Iesous is depicted by Matthew, iv. 8, as being 
tempted by Satan with great worldly prospects, which the 
Healer scorns. Even Matthew must have confessed that such 
offers could never have been made to any Gnostic. Satan knew 
as much as that! For no spiritual essence could they possess 
the slightest charm. When charged with hostility to Rome, 
and when asked if he was king of the Jews he is made to ad¬ 
mit the accusation (—Luke, xxiii. 1-7; Mattli. xxvi. 69-71). 
Matthew’s publication of the writing set up over the Healer’s 
head, “ this is Iesous the king of the Jews ” certainly implies 
complicity with the Jewish insurrection against the Romans ; 
for the Messiah was expected to expel them. After Matthew 
makes Pilate say “ What wrong has he done ” he lets, by 
Pilate’s authority, an accusation of that sort be set up, as if 
Pilate was a fool and the Healer one of those in arms against 
the Roman suzerainty.—Matthew,^ xxvii. 26. Then again he 
exhibits Pilate in full accord with the Pharisees in verses 62 
f., although he admits the Healer’s innocence. This vacillation 
and weakness is not the character that Josephus gives of Pilate 
but the very reverse. He sent troops after an adventurer, 
slaughtering a large number of easily gulled country folks ; he 
had sent his soldiers in disguise with swords to stab the Jews 
who assembled in the public square in front of his quarters to 
petition him ; and he was recalled for his severity to the Sa¬ 
maritans ! How does the account of Josephus agree with that 
of Matthew ? They differ in toto. The writer, John, too, makes 
a doctrinal statement which he puts in the m,outh of the Ilecder. 
“No one has ascended into the heavens except the one who 
came down out of the heaven, the Son of the Man.”—John, iii. 
13. Matthew says that the Christos (in the shape of the liagion 
pneuma) came down at the Baptism of the Jordan ; but how 
the Healer could say, before his crucifixion, that he had as¬ 
cended into heaven is a puzzle. If it is exclusively John's argu¬ 
ment, why does he put it in the Healer’s mouth ? Supernatural 


THE NAZARENES. 


487 


Religion, I. 327, states that Christian writers composed ficti¬ 
tious reports in the name of Pilate. Justin Martyr had a way 
of going to the Hebrew prophets to derive from their premoni¬ 
tions proofs of a Messiah to come. Matthew does the same} 
But he goes to the Septuagint-Greek copy, thus showing that 
he was an Ebionite of the Diaspora. Kerinthus was a Gnostic 
for he acknowledged the Gnosis of the “ Unknown Father ” 
and the Anointed (the Christ), as Chief of the Powers of the 
Unknown Father. The “ Father alone (6 narrjp /xoVos) ” in Mat¬ 
thew, xxiv. 36, is evidently the same Gnostic “ Unknown 
Father.” He knows what the Son does not know! and may be 
slightly compared with the Ancient of Days in Daniel and 
with Saturn as God of Time. The Christos descended on the 
man Iesous after baptism (Matthew, iii. 16, 17; Kerinthus, in 
Irenaeus , I. xxv.), performed the miracles, and then flew back 
from Iesous, leaving him to suffer. Now just where the split 
came was the point of union and severance. Kerinthus and 
Karpokrates must evidently mark the period in Palestine 
when Iesous was first regarded as a man, “ like other men ; ” 
while Matthew combines with the supernatural descent of the 
holy spirit on the Jordan also the supernatural birth from a 
virgin. Twice one makes two; you must have had the unit 
first, in order to double it. That unit was the Christos, later 
identified with some one. Theodotos borrowed from Kerin¬ 
thus ; and the Alogians and Theodotians ascribed the Apok- 
alypse to Kerinthus.—Iren. p. 490, note. 

In the year 3, after Archelaos sailed for Rome the nation of 
the Jews was in revolt. Galileans, men of the Jordan and be¬ 
yond Jordan and Idumeans came to their assistance. In a.d. 
12 lived Iudah (Judas the Galilean) the great opponent of the 
Roman power in Iudea, who, after Archelaus was deposed, said 
that the payment of the tribute to Rome was the most shame¬ 
ful slavery and contrary to the Law, which required the Jews 
to acknowledge no sovereign but their God. He had two sons 
Iakobos (James) and Simon, who were crucified in a.d. 46 by 
Tiberius Alexander.—Josephus, Ant. xx. 5, 2; Jahn, Hebrew 

1 Matthew, ii. 14, 15, has no hesitation in misapplying Hosea, xi. 1 (where Hosea 
speaks of Israel as the son to whom the call is made) to ISsous the Healer. If Hosea 
meant Israel, then Matthew had no right to say that the prophet spoke concerning 
ISsous, what is plainly spoken concerning Israel. And this is only one instance of 
prophesies misapplied. Of the four quotations from the prophets in Matthew, ii. two 
cannot be used correctly for a support to his argument. 


488 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Com. 368. Josephus, xviii. 1, describes his revolution as of the 
utmost importance, stating that the undertaking advanced to 
a great degree of enterprise , implying that somebody ran consid¬ 
erable risk ! But he maintains an absolute silence respect¬ 
ing the fate of the hero himself, neither telling whether he 
lived, died in battle or was crucified. Nevertheless what 
Josephus did not say of the man is the highest encomium, for 
it implies that his conduct was beyond praise, and that Jose¬ 
phus in Judas the Galilean had an elephant on his hands that 
it would be dangerous to praise at Rome. Still he admits that 
this Judas was the idol of his party, the idol of the people to 
such a degree that a sect 1 derives its name from him ! How 
could a sect be derived from a hero, a sect surviving his death 
down to the year 96 ? His son Menahem captured the tower 
Antonia from the Romans.—Josephus, Wars, II. xvii. 8. No 
doubt Judas was long remembered on the Jordan where Jose¬ 
phus records the presence of Banous the Baptist. But Jose¬ 
phus nowhere records the death of the Great Galilean! No 
one knows how he died. 

If the Jews, before the Christian era, had no knowledge of 
any place called Nazaret or Nazareta (not mentioned in the 
Hebrew Testament, in Josephus, or in the Talmud) we yet 
know that there were Nazorenes along the Jordan, and in Au- 
ranitis; of such was Banous. In fact, Isaiah walking the sands 
of Arabia for three years naked and barefoot was a great exam¬ 
ple, as well as a sign and a wonder to the Nazarenes of Naba- 
thea. It apparently made little difference to those gnostics 
whether they were in or out of the flesh, and clothing w r as likely 
to become, as long as the flesh was mortified, a secondary con¬ 
sideration. Epiphanius, 1.121, says that the Nazarene sect was 
before Christ and knew not Christ. Compare Isaiah, lvi. 4, 5. 

The Prophets of the Old Testament kept alive in the popu¬ 
lar mind along the Jordan a belief in the prophets of the 2nd 
century that belonged to the society of ‘ apostles * and ‘ teach¬ 
ers ’ of that period. Some of these prophets appear, like the 
apostles, to have been itinerant, 2 others were settled in parti - 

1 It was the Pharisee party. Two celebrated Pharisee doctors, Iudah and Mathiah 
and some of their disciples were burnt alive by Herod for pulling down the Roman 
eagle from the oriental portal of the Temple somewhere in the neighborhood of four 
years before our era. After Herod’s death the seditious lamented them vigorously. 

2 Nabaa, in Arabic, means to go about from place to place.—Jervis, Gen. 324; 
Codex Nasar. I. 58, Norberg. The Essenes made the “travels.” Acts, xix. 13, men- 


THE NAZARENES. 


489 


cular places (—Antiqua Mater, 61, 64). These rustic prophets 
(or seers) are mentioned in 1 Samuel, ix. 9, 13 ; x. 10. In the 
time of Klaudius the Jews broke out into insurrection (—Jose¬ 
phus, Wars, II. xii. 1-3). It is said, whether truly or not is not 
settled, that the rumor of the resurrection of Iesus spread in 
the first years of the reign of Klaudius ; of course in connec¬ 
tion with the opposition to the Roman Government in Judea. 
The sword of Bar Abba (Barabbas) somehow stuck out in all 
directions.—Luke, xxii. 36 ; Matthew, x. 34; xxvii. 37. Iesous 
was on the side of liberty ! 1 Iesous Bar Abbah 2 had been in 
the rebellion. No prophet (not even Isaiah, xi. 1) had prophe¬ 
sied “ He will be called a Nazorene.” Ringleaders of the sect 
of Nazarenes existed after Christ; but Epiphanius, 1.121, says 
the Nazarenes were before Christ, and knew not Christ. 3 

The Nazoria were found in all the mountain districts of 
Judea in Idumea, Moab, Galaitis, and Basan. 

“Galilaei, a Iuda quodam seditioso Galilaeo accepta origine.” 

It is evident that Samaritan, Greek, Nabathean or Jewish gno¬ 
sis has carried on the Ebionite idea to its two final forms in 
Kerinthus and Justin. Isaiah was the Messianist warrant 
that the Light (of the Messiah) had to come! Judas, chief of 
the Zealots came from Gamala in the mountain southeast of 
the sea of Galilee. Land Zabulon and land Nephthaleim by 
the route of the sea (of Galilee) beyond the Jordan, Galilaia 
of the Nations! The people sitting in Darkness beheld a 
Great Light,—the Light of the Messiah ! ‘ Judas the Gaula- 
nite ’ was called also, by Josephus, ‘ Judas the Galilean.’ Gau- 
lanitis lay the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the east side— 
exactly agreeing with the description in Matthew, iv. 15. So 
that the Gospel in using Isaiah, ix. 1 locates the Messiah in 
the birthplace of Judas beyond J or dan. 

Judgment will be made concerning the Nazoria according to their works.— 
Codex Nazor. II. 144, 146. 


tions ‘ wandering Jewish exorcisers ’ who used the Name Iesous over them that had 
demons. Josephus, Ant. viii. 2, 5, speaks of expelling demons. The Codex Nasaraeus, 
III. 87, 95, 279, holds that there are demons. The prophets were orators.—Munk, 
Palestine, 194. 

1 Matt. xvii. 26 : Then the sons are free ! 

2 Mark, xv. 7; Matthew, xxvii. 16. 

3 see Dunlap, Sod. II. 47. 


490 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


He shall be called a Nazorene !—Matthew, ii. 28. 

Iesou the Nazorene.—Acts, xxii. 8. 

Chief of the sect of the Nazorenes.—Acts, xxiv. 5. 

The Jews were afraid to say Rome when they prophesied the 
Eternal City’s destruction; so they wrote Babylon for Rome 
in the Apokalypse. They were afraid to openly pay honors to 
the memory of Iudas the Galilean; but under the name Iesu 
they could honor the patriotism of any Galilean, or all.—Acts, 
i. 6. 

The conspiracy against the chaste Susannah w r as upset 
when the witnesses contradicted each other. The genealogies 
of Iesu in the first and third Gospels differ irreconcilably from 
each other. Justin differs from both. In this passage another 
discrepancy arises. While Luke seems to represent Nazareth 
as the dwelling-place of Joseph and Mary, and Bethlehem as 
the city to which they went solely on account of the census, 1 
Matthew knows nothing of the census and seems to make Beth¬ 
lehem, on the contrary, the place of residence of Joseph, 2 and 
on coming back from Egypt with the evident intention of re¬ 
turning to Bethlehem, Joseph is warned by a dream to turn 
aside into Galilee, and he goes and dwells, apparently for the 
first time, “ in a city called Nazareth ; that it might be fulfilled 
which was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Naza- 
rene.” 3 Justin, however, goes still further than the third Gos¬ 
pel in his departure from the data found in Matthew, and 
w r here Luke merely infers, Justin distinctly asserts Nazareth 
to have been the dwelling-place of Joseph (lv6a w/cei), and Beth¬ 
lehem, in contradistinction, the place from which he derived 
his origin (oOer rjv). The same view is to be found in several 
apocryphal Gospels still extant. In the Protevangelium of 
James again, we find Joseph journeying to Bethlehem with 
Mary before the birth of Jesus. 4 The census here is ordered 


1 Luke, ii. 4. 

2 Matt. ii. 1. cf. Alford, Greek Test., i. p. 14. 

3 Matt. ii. 22 f. There is no such passage in the Prophets or in the Old Testament. 
It is altered from a word (nezer) meaning ‘a root,’ in Isaiah, xi. 1. Besides Idumeans 
Nabatheans, Galileans, Zealots, Robbers, and Baptists, was there any room for Chris¬ 
tians in a.d. 30-68 ? How could Paul have written before Jerusalem’s fall ? The Na- 
zarenes could have acquired no power while the Pharisees and Jerusalem were safe. 
Paul was Nazarene.—1 Cor. vii. 

4 Protev. Jac. xvii., cf. Fabricius, Cod. Apocr. N. T. i. p. 103; Tischendorf, 
Evang. Apocr. p. 30, p. 39. 


THE NAZARENES. 491 

by Augustus, who commands: “ That all who were in Bethle¬ 
hem of Judaea should be enrolled,” 1 a limitation worthy of no¬ 
tice in comparison with that of Justin, who merely speaks of 
the census taken under Kurenius as the first census taken in 
Judaea. 2 Justin, however, says : ‘And, too, since it is necessary 
to adore the God alone he urged thus, saying : The greatest 
command is, thou shalt adore (the) Lord thy God, and him only 
shall thou serve from thy whole heart and from thy entire 
strength, (the) Lord the God that made thee. 3 Now if we com¬ 
pare this command of Iesous with the description given by 
Josephus (Ant. xviii. 1 § 6) of the sect of Iudah the Galilean, 
we shall notice a striking likeness. 

They have a love of what is free, hard to overcome ; they have assumed 
that the God is the sole Ruler and Master.—Josephus, Antiq., xviii. 1 § 6. 

We now see that perhaps the earliest Christians sympathised 
with the followers of Iudas (or Iesous), and the question (Mat¬ 
thew, xxii. 17) ‘ Is it lawful to pay Census to Kaisar ’ was a 
very close and pertinent question under the circumstances. 4 
The “ Robbers ” were with the patriots against the Romans, 
(Iesous) Bar Abba was a “Robber.”—John, xviii. 40. 

Ioudas the Galilean rose in arms in the days of the Registering and drew 
people after him, and he perished and all who obeyed him were dispersed.— 
Acts, v. 37 ; Luke, xxiii. 5, 6 ;—a political allusion ! 

And they had then a Prominent Prisoner called Iesous Bar Abba.—Mat¬ 
thew, xxvii. 16. Tischendorf, ed. Lipsic, 1850. 

They held of small account the punishments inflicted on their relatives and 
friends ;—for the sake of calling no man Lord !—Josephus, Antiq. xviii. 1. § 6. 

What belongs to the God render to the God.—Matthew, xxii. 21. 

1 Keleusis dfc egeneto apb Augoustou Basileos apografesthai pantas toils en BSth- 
leem t^s Ioudafas.—Protevang. Jac. xvii. Until after Herod’s death Augustus had 
not assumed the administration of the affairs of Judea. Before his death Herod did 
all that. 

2 Supemat. Religion, I. 306, 308, 309. The author of this quoted work mentions 
many similar errors of Justin and Luke. See I. p. 301-303, 307, et passim. 

3 Justin, Apol. I. p. 141 ed. 1551; Matthew, iv. 10; Luke, iv. 8. We have seen 
that the writer of “ Paul” must have seen this passage in thegraphai (Christian Script¬ 
ures). 

4 The Zealots. John stated that Annas and Kaiaphas were both high priest at the 
same period. Josephus says that Kaiaphas was high priest for ten years, A.D. 25-36. 
Annas had previously been high priest (Jos. Ant. xviii. 2, 1), but nothing is more cer¬ 
tain than that the title was not continued after the office was resigned ; and Ishmael, 
Eleazar and Simon, who succeeded Annas and separated his term of office from that of 
Kaiaphas, did not subsequently bear the title.—Supernatural Relig. II. 217-219. 
Luke, iii. 2 and Acts, iv. 6, had previously made the same mistake. 


492 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON . 


Who in the middle of the 2nd century would have re¬ 
membered what inscription was set over the Healer’s head ? 
It is not very likely that by Pilate’s order a superscription was 
placed over the head of the Healer with a false indictment on 
it. If any superscription was set over his head it must have 
indicated what was the charge against him. An indiscreet 
superscription would perhaps offend the Caesar ! But we are 
not yet done with the hero of Galilee. His blood continued 
to fight after he had perished. His two sons fought on until 
the Romans crucified them; and, finally, when Jerusalem was 
destroyed and all was lost, his descendant Eleazar exhibited 
the blood of Judas still in the way'; for with a faithful band he 
had thrown himself into the impregnable fortress of Masada, 
and still held out, refusing to surrender. He was a descendant 
of that Judas who when Kurenius was despatched as censor 
into Judea prevailed on numbers of the Jews not to enroll them¬ 
selves. For it was at that juncture that the Sikarii combined 
against those who were willing to obey the Romans, treating 
them in every way as enemies, plundering their property, 
driving off their cattle, and setting fire to their habitations. 
Against the Sikarii and Eleazar the Romans advanced sur¬ 
rounding the entire circuit of the fortress with a wall and dis¬ 
tributing sentinels. The general himself encamped at that 
point where the rocks of the fortress adjoined the neighboring 
mountain. 

Masada, a rock not inconsiderable in circumference, and 
lofty throughout its entire length, is encompassed on every 
side by ravines of such vast depth that they are unfathomable 
by the eye; precipitous withal, and inaccessible to the foot of 
every living creature, except in two places, where the rock 
admits a difficult ascent. Of these passages one leads from 
the Dead Sea and fronts the rising sun : the other, by which 
the approach is less difficult, is from the west. The former is 
called the snake, from its narrowness and continual involutions. 
Its line is broken at the projections of the precipices. In 
going through it the feet must alternately be firmly fi^ed. 
Destruction threatens; for on either side yawn deep caverns 
so terrific as to appal the most undaunted spirit. After thirty 
furlongs of this sort the summit is reached which spreads out 
into a plain. The Romans had to in part fill up the valley be¬ 
tween the mountains to get space to plant their engines of war. 


TIIE NAZARENES. 


493 


After destroying Herod’s wall by a battering ram, and 
burning another built by the Sikarii behind the first, the place 
became untenable. But neither did Eleazar himself meditate 
flight, nor had he any intention of permitting others to do so. 
Setting before his eyes what the Romans would inflict on 
them, their children, and their wives, he planned the death 
of all. After reminding his soldiers of the Resurrection in 
heaven, and that life alone is miserable, he broached his plan 
to them. At daylight next morning the Roman army moved 
upon the camp of Eleazar “ the first of all to revolt and the 
last in arms against them.” But seeing no enemy and a dread¬ 
ful solitude on every side, fire and silence within, they could 
not imagine what had occurred. Nine hundred and sixty 
persons including women and children, lay dead. When all 
the rest had fallen the scion of Judas the Galilean inspected 
the bodies to see if any remained alive, and then driving his 
sword with one collected effort completely through his body, 
fell down beside his family. The sect of Iudas, says Josephus, 
have a love of what is free hard to overcome ! 

What do you think, Sim5n ? The kings of the earth, from whom do they 
take taxes and census, from their sons or from the foreigners ? 

And when he said “ from the foreigners,” the Healer said to him : 

Then the sons are free! —Matthew, xvii. 25, 26. 

This is Iesous the prophet from Nazaret of Galilee.—Matthew, xxi. 11. 

Tell the “ Brothers ” to go to Galilee and there they will see me !—Matthew, 
xxviii. 10. 

The word Iesua has the double meaning to save (Matthew, i. 
21) and to heal. He (Iesous) went down and dwelt at Nazareth, 
to escape from Archelaus the son of Herod. 1 When the ter¬ 
ritory of Archelaus was reduced to a Roman province under 
the administration of Koponeus the procurator, Judas, a 
Galilean, excited the inhabitants to revolt, denouncing the 
payment of tribute to the Romans.—Josephus, Wars, II. ch. 
8. 1. Eleazar, a man of influence among the Sikars, was a 
descendant of the Judas.—Josephus, Wars, VII. 8. 1. Barab- 
bas (Bar Abbali) was a Robber.—John, xviii. 40. The Patriots 
were called Robbers. 

Pilate sent to Herod (Antipas) the Iesous under arrest, Herod succeeding 
Archelaus.—Justin, Trypho, p. 103 ; Luke, xxiii. 7, 8. 

1 Tertullian vs. Marcion, Ante-Nicene Library, vii. 196 ; Matth. ii. 22. 


494 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


They had then a distinguished prisoner, called Iesu Barabbah.—Matthew 
xxvii. 16. ed. Tiscliendorf, ed. Leipsic. 1850. 

And there was the one called Barabbas, arrested with the rebels that had 
done some bloodshed in the insurrection.—Mark, xv. 7. 

And they then had a noted prisoner called Barabbas.—Matthew, xxvii. 16. 
Codex, Sinait. 

The pernicious superstition, repressed for the moment, again broke out 
not only throughout Iudea.—Tacitus, An. xv. 

The Nazorenes were still patriotic so far as regards interest in 
their race and country 1 (Acts, i. 6). Bar Cocheba’s rising 
indicates the feeling of the Jews after the destruction of Jeru¬ 
salem ; so that the hope of the Messiah was always present 
£ through all the hill country of Judea.’ Judas the Gaulanite, 
£ Iesou Bar Abbah,’ Eleazar and Bar Cocheba corresponded 
to this feeling of hostility to Rome and the foreigners, that 
existed among the lower and middle classes. It was not 
w r holly unreasonable to expect some manifestation of senti¬ 
ment in this connection among an outraged and shamefully 
abused people after the fall of their temple and the ruin of 
their hopes. Some Christian not far from A.D. 138-149 who 
had Josephus’s writings before him, undertook the produc¬ 
tion of a work that should be Ebionite, Messianic, written in 
response to the national sentiment, and yet peculiar in this 
that the Scribes and Pharisees are detested while the Saints 
are made of paramount interest, and the whole scene is 
changed from war to peace, subjection to Roman sway, and the 
Resurrection of Iesous. 

My sway is not derived from this world. 2 —John, xviii. 36. 

Justus of Tiberias wrote a history of the war of the Jews, but 
says nothing about Christ or Christians. 3 There were several 

1 Acts, i. 6: ‘If thou wilt reinstate the kingdom for the Israel! ’ Solomon’s 
‘ Jesus of History,’ 13, 16, takes the ground that the followers of Judas of Galilee were 
the followers of Jesus ; and psalm, ii. 6, 7, when quoted by Justin Martyr as foretell¬ 
ing the Messiah, applies to Judas (as the expected Messiah) and his followers the 
Nazarenes and Ebionites.—Solomon, 97, 102, 108, 172, 174, 178, 180, 181, 232-234; 
Luke, xxii. 34-36. The narrative is a jumble of historical events as illustrating a fore¬ 
gone theosophy, and is no myth, but the reflection of a real movement of a section of the 
Jewish mind before and after the national dissolution and dispersion.—Geo - . Solomon, 
201. No doubt other elements having more or less a historical root were added.—ibid. 

p. 202. 

2 My authority (right to govern) is derived from on high! 

3 Renan, l’Ant., 237; Photius, Biblioth. cod. xxxiii. died a.d. about 891. See 
Diet. Chr. Biogr. IV. 


THE NAZARENES. 


495 


of the name Iesous, mentioned by Josephus, two especially 
suited to the writer’s purpose. One Iesou was surnamed Bar 
Abba, a man of some distinction in the interior of the country 
as a Zealot probably (as Josephus’s ‘Robbers’ usually were); 
the other was the mild, peaceable prophet of Jerusalem’s 
destruction, who was scourged to the bone, and like a lamb 
opened not his mouth ! These two characters supplied the 
basis for the undertaking which was largely the result of read¬ 
ing the'writings of Josephus, but which the Jew Christian 
writer, as it seems to us, used for his own purpose in utter 
defiance of the chronological succession of events. 1 

The destroyer of the temple. — Matthew, xxvii. 40. 

I will destroy this hand-made temple.—Mark, xiv. 58. 

Of course Mark was written after the Temple had been de¬ 
stroyed ! 

K ara\v(rct} rbu vaov tovtov rbv x* L p°' ,r o'i7]TOv. —Mark, xiv. 58. 

6 KaTaXvw rbv vabv. —Matthew, xxvii. 40. 

Philo Judaeus, b.c. 16-a.d. 54, like Justus of Tiberias (a.d. 70- 
101), shows entire ignorance of the advent of the Jewish 
Redeemer. 2 The author of ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ affirms 

1 In using Josephus the errors were evidently intentional on the part of the one 
who used his narrative. Geo. Solomon p. 186 says ‘that the Jesus, whom they sup¬ 
posed to be one, was really two.’ 

2 Strange, Sources and Development of Christianity, p. 19. Then Eusebius, H. E. 
III. 5, says that the whole body of the Church at Jerusalem, having been commanded 
by a divine revelation, given to men of approved piety there before the war, removed 
from the city and dwelt at a certain town, beyond the Jordan, called Pella. Those 
that believed in Christ, he says, removed from Jerusalem. This is an exceedingly im¬ 
probable statement in itself (—See Library of Univ. Knowledge, New York, 1880. vol. 
v. p. 236, which says that the Ebionites first became an organised body or sect in the 
time of Hadrian at Pella). Eusebius, as has been before remarked, is a very unsafe 
authority. He made out the Therapeutae of Egypt to be Christians (Christians were 
hard to find before A.D. 85-91); and he probably found it hard to explain why there 
were no Christians at the siege of Jerusalem. Christians, who believed that lesu was 
the Christos , seem to have been very rare in the time of Kerinthus at Antioch, or 
among the Ebionim in a.d. 140. The Christian passages in Josephus are distrusted ; 
but not his references to Iudah the Galilean Hero, born towards the beginning of our 
era. In Philo’s Kabalah there was (as perhaps in psalm, ii.) the essence of the idea of 
a Christos, perhaps of a Iesua. No one can doubt that, if Iudah had been taken alive, 
he would have been crucified by the Romans. The Nazarenes were native ascetics 
hostile, after Jerusalem’s fall, to both Pharisees and Rfomans, and in their hearts likely 
to remember Iudah the Galilean, if Josephus remembered him and his ‘ sect.’ Dclitzsch 
finds traces of the Gospel of the Hebrews before a.d. 130 in the Talmud. But that is 
nearly sixty years after Jerusalem was destroyed, and the words Siphri ha Minim 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


496 

that there is a gap in the testimony to the Resurrection that 
has never been filled up : “ As it is, no evidence is offered that 
Jesus really died.” The Gospels do not pretend that any one 
was an eye-witness of the Resurrection itself. Paul passes 
over the event itself, and relies solely on the fact that Jesus 
was supposed to have been seen by certain persons to prove 
that he died, was buried, and had actually risen the third day. 

might mean the books of the Elchasites, the Haeretist Gnostic writers,* etc. The 
Ebionites differed very little from Jews (—Origen, II. p. 15). Those of the Jewish 
people who believed in Iesu have not given irp following their ancestral laws and are 
called Ebion (—Origen, II. pp. 429, 430). The Markionites declare utterly that Iesu 
was not born from a woman; the Ebionites say that he was generated from a man and 
woman, like us. And as to his human body, this is denied ; some saying that he 
came from the heavens ; others, that he had such a body as we have, in order through 
the likeness of the body to redeem also our bodies from sins and give us the hope of a 
resurrection.—Origen, II. p. 145. ed. Paris, 1619. Peter and James were represented 
as of the Ebionite sort.—Acts, ii. 44 ; x. 14 ; xv. 1 ; xxi. 20. It is evident that the 
‘resurrection of the dead’ was a sore subject (Acts, xxiii. 6.) and that if the doctrine 
of ‘ spirit and matter ’ was true, there could not fail of a large multitude of sins accu¬ 
mulating against every man, and then, what was to become of him in the resurrection ? 
The Pharisees courted this tribulation ; the Sadukees denied the resurrection ; but the 
Iessenes, Baptists, and Nazorian-Iessaeans made the most of the doctrine. The Pha¬ 
risees were on the side of the regular Church-elders and rabbis; it was assumed that 
their souls were safe. The Death-Angel was required every night to deliver their souls 
safely in Paradise. Lucian’s description of the Christian excitable temperament is 
confirmed by the Jewish temperament described in Acts, xxi. 28, 31, 36, xxii. 22-24, 
xxiii. 6-10, 12, 21. Suetonius describes the Jewish Messianists as tumultuous on 
account of Christos. John the Baptist was said to be the Christus, which thing indeed 
some too said of Dositheus the heresiarch of the Samaritans, but some (said it) of Iudas 
the Galilean.—Origen, Homilia, xxv. in Lucam. Vol. II. p. 150. Barabbas had the 
prenomen Iesu as we have elsewhere shown. ‘In many copies’ (says Origen, II. p. 
125) ‘it is not contained that Barabbas was also called Iesus.’ But the people called 
for Bar Abbah, one of the ‘ Robbers ’ (probably) who defended Judea against the 
Roman soldiery. It looks as if Origen tried to explain away certain similarities 
between Iesu, Iesou Bar Abbah, and Iudah the Galilean. But there they are still; 
and Origen is a witness to the existence of these singular approximations between 
Nazorene, Galilean and Sicarian or Messianist history. The Saviour Angel (Iesua) was 
the Son of the Father, being, like Gabriel in the gnosis, regarded as the Logos. Iudah 
does not mean Saviour ; but both Iesu and Iudah are described as in favor of Jewish 
freedom, and both perish (in the accounts) at the hands of the Romans. This is not 
literally stated in the case of the Galilean Iudah, except in the Book of Acts. But 
the splendid conduct of his sons leaves nearly no doubt of the death of their father in 
fighting for the cause in which he had so greatly distinguished himself. But the 
point must be made that Matthew, xxvii. 17, 22, infuses a doctrinal (argumentative) 
piece of evidence into his text when he makes Pilate say “ Iesus who is called 
Christos.” Each of these two verses endeavors to include the specific doctrine of the 
two natures in Iesu. It did not happen accidentally, or by miracle. It is an argu¬ 
ment (like Matthew, i. 18; iii. 16) in favor not of the pure gnosticism, but of the 
combination of the Christos with the flesh, which Kerinthus refused to admit. 
It was purposely done. 


THE NAZARENES. 


497 


The Apostle states that the doctrines which he had delivered 
to the Korinthians he had himself “ received.”—Supernatural 
Religion, III. 483-485. “It might then, indeed, have been 
reasonably expected that Paul should have sought out those 
who could have informed him of all the extraordinary occur¬ 
rences supposed to have taken place after the death of Iesus. 
Paul does nothing of the kind. He is apparently quite satisfied 
with his own convictions.”—Supern. Rel., III. p. 494. “ Does 

the mere passage of any story or tradition through Paul neces¬ 
sarily transmute error into truth—self-deception or hallucina¬ 
tion into objective fact?”—Sup. Rel. III. p. 496. Bar means 
“ son,” Barabbas means 4 Son of (the) Father.’ 

Saturninus’s statement that the Salvator Soter was only a 
bodiless man in phantom 1 not only indicates that he knew no 
Iesu, but seems to have called forth express replies in Luke, 
xxiv. and John xx. It is written that Basileides a founder of a 
Gnostic system lived in Alexandria about the year 125. Alex¬ 
andria had about a century or more previous learned the gnosis 
of Philo Judaeus. Basileides, it is said , wrote a gospel, which 
certainly was called after his own name. He expressly states 
that he received his knowledge of the truth from Glaucias “ the 
interpreter of Peter.”—Supern. Rel. II. 41-44; Clemens Al. 
Strom, vii. 17. § 106. It is evident from Hippblytus, vii. 22 
(Duncker and Schneidewin, p. 360) that Basileides was an Alex¬ 
andrian philosopher whose speculations related to the ayin 
(non ens) and creation (as related in Genesis, i. 4), the Creative 
Word, and the holy spirit. The Sonship (rio'r^s) bore a certain 
relation to the holy spirit (to pneuma to ay lov), and the pneuma 
to the Sonship.—Hippolytus, p. 363. Here we come upon the 
first stages of that doctrine which is later exhibited in Matthew, 
i. 20, iii. 16,17, which is the relation the Son and Holy Spirit bore 
one to the other, and finally to the manifestation in the flesh. 
Writers in later times, like Irenaeus and Hippolytus, after the 
Christian system had fought its battle with certain develop¬ 
ments of the gnosis, would naturally be biassed in favor of their 
own system and contend against that of Basileides ; but his sys¬ 
tem in its inception was a part of Jewish gnosis. The Gospel of 
Basileides came first from the Sonship, he says, to the Archon 
through the Son who sat with the Archon, and the Archon 

1 Dionysus the Saviour, a sitting statue.—Pausanias, II. 2. The Alkyonian Lake 
through which Dionysus came into the Hades to bring up Semele.— ibid. II. 37. 5. 

32 


498 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


learned that he was not God of all things, but was begotten.— 
Hippolyt. vii. 26. The Gospel is the gnosis of supermundane 
affairs.—ibid. vii. 27. Basileides and the authors of Christian- 
ism were then engaged in manufacturing the ‘ superior science; ’ 
and the author of ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ tells us that, at the 
period referred to, our four Gospels were not then in existence. 
But the Gospel according to the Hebrews (called also ‘ according 
to the Egyptians ’) was already there present; so that it would 
hardly be safe to assume that the Gospel History as contained 
in our Matthew was not alreadj^ in some measure to be found 
in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Indeed about a.d. 
170-160 (or possibly still later) Justin Martyr proves this to 
have been the case. Still we need not surrender the point that 
the gnosis preceded the narrative part of our Gospels. Canon 
Westcott says : It is just possible that Hippolytus made use of 
writings which were current in his own time without further ex¬ 
amination, and transferred to the Apostolic age forms of thought 
and expression which had been the growth of two and even of 
three generations. The author of Supernatural Religion, II. p. 
53, approves of this remark. Oualentinus a.d. 140-187 evi¬ 
dently attached no canonical authority to Christian Scripture. 
Clemens-Alexandrinus, however, informs us that Oualentinus, 
like Basileides, professed to have direct traditions from the 
Apostles, his teacher being Theodas, a disciple of the Apostle 
Paul(?). If he had known any Gospels which he believed to 
have apostolic authority, there would clearly not have been 
any need of such tradition. 1 Hippolytus distinctly affirms that 
Oualentinus derived his system from Pythagoras and Plato 
and not from the evangels.—Supern. Rel. II. 75, 76 ; Clem. 
Strom, vii. 17. § 106. So that the Alexandrine Greek-Jewish 
speculation was still at work. The Oualentinians in the time 
of Irenaeus had many gospels, one peculiar to themselves, and 
rejected the New Testament writings which they certainly 
would not have done had the founder of their sect acknowl¬ 
edged them. 2 There was absolutely no New Testament for 

1 The fact that there was a tradition from the Apostles upsets the claims of the 
Four Gospels, which are evidently later treatises, and we learn that there were Apostles 
from whom Basileides professed to have direct traditions. The word Apostles was an 
ancient term not at first hut subsequently applied to the Christian Apostles. In the 
primitive sense Paulus may have been an Apostle from the Churches of Asia Minor and 
Antioch. The apostle was a messenger (angel) or delegate from the Ekklesia. 

2 Tertullian says that Valentinus at first believed in the doctrine of the Katholic 


THE NAZARENES. 


499 


Valentinus himself to deal with.—Supernat. Relig., II. 77. One 
is the King of Light in his kingdom, nor is any higher than he, 
none that shall have resembled his likeness, none who with up¬ 
lifted eyes shall have seen the grown that is on his head.— 
Codex Nazoria, I. 9. The King rejoices in the Sons of Light. 
—Codex Nazor. I. 20, Matthew, xxv. 34. The Nazorian Codex 
claims John the Baptist as its founder, just as Matthew claims 
John as a Nazarene Baptist, baptising Iesu. Jordan was the 
beginning of the evangels.—Cyril, bishop of Jerusalem, III. 
ii. ; XIV. viii. The Adam-Christos of the Clementine Homilies 
was regarded by the gnostics as the Son of God, and, further, 
as the “ Man,” " the Son of the Man.” In the Kabalali the 
three letters Adm, were held to refer to Adam, Dauid, Messiach, 
indicating that the soul of Adam was expected to reappear in 
Dauid and the Messiach. According to Justin, p. 36, the zo- 
tikon pneuma was in the human soul. Genesis, ii. 6, 9, was 
held by the gnostics to mean that into Adam was breathed the 
pneuma hachaiim (the spiritus of the lives), consequently, he 
received the holy pneuma (breath) as Son. In the gnosis 
the holy spirit was the “ spirit of the anointing.” This is the 
Christos, the Massiacha. But the Ebionites in the time of 
Irenaeus (a.d. 179) considered the Healer only a man.—Euse¬ 
bius, H. E. iii. 27. The Mandaites (who are the Nazoria of the 
Liber Adami) are the descendants of the Nabathaeans.—Chwol- 
solin, die Ssabier, I. 111. 

The sect of Iudah the Galilean were fanatics. The teaching 
that religion is law, that the Law was delivered to Moses on 
Sinai, that the holy spirit of the God himself is bestowed in 
measure on the prophets, the severance of spirit from matter, 
the contempt for the latter, the idea that the Unknown God is 
the sole cause of all that happens, the doctrine of self-denial, 
the positive belief in the resurrection after death, the applica¬ 
tion of the distinguishing mark of circumcision to a whole 
people were as well calculated to make a nation of Eleazars as 
West Point is to rear soldiers. The Mohammedan showed that 
same spirit at the Shipka Pass and in the Soudan. Conse¬ 
quently Iudah ben Sariphai and Matthaiah ben Margaloth, 

Church until (donee) the episcopate of Eleutherus (177).—Tertull. de Prescript., xxx. 
The Church could have had a bishop even if it had no Written Evangels of the N. T. We 
have also been obliged to date Markion later than is usual, owing to Tertullian, On 
Prescript., xxx. and the force of his word ‘ donee.’ 


500 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


celebrated lawyers of the Jewish Law, pulled down the Roman 
Eagle over the gate of the Temple and died for the preserva¬ 
tion of their Law,—which seems to have been the beginning 
of the Jewish war; for Iudah the Galilean and Saddouk the 
Pharisee with the same sentiments urged to rebellion, sum¬ 
moning the nation to freedom in the name of their God! As 
Josephus said, they did not mind dying any kind of death, 
considering the God their sole Ruler and Lord. How should 
such a ‘ sect ’ last to the year a.d. 90, without their spirit contin¬ 
uing to raise up Sampsons in the camp of Dan ! The Romans 
understood them well. When their Temple was destroyed by 
the army of Titus, some might think that the Lord was not al¬ 
together on their side. When Hadrian built a temple to Jupi¬ 
ter Capitolinus over the spot where the Temple had been they 
were sure of it; and as Christianism, founded first on the 
oriental gnosis and, second, upon the supposed martyrdom of 
Iesous, had in the meantime grown up in self-denial, non- 
resistance, and submission to Roman sway, the Jewish War had 
borne some fruits. The Sect of Iudah, for all we can now see, 
can hardly have later become the Sect of the Jordan. But, we 
may be certain that in the 2nd century neither the Jordan nor 
the Jews in a.d. 160 had forgotten him. Acts, v. 37 settles that. 
If the Messianists threw away the sword and acknowledged 
that all power is from the God, even the power of Rome,—they 
stubbornly held their faith and won the martyr’s crown, like 
the Jews and Turks. They probably were as fanatical as the 
“ sect ” of Iudah. 

It is very singular that Justin in the dialogue with Tryplio, 
p. 103, refers directly to the statement in Luke, xxiii. 7, 8. 
Justin, p. 106, also refers to the story in Matthew, xxvii. 64 and 
xxviii. 13. The author of “Supernatural Religion” says that 
Justin’s Greek shows that he borrowed from the “ Gospel of 
the Hebrews ” and not from our Gospels. The Gospel of the 
Hebrews must have been very complete, if it contained all the 
passages found in Justin’s dialogue that resemble passages in 
our first three Gospels. So near is Justin of Samaria to the 
Ebionite Matthew. 

Iesous and Bar Aba are brought into connection with the 
war of Iudas against the Romans (Luke, xxiii. 2-7). Galatians, 
iv. 25, 26 states that £ Jerusalem is in bondage with her chil¬ 
dren.’ This was evidently written after Jerusalem’s destruction 


THE NAZARENES. 


501 


by Titus. Justin’s silence in regard to Paul, when he had 
every reason to cite him in his anti-Judaistic reasonings, is a 
silence that speaks—a void that no iteration of unattested 
statements, no nebulous declamation, can ever fill.—Antiqua 
Mater, 35. The writer of Pauline Epistles was a Christian 
gnostic. He preaches the ‘ Christos crucified ’ and starts off 
into Justification by faith. In Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom, 
vii. cap. 17 and 18 Paul comes before us as a friend of Tlieodas. 
The context in Clemens mentions Simon Magus and his tem¬ 
porary conversion to Christendom (Loman, Quaest. Paulinae, p. 
69). For this unification pleads the context in Clemens. In 
addition, a trace of the old tradition has been preserved which 
brought the movement of Tlieodas into immediate connection 
with the Christendom in a treatise against the heretics by 
Yigilius Tapsensis in his dialogue contra Arianos, Book I. cap. 
29. Athanasius illustrates the heretics by an example bor¬ 
rowed from the history of the Christian antiquity. The name 
Christian, he says, was first adopted after some had illegally 
joined the believers in Christus. He reckons then the follow¬ 
ers of Dositheus, Theodas, Judas and John the Baptist to the 
quasi believers, to the pseudo-Christians from whom the true 
believers distinguished themselves by the assumption of the 
name Christiani (—Loman, p. 69). The words are: et quia 
multi dogmatum novorum auctores exstiterant, doctrinae ob- 
viantes Apostolicae, omnesque sectatores suos discipulos nom- 
inabant, nec erat ulla nominis discretio inter veros falsosque 
discipulos, sive qui Christi, sive qui Dosithei, sive Theodae, 
sive Judae cujusdam, sive etiam Joannis sectatores, qui se 
quasi Christo credere fatebantur. Here we are removed by 
this church-father into the same period of traditions in which 
the haeresiarclis of the second century, according to Clemens, 
moved, when they wished to make their adherents believe 
on the high antiquity of the gnostic ideas. Presumptuous 
should it be out of these and such like evidences to infer a 
real, out of spiritual intercourse born, connection between the 
national religious movements of Jews and Samaritans in the 
first half of the 2nd century of our era on the one side, and 
the gnosticism of Valentinus, Basilides, Markion, etc., on the 
other ? What here must be held fast comes chiefly afterwards 
below: 

1st. The Gnostic parties strove after popularity in the Church, 


502 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


just as the party of the centre and the right side, through ap¬ 
pealing to Old-Christian authorities. 

2nd. The Church-fathers endeavored to neutralise these tactics 
of the Gnostics, partly by making clear what a crying contrast 
there was between the Gnostic and the Apostolic ideas, partly 
through declining as far as possible to admit the supposed 
(pretended) authorities out of the former Christian time, to 
which the Gnostics appealed; to which end they sought to 
bring the authorities into the suspected company of men like 
Theudas , Simon Magus , Dositheus, etc.—Loman, 69, 70. 

The citations out of the Kerugma Petrou (the root and main 
trunk of the Clementine literature) that we meet with in Cle¬ 
mens Alexandrinus betray a spirit not at all hostile to Paul.— 
Loman, 71. Bitschl, who was in the construction of the picture 
of Paul more influenced by the author of Acts, could in the 
“ Testament of the 12 Patriarchs ” read the panegyric of Paul 
without doubting the Jew-christian character of the book. 
Hilgenfeld on the contrary, whose Paulus Canonicus had awa- „ 
kened more distrust of the “ Acts,” was obliged from the same 
Testament of Benjamin to infer the Antijewish tendency of 
the whole book. Take,. the proton pseudos (the first falsehood) 
away, the supposed genuineness of the Chief Epistles, first of 
all that of the Epistle to the Galatians, and the misconception 
between the two scholars can be abolished. We regard then 
the author of the Testamenta as spiritually related to the 
Nazarenes, as Hieronymus sketches him, and thus full of aston¬ 
ishment at Paul the Benjaminite “the friend of the Lord” 
(Deuteron. xxxiii. 12), as is said in the Testament of Benja¬ 
min : “ Who has told all peoples a new gnosis ; 1 . . . who of the 
spoil obtained in him gives to the synagogue of the heathen, 
and moreover to the end of the ages as a beautiful song shall 
be in the mouth of all; whose work and word was written down 
in the holy books; who to the end shall be a chosen of the 
Lord ; he, with regard to whom Jacob had said to Benjamin : 
he shall fill up the remnants of your tribe.” In Paul Canoni¬ 
cus there is no love for Israel in the heart but only on the lips ; 
the love for the Jewish nation is dead; with the Nazarenes and 
the author of the (12) Testaments the love lives and notwith¬ 
standing the judgments of God it has gone over the nation, 

1 Enlightening the nations with a new gnosis.—Cod. Cantabrig. The Elkesaites 
threw out the entire Apostle.—Loman, 85. 


THE NAZARENES. 


503 


the driving-power (the impulsion) left from their belief and 
their hope.—Loman, 81, 82. 

According to Volter, p. 293, the entire Epistle to the Gala¬ 
tians is spurious. No proof of the existence of the Epistle to 
the Galatians 1 until the time of Markion and Justin. The 
argument e silentio, says Loman, delivered to us this advan- 


1 In Paul canonicus the Christianism consists in the conscious denial of the Juda¬ 
ism and in the belief in the abrogation of the Law through the Crucified. Among the 
Nazarenes Christianity is the discovery and revelation of the holy of holies of Judaism 
for all peoples, resulting in the destruction of fatality, resulting too in the moral eleva¬ 
tion of the descendants of the twelve patriarchs, visibly in their mutual forbearance, 
their respect for the royalty in Juda, for the priesthood in Levi guaranteed to the end 
of the days. The polemic of Paul canonicus is only in appearance directed against the 
Judaism outside the Church ; in the nature of the subject it has reference to the men 
of salvation in the Church who appeal to the 1 pretended pillars ’ against the new evangel 
that the author of the Epistle to the Galatians, as Paul’s own evangel, will maintain 
against any other Christian theory. The Nazarenes on the contrary have mainly aimed 
at a purely Jewish party, namely, the letter-sifting scribes who through their hair¬ 
splittings over the scripture and the law in them made impossible the propaganda for 
Judaism as the divine institution for the moral-religious reformation of the world. 
With one word, Paul canonicus is equally good in his place in the half of the 2nd cen¬ 
tury as the Paul of the Nazarenes is about the catastrophe of a.d. 70. This national 
disaster was the chief cause of the rise of a Messias-community.—Loman, 83. The 
Elkesaites threw out the entire Apostle. They opposed the efforts of the Catholic 
Church, by means of the speculations concerning the logos, to crush out the ancient 
Christianism. As Origen says, rov an6 ctto\ov neKeiov aOerei, (the sect) excludes all of the 
Apostle.—Loman, 85. The Severians blasphemed Paul and threw out his Epistles, and 
rejected “Acts.” Tatian, too, altered the text of Paul’s epistles, claiming to correct 
them. Severus the contemporary of Tatian contended against Paul canonicus. Hie¬ 
ronymus says that there are some sects ( aipecreiq ) not admitting the Epistles of Paul the 
Apostle, such as both Ebionites and those called Encratites. Severus denies Paul’s 
Epistles and the “ Acts.” Paul wrote as prophet against the Encratites.—Loman, 80- 
90. Paul appears as patron of the Catholic direction, opposed to those who onesided, 
theoretical, busied themselves with gnostic cavilings, or in practice, through their slack 
morals gave the Church a bad name.—Loman, 90. If one should hesitate to admit the 
possibility that still in the second half of the 2nd century use was made too freely of 
fabricated documents to oppose doctrines and movements that seemed objectionable, 
then let him give attention to a fragment (preserved in Eusebius, H. E. v. 16. p. 210) 
of a work against Montanism written in 193. The anonymous author’s fear was that he 
by the utterance of his writing should draw upon himself the appearance of wishing to 
add something to the logos of the New Testament. This fear now points clearly to the 
great significance then ascribed to the New Testament as concluded (final) Aoyo? ri)? *a ivrjs 
The quasi apostolic canon here called logos of the New Testament of the 
evangel can in 193 not have long become settled as concluded and generally recognised 
as codex sacer among the Christians. In that case, there could be no fear of doing in¬ 
jury to the canon by a pastoral writing. The issuing of writings intended to impose 
upon others must at the time have been, in the hands of clerical persons, and adminis¬ 
trators, a not unusual mode of as far as possible stopping in its birth movements in the 
department of public preaching that appeared dangerous. As the commission had 
come to him a long time past when he went to writing his books on Montanism, and if 


504 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tage that we get certainty in regard to the absence of all direct 
traces of the existence of onr Epistle (to the Galatians) down 
to, in, and even after the time of Justin Martyr. With this 
negative result is readily connected this positive fact already 
related by Irenaeus and confirmed by others that the endeav¬ 
ors of the Catholic party towards the end of the second'century 
in regard to the canonisation of Paul’s Epistles met with Resist¬ 
ance not only from the Ebionites but also from the Severians 
and Enkratites, among the Elkesaites, even among the Marki- 
onites. With all respect to the good loyalty and sincerity of 
the Church-fathers we can to be sure attribute only little worth 
in so far to their view, as they in things affecting the canon, as 
everywhere where they had to do right or left with principieele 
(doctrinal) opponents, made more use of declamation than of 
argument. The system, by Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus 
and others, of casting suspicion, followed by polemic against 
the heretics, in whom they recognise nothing else than chil¬ 
dren of the Devil, gives us no high opinion of the capacity of 
these heretic-hunters for estimating their adversaries. In 
the judgment passed, out of the height , upon the enemies of 
Paul canonicus speaks a great measure of disdain, but not al¬ 
ways a conviction resting on good grounds. The exasperation 

we assume that Montanus came forward probably first after 170, then this observation 
acquires a more concrete and palpable significance. 

We must assume at the time of the formation of the Old Catholic Church the 
existence of two sorts of Christian literature according as the leaders of the Catholic 
movement directed themselves towards a wider circle of readers in and out of the 
Church or directly and only to the community. A great amount of quasi-apostolic 
writings were vouchsafed conditioned for Church purposes. About a.d. 190 this form 
could hardly be used by the Catholic party (as is seen from the introduction of our 
anonymus) ; already a considerable time before, about 170, an ecclesiastic could cherish 
uneasiness regarding the use of this means although he could consider himself protected 
by the commission of his bishop. No wonder. Against the individualism of the new 
prophet the dam of the episcopate did not exist unless this power was established on 
another considered still stronger, that of the apostolate. And, if one should wish to 
possess in the canon the equivalent for the episcopate, then the canon must be closed, 
and so, necessarily, as the only certain reflection of the pure (genuine) Christianity, be 
distinguished from all other writings and documents. The movement to limit the pro¬ 
duction of authoritative quasi-apostolic scriptures must be first placed in the time of 
the anonymus.—Loman, 93-97. No real proof can be derived of the existence of our 
Epistle to the Galatians before the last quarter of the second century or about that 
time.—Loman, Quaest. Paulinae, II. 100. The opposition to the canonisation of the 
Epistles of Paul proceeded chiefly from the party in the Church that, as the exception¬ 
ally conservative, set the highest estimate upon the old apostolic evidences.—Loman, 
100. Paul historicus has been largely interpolated in his epistle to the Romans.— 
Daniel Volter, in Theolog. Tijdschrift, 1889, 287-290. 


THE NAZARENES. 


505 


that airs itself only in great words and dishonoring appella¬ 
tives makes upon us at a distance far removed and not partisan 
witnesses usually only the impression of powerless antipathy 
. . . How came these cursed Ebionites to call themselves 
Christians at the time of Irenaeus, if the idea which this 
Church-father gives us of the Apostolic Christendom had even 
any resemblance with the actual fact ? And will any one as¬ 
sert that the Ebionites rejected the Pauline Epistles not be¬ 
cause they had doubts of their genuineness but just because 
they saw in them the productions of the man that in their view 
had usurped the title of Apostle, will one out of this proposi¬ 
tion draw the conclusion, as this is since long in vogue among 
the Apologists, that the Antipauline movement described by 
Irenaeus may be used rather as evidence for than against the 
genuineness of our canonical Pauline Epistles, then I must 
again give to my co-inquirers in reconsideration the matters 
which have here been treated, to please distinguish them a 
little closer. It is true, Irenaeus denotes the Ebionites in a 
way that should be able to make his readers think that they 
here had to do with people who rejected the Epistles in ques¬ 
tion just because they thought they heard speak in them the 
historic Paul. His words are: Apostolum Paulum recusant 
(Ebionaei) apostatum eum legis dicentes. Do not forget how¬ 
ever, 1st that the expression “ Apostolus Paulus ” just as often 
must serve to indicate about the canonical epistles composed 
in Paul’s name as about the person himself, as if he had worked 
in the old time of Christianism ; 2nd, that the context in 
Irenaeus undeniably advises us to give to the word the mean¬ 
ing of terminus technicus and therefore to think of a throwing 
out of the Epistles standing in Paul’s name and clothed by 
the catholic Christians with canonical authority, because be¬ 
fore this “ Paulum apostolum recusant ” immediately comes: 
“ solo eo, quod est secundum Matthaeum, evangelio utuntur ; ” 
3d that the words “ apostatum eum legis dicentes ” naturally 
and simply enough sound as the motive for the antipathy of 
the Ebionites towards the canonical Epistles of Paul, but 
therefore yet do not necessarily lead to the meaning that the 
Ebionites of the time of Irenaeus should have repudiated the 
historical person of Paul and his evangelical preaching; 4tli, 
that Irenaeus himself elsewhere, III. 15. 1, authorises us to 
make the last-n,amed distinction by the here appearing de- 


506 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


signed testimony in favor of the Epistles on the ground of 
what was related in the Acts about Paul. The opposition of 
Nazarenes and Ebionites was not to Paul liistoricus but to the 
canonical Paulus, and for the simple reason that the last came 
to be divulged first when the Christendom has forsaken its 
original Ebionite standpoint and laid its new gnosis in the 
mouth either of its last called apostle or of the John who out¬ 
lived all the rest. The opposition of the Ebionites first took 
place after the “ Acts ” were written and had become positive 
authority. And these Ebionites have seen in our Epistles of 
Paul pure heathen, that is, absolutely Anti-Jewish productions. 
—Loman, Theol. Tijdschr. 1886, pp. 44-68-71. 

That Ebionism took its rise posterior to the destruction of 
Jerusalem could have been suggested (Quellenkritik des Epi- 
phanios, p. 144) from the words fiera KaSaipeaLv tov ayi'ov tottov 
eva.yyeA.iov aA r)3k$ Kpvcfxi Sta7rep,<^J^vat (Hom. II. 17) ill which the 
destruction of the holy place is referred to. From a.d. 70-130 
there were sixty years in which to write all the chief works of 
the Ebionites, the Apokalypse, the Gospel of the Hebrews, 
and various gospels and epistles anterior to Markion (a.d. 145- 
165). According to tradition the Ebionites a.d. 190 regarded 
“ Paul ” as an apostate from the Law ; but in the time of 
Hieronymus (346-420) the Nazarenes recognised Paul as the 
Apostle to the heathen (Lipsius, 127, 128). Now whether the 
passage in Josephus concerning James is an interpolation, or 
the references to James in the Homilies episcopal arguments 
merely, it is necessary to recognise that there was a kernel 
out of which the Gospel narrative grew. That Eome had 
killed the Messiah would not seem so improbable to some of 
the Nazarenes and credulous Ebionites; and the persistent 
way the Ebionite narrative contrives to implicate the priestly 
party (the enemies of the Nabatheans and Ebionites) in Pi¬ 
late’s crime distinctly points to the new party, the opponent of 
the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadukees, and priests of the temple. 
“ Iesous born from the seed of a man and selected, £ called ’ 
Son of God by election, the Anointed coming from the ‘ on 
high’ into him in the form of a dove.” This is the Chris- 
tology ascribed to Kerinthus and the Ebionites, by Irenaeus. 
This piece of Ebionism has also come down to us in the Greek 
Matthew, iii. 16. The idea is slightly of a gnostic character. 
In seeking to follow the natural succession of the growths of 


THE NAZARENES. 


507 


idea we find it (in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, 
III. p. 94) to be 1st Essenes, 2nd Samaritans, 3d Healers, 4th 
Nazarenes. But we are not prepared to leave out the Gali¬ 
leans. Hence we must associate together the Nazoria, Gali¬ 
leans, Samaritans Healers, Ebionim, Iessaioi and Nazarenes. 


The Iesous went round all the cities and villages preaching in their syna¬ 
gogues, preaching the evangel of the Kingdom and healing every disease and 
sickness in the people.—Matthew, ix. 35. 

This is the prophet Iesous from Nazaret of the Galilee.—Matthew, xxi. 11. 

360 prophets shall go out from Aurasalem, and indeed in the Name of the 
Lord of greatness, wandering. —Codex Nazoraeus, I. 58, 59. Norberg. 

IesoCi tinos Galilaiou planou.—Justin, Dial., Trypho, p. 106. 

Justin states that some regarded Iesua as a certain Galilean 
wanderer. 

That there was a Sect of Simonians we know from Baur 
(Christenth. d. drei ersten Jahrhh. p. 82, 176 ff.) and Hilgenfeld 
(App. YY. p. 241). The testimony is so strong that only a hy¬ 
percriticism could entertain any doubt on the subject. Justin, 
Ap. I. 26 knows the sect and says expressly (I. 56) that it was 
not persecuted by the heathen. Irenaeus, I. xx. regards Simon 
as Archheretic and knows a distinct sect of Simonians. So 
does Theodoret, Haeret. Fab. I. 1. ff. See Iren. I. pp. 116, 117 
note 9. But as regards doctrine Simon is Simon by himself.— 
Uhlhorn, p. 290. Samaritan gnosis is prechristian and grad¬ 
ually has developed to a Christian gnosis. Bitchl, p. 161, con¬ 
ceived that Simon was a false messiah. The Simonian system 
in its development leans upon the chief phases of the gnosis, 
but yet in spite of that, is an independent system distinctly 
separate from the others.—Uhlhorn, 292, 293. Uhlhorn con¬ 
cludes from an examination of Irenaeus that he had not read 
the c Apophasis ’ which is apparently a later form of the doc¬ 
trine, and that both Irenaeus and the Philosophumena give 
even a less original account, which contains much that is to be 
regarded as opinion of the orthodox respecting the Simonians 
but not as their doctrine.—ibid. 293. Simon, then, so far as he 
is not expressly made a carrier of alien (strange) doctrine is no 
one else but Simon himself, that is, that he is charged in part 
rightly, partly wrongly, with the later doctrine of the Simo¬ 
nians. Simon chose to regard himself as the ‘Notes ’ and at 
times is called Christos—which is so near the Philonian gnosis 


508 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


as to imply that he lived after him in perhaps a.d. 90 or later. 
The Simonian boy-story is merely a symbolizing- of the Divine 
power in man. Only, Simon will have himself formed the boy. 
The human-spirit, changed into the nature of heat, has at¬ 
tracted air, this is in water, the water is changed into flesh 
and blood; Simon has then taken a likeness thereof and af¬ 
terwards let the boy fly away into the air. That is in details 
the very course which the symbolizing of the divine dunamis 
(power) takes in man. The human spirit, emanating from the 
divine power, is fire, the fire becomes air and water; the change 
to flesh and blood is then the passing over into the material 
world, and the symbolising is a sort of double entendre made 
real (apparently) by the fabrication of a real image. When he 
lets the boy fly away again into air this is the return of the 
represented (verbildlichten) human spirit (now passed over 
into energeia) into the Boundless Power.—Uhlhorn, 295, 296. 
Whatever was the nature of Simon’s magic, he knew his own 
Samaritan gnosis as well as anybody. No wonder that Mat¬ 
thew, x. 5, directs “ the Brothers ” not to enter any city of the 
Samaritans; but to go to Galilee.—Matthew, xxviii. 10. This 
use of the term “ Brothers ” appears in the Epistle of Peter to 
James, ii. and was the expression used by the self-denying 
ascetics in the cloisters. Moreover, the Ebionites had their 
own “Acts of the apostles,” which (as they were evidently not 
the same as ours) recalls the view of Eusebius that there is ‘ a 
tradition of the apostles’ (Euseb. iii. 36), and that of Antiqua 
Mater, that the real founders were the roving teachers, saints 
and apostles ; and that in the Gnostic movement we see the 
real beginning of the conquests of the Christiani, 1 in other 
words, the victory of Hellenic religion and speculation over 
the narrower and less flexible spirit of Judaism.—Antiqua 
Mater, 43, 51, 58, 59. The saint, the gnosis and the dervish 
will account for almost anything in the East. A mighty effort 
of spiritual innovation had been going on in Asia Minor, in 
Samaria, in Antioch, Borne and Alexandria. The Gnostics 
had proclaimed a new religion, a new rite, a new God at war 
with the Creator and God of the Old Testament, a Gospel of 
liberation from the present world, a doctrine of knowledge, 
faith and immortality, a denial of the flesh and suffering of 

1 The whole of the Ignatian literature is a mass of falsification and fraud.—Super- 
nat. Relig. I. 267-269. 


THE NAZARENES. 


509 


Iesu. Simon Magus represents the glorification of the Logos 
in the Gnostic preaching.—Compare Antiqua Mater, p. 50. 

Simon Magus is the Great Figure that the Apostle Peter 
is said to have followed through the Levant. The Church- 
father was not obliged to state that Simon was said “ to have 
been transfigured and assimilated to Archai (Beginnings), 
Exousiai (Powers) and Angels (compare ‘ the seen and the 
unseen, whether Thrones, or Lordships, or Beginnings, or 
Powers ; ’■—Coloss. i. 16) so that he both appeared man when 
he was not man and was reputed to suffer in Judea when he 
did not suffer, but, appearing to the Jews as Son and in Sa¬ 
maria as Father and in the other nations as holy spirit, suf¬ 
fered himself to be called by whatever name the men should 
wish to call him.” This is a singular testimony! Neither 
was it necessary that Acts, viii. 9-24 should give a wholly 
different account! The two statements are not likely to be 
both true. They conflict. But, again, note that the grades 
of Powers and Angels in Colossians i. 15, 16, are quite as 
gnostical as those with which the Magus is assimilated in 
Hippolytus, vi. 19. Observe also that Simon, the great Gnos¬ 
tic, was regarded by his Samaritan followers as the Logos. 
Suppose then that in opposition to those Ebionites that be¬ 
lieved (like the Jews) that Iesous was the son of Joseph some 
Samaritan, Jordan, Idumean, Nabathean and Asia Minor Gnos¬ 
tics were ready to believe him to be the Logos , the Anointed ! 
Observe the parallelism between the account of the Logos in 
Simon and the Logos in Iesous (according to the relation of 
Hippolytus), and then (if Hippolytus gives the original doc¬ 
ument) see how Acts counters it by a defamatory charge! 
Suppose further that the difference between the gnostic (Asi¬ 
atic) Christians and part of the Ebionites had become irrecon¬ 
cilable, so that the Healer and the Christos might part com¬ 
pany in the contest (for some of the Gnostics said that not 
Christ but Simon of Kurene was really crucified). The Gnos¬ 
tics, asserting the impurity of matter and of marriage, were 
scandalised at the notion of a human birth for the Logos, 
for they asserted the divine nature of the Christos ! They in¬ 
vented the hypothesis that instead of issuing from the womb 
of the Virgin he had descended on the banks of the Jordan 
(see Matthew, iii. 16, 17) in the form of perfect manhood, that 
this form deceived and imposed upon his disciples, and that 


510 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the ministers of Pilate wasted their efforts on an airy image. 
Fourscore years after the so-called death of Christ the Chris¬ 
tians of Bithynia declared before the tribunal of Pliny that 
they invoked him (the Christos) as a God. In the gnosis he 
was one. We see, then, how hard pressed the Gnostics were 
between the account of the crucifixion and their own inherent 
convictions! The Asian Christians were more numerous, if we 
include those of Antioch ; so that the majority may be said to 
have had the greater influence at Rome. At any rate if we 
admit that the above given account of Simon Magus is the 
original account it is obvious that the Nazoraians, Ebionites 
and the Iessaians had a pattern and prefiguration to follow, if 
they followed the story of Simon Magus in their own nar¬ 
ratives of the life of Christ. There was no likelihood of there 
being any successful Christian religion without Rome adopting 
it; since politics are the main issues with governments. 

The Gnostics seem to have started the first Gospel, the 
Gospel of the Hebrews, but for anything much earlier than 
Daniel, the traditions of the Kabalah and the Targums it 
would be in vain to look. With some reservations in favor of 
Philo and the Old Testament gnosis the source and growth of 
the Christian idea of Iesu must be located, at the very earliest, 
between a.d. 105 and a.d. 140. There was doubtless a new be¬ 
ginning indicated by the Gospel of the Hebrews or the Gospel 
of the Nazarenes ; but a further point of departure undoubted¬ 
ly was developed about 145-160 when our three synoptics (as 
it would seem) were composed. 

Long before Baur or Semler it was generally known that 
the canonisation of “ Paul ” had encountered some opposition. 
From evidence that has been preserved relating to the Naza¬ 
renes 1 it follows that we have the right to suspect that the 
historic Paulus resembles the Paul of the Acts more than the 
Paul of the Epistles. Epiphanius (Haer. 30, 16) states that 

1 Postea per evangelium Pauli ingravata est, id est, multiplicata praedicatio.— 
Hieronymus. u Great significance attaches to the estimation of the apostle Paulus in 
this circle in contrast with the well established fact of the later rejection of the Paul 
of the canon by the Ebionites.”—Loman, 63, 64. Credner, Beitrage, I. 370 fig in 1832 
came to the legitimate conclusion that anciently there must have been Ebionites who 
were on a friendly footing with Paul. First after rejection of the axiom that the prin¬ 
cipal epistles are genuine can we without fear go back to Credner’s resultant of 1832 
for so far as the above-named fact is concerned. Origen expressly declares that the 
two heretical parties (two sorts of Ebion, or Ebionites and Nazarenes) mutually agreed 
in rejecting Paulus canonicus.—Loman, 68. 


THE NAZARENES. 


511 


the Ebionites had their own ‘ Acts of the Apostles' One might 
think, says Loman, that we here had an enveloped proof for 
the proposition that in the Ebionite “ Acts ” the genuineness 
of the anti-nomist Pauline Epistles is supposed. According 
to the Ebionites, his origin was Gentile, from Tarsus. If it was 
merely to borrow weapons against the Paul of the canon, this 
passage from Epiphanius just shows, 1st, that this opposition 
took place after the ‘ Acts ’ had become positive authority ; 2d, 
that the Ebionites of the second century saw in the Epistles 
of Paul heathen, that is, anti-jewish productions, and thus to 
that extent certify the spurious character of these epistles, if 
these wish to pass for the work of a born Jewish writer. 
“ When Christ appeared and the light of his preaching rose in 
splendor, then the land of Sebulon and Naphtali is first freed 
from the errors of the Scribes and Pharisees, and the heavy 
yoke of Jewish traditions flung from the neck. After that, 
nevertheless, through the evangel of Paulus, who was the last 
of all apostles, the preaching is strengthened, that is, multi 
plied, and the evangel of Christ has been made apparent to 
the borders of the heathen and to the way of the general sea.” 
Hieronymus expressly and unmistakably declares that the 
Nazarenes have recognised in Paulus the latest apostle, etc. 
It is clear that the opposition of the Nazarenes and Ebionites 
had reference not to Paul historicus but to Paul canonicus. 
Paul canonicus first came to light when Christianism had for¬ 
saken its original Ebionite standpoint and laid its new gn6sis 
in the mouth either of Paulus the latest called Apostle, or of 
John who survived all the rest. Theodas appears in Clemens 
Alexandrinus as an acquaintance (yvw/n/xos) of Paul. 1 An old 
tradition brings the movement of Theudas into immediate 
connection with Christianism in a treatise against the heretics 
by Yigilius Tapsensis. The passage referred to is in his dia¬ 
logue contra Arianos, book I. cap. 29. The name ■ Christians, 
says Athanasius, was first assumed when some had joined 
themselves illegally to the believers in Christus. To the 
quasi believers, to the pseudo-christians, from whom the true 
believers distinguished themselves by the adoption of the 
name Christiani, he reckons then the followers of Dositheus, 
Theudas, Judas the Gaulonite, and John the Baptist. 2 Et quia 

1 Loman, Quaestiones Paulinae, 69. 

2 Loman, 69. 


512 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


multi dogmatum novorum auctores exstiterant, doctrinae ob- 
viantes Apostolicae, omnesque sectatores suos discipulos nom- 
inabant, nec erat ulla nominis discretio inter veros falsosque 
discipulos, sive qui Christi, sive qui Dosithei, sive Theodae, 
sive Judae cujusdam, sive etiam Joannis sectatores, qui se 
quasi Christo credere fatebantur. If one thinks here of Judas 
the Gaulonite agitator (Judas quidam) then one sees himself 
removed by this churchfather into the same circle of traditions 
in which the heresiarchs of the 2nd century (according to Cle¬ 
mens) moved when they wished to make their followers be¬ 
lieve in the high antiquity of the gnostic ideas. It would be 
presumptuous out of these and the like evidences to come to 
infer a real and spiritual connection between the national re¬ 
ligious commotions of Jews and Samaritans in the first half of 
the second century of our era on the one side, and the gnosti¬ 
cism of Valentinus, Basilides, Markion etc., on the other side. 
We should never forget, first, that the gnostic parties strove 
to get popularity in the church by appealing to Old-Christian 
authorities ; second, that the churchfathers tried to neutralise 
these tactics of the gnostics partly by showing what a startling 
contrast there was between the gnostic and the apostolic ideas, 
partly by rejecting the pretended authorities out of the Chris¬ 
tian preceding period on which the gnostics relied ; and to 
this end they sought to bring the authorities into the suspect¬ 
ed company of Theudas, Simon Magus, Dositheus, etc. 1 

The opinions about Iesu varied very much, as in the case 
of Kerinthus, Mark, vi. 3; viii. 28; Luke, xxiii. xxiv. Justin 
says that Iesu was hid from other men until he came to man¬ 
hood. Some may have thought that he was in the Desert, or 
in Egypt. This is evidently the idea given in Matthew, iii.— 
v.; see Luke, i. 80. Justin only knows that he was put to 
death over a hundred (about 150) years before his own time. 
He had been called a Nazarene, not a Pharisee! He had 
gone, so it was said, through villages healing,—like an Apollo, 
like Krishna. The hostility to the Pharisees was probably 
greater on the Jordan, in Galilee, Moab, Nabathea, and in 
Jerusalem after a.d. 80 than before Jerusalem’s fall, and words 
of denunciation were put in his mouth against them. “ It is a 
tremendous leap from the ideal and subjective to the objective 
and real,” says Antiqua Mater, 33, 159. But the Egyptians 

1 Loman, 70. 


THE NAZARENES. 


513 


represented Osiris as God and as a man, and Syrians have 
done as much. Compare, too, in the Krishna-legend Krishna’s 
raising the dead Kalavatti with the Healer’s “ Talitha cumi ” 
in Mark, v. Could not the legend of Krishna be told also in 
Palestine? Was not the death of Krishna by being “ hanged 
upon a tree ” and shot to death with arrows rendered in 
Acts, v. 30 and Zachariah, xii. 10 (“ whom ye have pierced ”) ? 
Are the words <c hanged on a tree ” in Acts, v. 30, applicable 
to a crucifixion at all ? As a nation, the Jews had been in 
one sense “ crucified.” Hence in the absolute subjugation of 
Palestine we see the effects of the blow, in the doctrine of 
the new party : Resist not evil.—Matthew, v. 39. The Roman 
bronze wolf, had turned even the transjordan into a sheep 
pasture. “ Sheep in the midst of wolves ” indeed! The over¬ 
throw of the Pharisees symbolised the destruction of Jerusa¬ 
lem’s sovereignty and her defenders. The new party that held 
that to “ draw the sword ” was to “ perish by the sword ” were 
to that extent submitting to the Roman sway when it showed 
the “ blind guides,” the Pharisees, no quarter! The power of 
Rome had taught even Galilee common sense! But, still 
the Jewish evangelist recalled her Desolation in the cry, O 
Ierusalem, Ierusalem, condemning to death the prophets and 
stoning those sent to her, how often I wished to collect thy 
children, as a bird gathers her chicks under the wings, and 
you would not ! Think you those Galileans whose blood 
Pilate mingled with their sacrifices were sinners beyond all 
the Galileans because they did these things? “I tell you no ; 
but if you should.not change, you will all in like manner per¬ 
ish.” Common sense was in a degree coming back again to 
the Jordan! Another thing we learn, that Pilate’s name, like 
Herod’s or Peter’s, was a resource for every politician or theo¬ 
logical novelist to avail himself of (as in the case of the never 
published Akta Pilati), an unfailing resource for a writer who 
chose the style of the historical novel and possessed a copy 
of Josephus. The reader will see that Josephus handles the 
Galilean, Judas, very delicately, as a subject on which he stood 
between the Romans on one side and his own people on the 
other. Josephus makes Judas the leader of a sect, and Atha¬ 
nasius follows him. What concerns us more nearly, as we have 
seen, is that Judas was one of the Jewish rebels against Roman 
sway in Judea and lived with the Baptists by the Jordan. If 
33 


514 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


then the Jewish Christians meant Eome when they wrote 
Babylon 1 why may not those who wrote Iesou have meant to 
in some vague way recall Iudas to mind ? If it was sought 
to show that the Messiah (a Warrior, in the Old Testament) 
had already appeared on the banks of the Jordan the third 
party 2 had to designate who he was. To have pointed out 
Judas the Galilean would have been suicidal, thrown a doubt 
on their loyalty to Caesar, accused them of crying peace and 
not meaning it. And they had become Nonresistants! They 
had to find their Messiah in the past, on the Jordan, to partic¬ 
ularise him as a Nazorene, with what aid they could derive 
from the Nazorene gnosis (and the Baptist’s name) in conceal¬ 
ing him from inspection. This would be making such a use of 
the mysteries of the gnosis that would tempt Tacitus to call 
the outcome of it an * exitiabilis superstitio.’ If, too, they 
admitted that the Messiah had come nearly a century previous 
there was a chance that the public would cease to take any 
interest in the Messiah ; to avoid this they preached his Second 
Coming, that he was to come immediately , 3 to the poor of the 
Saints in Jerusalem. It is obvious that Josephus was em¬ 
barrassed when he got to Judas the Galilean. He turns off 
from history to the sects, where he again touches on Judas. 
Soon the interpolation is reached. 

If we represent the matter thus, that in the citations from 
Clemens Alexandrinus we possess fragments of the original 
Kerugma Petrou, then we shall have no difficulty in explain¬ 
ing the creation of such a book out of the existing need, in the 
first half of the 2nd century, of the Christian communities of 
the Diaspora (Dispersion of the Jews) that by degrees en¬ 
deavored to introduce their Christianity among the Greek 
world, and thereby take away the national and patriotic hues 
which stood in the way of its general diffusion, and further to 
replace the local particulist-jewish tints by a growth of Greco- 
Roman universalism.—(Matth. xxviii. 19.) In truth the said 
Kerugma book moves in the same world of thoughts and 
forms in which the civilised and learned Judaism at Alexandria 
is occupied. Like as Philo, pseudo-Phokylides, the poets of 


1 Rev. xviii. 2. 

3 Luke, xxii. 2. 

3 Matthew, xxiv. 3, 5; Thessal. iv. 15, 16; John, xxi. 22; Acts, i. 11 ; Rev. xxii. 


20 - 


THE NAZARENES. 


515 


the Jewish Sibyl etc., endeavored to make the Jewish ideas 
and fundamental principles acceptable to the Greeks and at 
the same time among their lukew T arm associates of the same 
faith sought to arouse a zeal for the Judaism now dressed in 
the garb of Greek poets and philosophers, so we see also the 
pretended Petrus and Paulus of the Kerugma recommend 
Christianity and propose it as the higher union of the Jewish 
prophetism and the sublimated christianism. We are here, 
too, no more in the middle of the first generation of Messias- 
believers so as we might think them in the period of powerful 
convulsions which from Klaudius to Yespasian in constantly 
rising measure thrilled through the Jewish nation; the new 
generation to which the writer of the Kerugma belonged has 
laid aside its fanatical hatred towards the heathenism, but still 
sticks to the national Messianic expectations, so as they were 
spoken out in the Jew-christian Sibyl and apparently in the 
fragments preserved to us during this time (under Yespasian, 
Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines) were kept 
alive. 

While now the Paulus, that was in Strom. YI. 5 introduced 
as speaking, continues still on the Jewish standpoint that he 
can recommend the Jewish Sibyl and the Hystaspes-book 
written in the same spirit, the pseudo-Clemens of the Recog¬ 
nitions and Homilies, as follows from Markion’s appearance, 
saw himself compelled to purge the apostolic Christianity of 
the charge of (just as occurred in the Kerugma of Petrus) hav¬ 
ing surrendered the absolute prerogatives of Judaism and 
having admitted that the Heathen were competent to explain 
the Old Testament as a book opened to them and therefore to 
deal with the sacred oracles of God as with their own books. 
Thus is completely explained the otherwise inconceivable 
theory of the hidden meaning of the Holy Scripture and of 
the authority of Christus as the Godlike Teacher and prophet 
extraordinary. But thus at the same time is explained the 
polemic of the Clementine Writings against the Heathen which 
Peter’s discourses had made unrecognisable, against the in- 
imicus homo (the inimical man), against Saul the not converted 
to Paul, d.i. against the personification of the gainst-itself-rag¬ 
ing and therefore gainst-the-Christians infuriated Judaism and 
against the quasi converted magus, that is, against the Mark- 
ionites who endeavored to insinuate themselves into Chris- 


516 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tianity among others, also by themselves to appeal to the false 
apostle, the forged Paulus of our Epistle to the Galatians. 

First after the appearance of the concluded anti-Jewish 
gnosis is the appearance of the Clemens-romance conceivable ; 
then first the relation between the Kerugma-book cited by 
Clemens Alexandrinus and the doubtful Kerugmata Petri of 
the Clementine (Homilies and Recognitions) becomes clear to 
us when we represent to ourselves the last as induced by the 
first; then first is that Paul, through the anonymous in Strom. 
VI. 5. laid in the mouth, perfectly clear to us, if we place the 
historical Paulus closer to the Judaism than to Markion and 
thus ever nearer to Acts than to Galatians. So regarded, 
Clemens Alexandrinus, who, just as Irenaeus, loved Paulus 
Canonicus, is as good a witness as the Bishop of Lyons for the 
late origin of our Epistle. As to Irenaeus and his statement 
that the Ebionites accept only the Gospel of Matthew and 
reject St. Paul, it simply means that they do not fancy the new 
lading covered with the old apostolic flags, to let them come in 
their ports ; rather can we out of this testimony of Irenaeus 
not once make out that our canonical Matthew’s Gospel is ac¬ 
cepted in all its parts by these salvation’s people. The last 
Hilgenfeld rightly admits. As to the Gospel of John he under¬ 
stands the matter so as we do. Still he will have to take one 
step to see rise up the full light so far as it shines for us out 
of the records that have come to us. It is that he recognise 
that the Nazarenes could at the same time and with the same 
right ascribe to Paul ‘ the last of all the apostles ’ the evangel¬ 
ization of the entire coast of the Mediterranean sea, and reject 
the epistles ascribed to him by the Catholic Church, in case 
the idea of Paulus that they the men of the salvation had 
borrowed from the old Christian tradition, differed importantly 
from that which spoke to them out of the so-called Epistles of 
Paul. 

Thus regarded, the evidence of Hieronymus about the 
Paul-loving Jew-Christians loses all ‘ the astonishing ’ that the 
Tubingen combination had spread over it; we can, once re¬ 
turned to the right way, also easier find the right explanation 
of other phenomena in the department of the old Christian 
literature wherewith the same critique knew T even less counsel. 
—A. D. Loman, 77-79. 

Justin, Hegesippus, Dionysius, Polycarp, Irenaeus and Ter- 


THE NAZARENES. 


517 


tullian oppose Markion with a fierceness that borders on fanat¬ 
icism ; but Clemens Alexandrinus makes a very faint polemic 
against him, never reproaching him with offense to the evan¬ 
gels or the apostle. He saw positive points of contact between 
the Markionite gnosis and the Alexandrian school.—Loman, 
97, 98. Justin (Apol. B. p. 145) in about a.d. 166 (147, says 
Harnack) mentions Markion. The 10 Pauline Epistles might 
date before Markion, since they, far from containing any op¬ 
position to the Markionites, could be used by this party in 
preference. Markion comes later (?). 

The Assyrian winged bulls with human heads are symbolical 
figures like the Egyptian Amon with the ram’s head, or the 
Hebrew cherubim with the faces of a bull, eagle, lion and man. 
The Assyrian winged bull represented three of these figures as 
it had the human head, indicating power and mind in the same 
divine being. Passing from these attempts to exhibit to the 
human eye a conception of the Almighty Unknown as the 
combination of every power, we next come to Daniel’s exhibi¬ 
tion of the Being of all Time, the Ancient of Days. Here, as 
in Ezekiel, i. 26, 27, we observe the preference for the human 
figure (as Mind) over animal symbolism.—Gen. i. 27. The fire 
of Saturn surrounds the Ancient of days. The God that an¬ 
swers by fire let him be God.—1 Kings, xviii. 24. In Greece, 
the Oldest Dionysus appeared as this Fire-God Moloch Ariel. 
—Movers, 372. He was the Phoenician and Arabian Bal Saturn, 
the Hebrew El Moloch. Malachbel (Moloch) is the Sungod. 
—Baethgen, p. 84 ; Movers, I. 400, 300, 414, 705. 

Son of the Father, spirit (pneuma) going forth from the Father.—The Philo- 
patris, 12. 

The Anointed of the God.—Luke, ix. 20. The Anointed is the spirit of the 
Creator.—Tertullian, adv. Markion, III. 16. 

The Kabbalists named “ the Firstborn ” 1 Light of Light. 2 
He issued with the 4 spirit of the anointing’from the Most 
High. Some of the Gnostics say that there is a certain pri¬ 
mal light without end (ain soph) and that this is the Father 
of all and is called first Man : the Mind 3 is his forthgoing Son, 


1 The Monad from the unit. 

2 compare also John, i. 1, 4 ; iii. 18 ; v. 25; ix. 5 ; vi. 51; xii. 34. Here we find 
the trinitarian homeousion. 

3 The Mind is the Logos, the Wisdom, Word. 


518 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


second Man . 1 His light, which is let down and enters within 
the thread of Ain Soph, is protended downwards ; and enters 
and breaks through and passes on through Adam primus 
the occult. The Crown is Adam primus, simply so called af¬ 
ter disposition.—Kabbala Denudata, II. 246. Adam-Clirist is 
then the New Test. King. 2 The Chaldeans claimed Adam as 
born among them. 3 Adam is the Man that issued from ©eos, 
formed by the hands of God. 4 * He has in him the spirit (the 
great and holy spirit of His foreknowing, the holy spirit of the 
Anointed, Xpiarov , 3 The Comprehension of his Mind they call 
Son of Man and Second Man . 6 —See Tlieodoret, in Iren. p. 137. 

The Father of all, the first Man, and the Son, the second Man, and Christ 
their Son.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. 

O Thou all that in us is, thou Life, preserve us, thou Light, illumine us.— 
Hermes, xiv. 76. 7 

There is a certain first light in the power of Depth (Buthos), 
blessed, incorruptible and boundless ; and this is the Father 
of all things and called first Man. But Thought is his progres¬ 
sing Son, Son of Him who puts him forth, Son of Man, Second 
Man. Below these is the Sacred Spirit and beneath the spirit 
the detached elements, water, tenebrae, abyss, chaos, above 
which they say the spirit is borne; calling it the primal 
Woman. Afterwards the first Man exulting with his Son (the 


1 Dunlap, Sod, II. 24, 28, 119; Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. 

2 Matthew, xxiv. 81, 34, 40. Dunlap Sod, II. 24, 25. Theodoret, quoted in Ire¬ 
naeus, ed. Paris, 1675, pp. 136, 137, note 1. 

3 Hippolytus, ed. Miller, v. 7, p. 97. Adam is the Chaldaean Lunus. Placing the 
power of Osiris in the moon they say that the Isis unites with him.—Plutarch, de 
Iside, 43. Kuophoria means pregnancy. Adam and Ishah (Aisah) are Adon and the 
Vinah, Osiris (Asari) and Isis (Ashera, Astarta). 

4 Clementine Horn. III. 17, 20. 

6 ibid. 17, 20 ; Gerhard Ulhorn, Horn, and Rec. 188. 

6 Theodoret; Irenaeus, 137 note 1: They call Christ Light. 

7 comp, psalm, xxxvi. 9. When they came to the Supper, standing with their faces 
and total corpus fronting the Sunrise, when they saw the Sun rising they held up their 
hands to heaven, praying for a Good Day !—De Vita Contemplativa, 11. This was the 
Sabian Mithra worship.—Numbers, xxv. 4 ; Chwolsohn, Ssab. I. 187. In the sun He 
hath set his tabernacle.—Psalm, xix. 4. Septuagint and Vulgate. Josephus, Wars, IV. 
6, 3, says that “ to defile the Deity, they left the dead putrifying under the sun.” No 
dead body was allowed to be buried in Delos, Apollo’s isle. It follows, that, if dead 
bodies defiled, in Jewish notions, the Deity, then Apollo and Iahoh (Mithra, in Num¬ 
bers, xxv. 4) were names of the God of life. The spirit is life in heaven and on earth. 
—John, xix. 34 ; Matthew, iii. 16, 17 ; John, I. v. 6. 7. The Son of the Man belongs to 
the system of the gnosis.—Matthew, iii. 16,17. 


THE NAZARENES. 


519 


Logos proforikos) over the beauty of the spirit, the Woman, 
and illuminating Her, generated, from Her, Incorruptible Light, 
the third Male, whom they call Anointed (Christos), Son of the 
first and second Man and the Spiritus Sanctus the primal 
Woman. The Father and Son overshadowing the Woman 
whom they also call Mother of the living (compare Eua, Mater 
omnis viventis.—Gen. iii. 20), but when She would not carry 
nor contain within herself the magnitude of the Lights they 
call Her superreplete and boiling over near the sinister parts, 
and so indeed say that their only Son the Christ, as on the 
right hand, liftable to the upper parts, was carried away with 
the Mother into the incorruptible world. This is the true and 
sancta Ecclesia which has been the appellation and the as¬ 
sembling and the union of the Father of all (the first Man) and 
the Son (second Man) and Christ the Son of them and the 
aforesaid Female. But they teach that the Power, which 
bubbled over from the Woman, and has gotten the irrigation of 
Light, fell down from the Fathers, but having by its own will 
an irrigation of light, whom they call Sinistra and Pronicos 
and Sophia masculofeminine, and descending into the waters, 
since they were motionless and also moved not, and violently 
setting them in motion even to their depths took corporal sub¬ 
stance from them.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. There are two obser¬ 
vations to be made on this gnostic generation. The first is, 
that it agrees so well with Genesis, i. and ii. that the idea 
occurs whether it may not have been the earlier (especially 
when we have regard to Ezekiel’s gnosis). Second, the first 
and second Man are Father and Son in the same way as the 
Logos (Word) is regarded as proceeding (proforikos) from the 
Father: but the transposition of a man, no matter how supe¬ 
rior, into the gnostical position of the Son of the Woman might 
have encountered less opposition, than if the direct assertion 
had in the first instance been made that Iesu was the Logos. 
For the Son of the Woman, in this gnostic theogony we will 
for argument’s sake call the third Male. Therefore he takes 
not the place of the Logos there, but the position next below. 
In the general darkness that overshadows the first part of the 
Second Century it might well happen that this was the actual 
position anciently assigned to the Iessene Healer upon whom 
power had descended from on high. Luke’s Gospel and Mat¬ 
thew’s might perhaps be better assimilated to this view; but 


520 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


John’s Anointed, in whom was the light, was evidently anointed 
with ‘ the spirit of the anointing. 5 The Light of the gnosis 
is plainly in John, i. 1-6, 9-11. “ The logos was born flesh ” 

one would think would have shocked a gnostic ; Markion did 
not admit that the Healer was born of a virgin.—Tertullian vs. 
Markion, III. 13 ; IV. 10 ; V. chap. 19. It is not singular that 
Kerintlius rejected the doctrine. According, then, to the Gno¬ 
sis in Irenaeus, I. xxxiv., their Christ was the third Male, the 
incorruptible Light! John’s Gospel is apparently founded on 
this very gnosis of Light. Matthew and some lost gospels 
seem to have made fire prominent in this connection. But the 
early Hindu and Essene gnosis revives in Luke, xxi. 34: Take 
care of yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down by ex¬ 
cess, and wine, and cares of life, and That Day come on you 
unawares! So, too, the Nazoria of Bassora were forbidden to 
eat the food of the children of the world. And the same views, 
based on the doctrine of ‘ spirit against the flesh,’were held 
by the recluses of Eastern Monachism in Egypt also. To the 
supercelestial theories of the gnosis was added the moral part. 
The gnosis also expected the end of the world. 

Father, tliou Impulse of the Powers, I thank thee, thou Power of mine 
activity.—Hermes, 1 xiv. 73. 

Here we find the substratum, in Irenaeus I. xxxiv. of the 
Powers of the Nazoria of the Codex. We see here plainly the 
kabbalist gnosis that preceded the formation of the Christian 
canon,—the Oriental gnosis! The Homily iii. 20 holds that the 
Adam is a pregnancy-birth, delivered by the hands of God. 
He has the breath of Him who has made man, the imperishable 
vestment of the soul. He has the holy pneuma of Christ. The 
Fire which is First beyond (this sphere) did not shut up his 
power in matter, in works, but in mind (vow) : for the Architect 
of the pyrean is the Mind of mind.—Proklus in Theol. Plato- 
nis, 333 ; in Tim. 157. Ezekiel, i. 4, 12, 26-28; viii. 2, 3, ex¬ 
hibits the Mind and Spirit in the Man. The power of the 
spirit is associated with fire.—Matthew, iii. 11; Ezekiel, i. 4, 

1 Hermes was the Divine Wisdom, the Supreme God, among the Thracian kings, 
who made oath by him alone and declared that from him they had their birth.—He¬ 
rodotus, v. 7. What Deus achieves in the formation of an infant is described by the 
Jews, con amore, in Wagenseil’s Sota, Excerpta, Gemarae, pp. 72, 73. The Thracian 
princes in the fifth century b.c. were, like the Greeks and Trojans, acquainted with 
Asian and Syro-Arabian notions. 


THE NAZARENES. 


521 


27; viii. 2; Wuttke II. 295, quotes the Aitareja-Aranjaka 
Upanishad to the Rigveda. 

For we are the Circumcision, who are serving the spirit of God and boasting 
in Christos Iesou, and put no trust in Flesh. —Philippesians, iii. 3. Sinaitic 
text. 

We now see why the gnosis of the Gospel of the Hebrews 
is Judaic, and at his baptism associates the Christos with fire. 
Gnosis is ‘ superior science,’ the hidden wisdom of the Magians. 
When Paul identified ‘ Christos ’ with the Hidden Wisdom 
(Proverbs, viii. 22-24, 30) created prior to all times and worlds 
he identified him with the gnosis ! Listen to the preaching of 
the spirit! Unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of 
the Son of the Man ye have no Life in you.—John, vi. You 
cannot enter into the ‘ Kingdom of the heavens,’—the kingdom 
taught in the gnosis. For the real bond between Judaism and 
Christianism, between the Old Testament and the New Testa¬ 
ment, is the gnosis. ‘ I am the bread of life. My father gives 
you the true bread that descends from heaven and gives Life 
to the world. I am the bread of life ; he that comes to me will 
never hunger ! ’ This is the spirit; for ‘ spirit is the God.’— 
John, iv. 24. ‘ I am the Light of the world.’ The Logos 

(Wisdom, Word) was with the God in the Beginning. In it 
was Light and Life was that Light. The spirit descended on 
me at the Baptism of the Jordan. I am that Hidden Wisdom, 
that (as Paul said, 1 Cor. ii. 7) the God preordained before 
the aeons,—the Wisdom of God in Mystery! The Logos was 
with the God!—John, i. 1. The God does not give the spirit 
by measure.— John, iii. 34. He baptises in holy spirit.— 
Matthew, iii. 11, 16, 17. I saw the spirit going down from out 
of the heaven, like a dove, and staying on him.—John, i. 32-34. 
The world was made through it, and the world knew it not.— 
John, i. 3, 4. God (the Speaker.—Gen. i. 3) was the Logos ; 
this was in the Beginning with the God. In it is Life, and the 
Life was the Light of the men.—John, i. 1, 4. The Logos is 
spirit, for Spirit 1 is the God !—John, iv. 24. Hence Matthew, 
xii. 31, 32, becomes comprehensible, because to speak against 
the spirit was in the view of the Gnostics to speak against God, 
—something “ unpardonable in this aion (time) and in the fol- 

1 The spirit of Iahoh began to impel Sampson in camps of Dan.—Judges, xiii. 25. 
Agitante cales cimus illo. 


522 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


lowing* one.” But Ovid mentions the spirit as God. Ovid was 
born in b.c. 43 ; while the spirit is mentioned in Genesis, i. 2. 

There is spirit in man.—Job, xxxii. 8. 

God is in us, when agitated by him we are kindled.—Ovid, Fast. vi. 5. 

The beginning of perfection is the cognition of man, but the cognition of 
God is absolute perfection.—Hippolytus, v. 6. p. 95. 

They called themselves Gnostics, saying that only they know the depths !— 
Hippolytus, v. 6. 

These considered their Logos as Man and Son of Man. And 
this Man is male and female (masculofeminine, hermathene), 
is called Adamas by them, and addressed in hymns as Father 
and Mother, the two immortal names. 1 This is what we find 
in Genesis, ii. 23, 24. The Chaldeans claimed Adam. On a 
Chaldean cylinder there is the following representation. 2 In 
the centre a tree and the two lower branches come out on 
opposite sides at the same level, and bending downwards 
terminate each in a bud in the shape of a £>ine cone apparently. 
A figure sits on a block artificially squared, or at least rectan¬ 
gular at the section that supports his figure. On the other 
side of the tree sits (what Dr. Fr. Delitzsch defines to be) a 
female, from her headdress ; and this lady sits on a well-exe¬ 
cuted block. A fine pair of horns appears on the head of the 
male figure; 3 Adam 4 in the Samothracian Mysteries was 
called the ‘horn of Mene * (Luna), and Adonis and Osiris. 5 Be¬ 
hind the Woman a serpent stands erect upon his tail, in elon¬ 
gated coils, with a badly defined head, which (in our copy) 
terminates in a short rising, as much like a knife handle as 
anything. The scene may have reference to the horned Adonis 
or Dionysus in Hades with Proserpine ; for the tree has a 
blasted aspect, except those two poor buds or pine cones. The 
man’s right hand points to the trunk, the woman’s left hand 
to the lower branch next to her, which ends in a bud or pine 
cone pointing downwards. This scene probably illustrates a 
doctrine of the oriental mysteries. In Etruscan tombs ser¬ 
pents were represented in the same position erect, and the 

1 Hippolytus, v. 6. They call the Moon the Mother of the kosmos.—Plut. de Iside, 
43. Sapientiam vero in luna.—Augustine, contra Faust, xx. See 1 Cor. i. 24. 

2 Delitzsch, ‘ Wo lagdasparadies,’ p. 80. 

3 Dionysus. Adamus ? 

4 Adam Sebasmios. 

6 Hippol. p. 118 (169 Dunk, et Schn.). 


THE NAZARENES. 


523 


double-sexed man of the Naaseni and Sethians points directly 
to the Adon (Adonis) and to the Adam at the tree of life in the 
withered Garden below earth, to which Umbel or Charon 
takes the pallid souls. There seems to be no temptation in 
such a tree; for the Garden of the Hesperides offered the 
lovers golden fruits, and gold is the symbol of sunrise and 
resurrection like the grain of wheat. But the Persian or Jew¬ 
ish scribe 1 of Mithra may have chosen to see in that upstart 
serpent an emblem of the temptations that had no power over 
Markion. Markionism and Christianitj^, like Judaism, Chal- 
daism, Magism and Setliianism, had finally to be founded on 
the Oriental Gnosis, upon the Man of boundless light (the 
symbol of endless intelligence is man) and the Son of the Man, 
the Logos his forth-going Son, 6 mos tov aySpuirov, and the 
pneuma (holy breath of life) proceeding from the Father and 
the Son (the two forms of the Logos.—Gen. ii. 2). Light and 
Darkness (see Isaiah, ix. 2; Matthew, iv. 15, 16) are the two 
natures proceeding from the Man (forming the Light and 
creating the Darkness.—Isa. xlv. 7); the two ousicd (natures, 
or principles) in the philosophy of the Sethians; and in the 
centre, between the two, is the unmingled spirit. 2 Osiris and 
Isis are described by Diodorus Sic. I. 13, 15-17, both as Gods 
and mortals. Here we find all the essentials of the incarna¬ 
tion doctrine. They had been incarnated in the popular mind 
for centuries, in the Mysteries. Eua was constructed out of 
Adam’s rib, being the Crescent Yena. Nonnus, Dionys. ix. 
represents the Child Dionysus at his birth the image of the 
moon with perfect horns. Osiris is Dionysus.—Diodorus, 1.15. 

The Mysteries bring us now to the first man Adam ; also to 
the last Adam. Adam is the interior formation in which the 
Spirit consists.—Kabbala Denudata, the Aidra Babba, § 1128. 
The Soharto Exodus fol. 29. col. 114 says : “This is the Mys¬ 
tery of Adam, of whom it is written (Genes, v. 1): ‘ This is the 
Book of the Generations of Adam,’ 3 and (in the following verse) 

1 Gen. iii. 1, 5, f. 

2 Hippolytus, v. 19. Venus was represented as Vena in the Moon, the Hebrew 
Benah, pronounced (b = v) Venah, the Universal Mother, Eua in the Mysteries, Asah, 
Issa, the Isis with cow-horns. As Eua held in her arms the Young Dionysus, as She 
was the Horned Keres in the Mysteries of DSmSter,—so Venus (see Winckelmann, ed. 
Roma, 1767. pi. 74; ed. Donauoschingen, 1826. pi. 73) was represented with the Child 
in her arms. Justin Martyr called Eua “ Virgin ” and “ Undefiled.” She was adored. 

3 Dionysus and DgmSter, Adon and the Benah, Ab Ram and Sarach. The proph- 


524 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


‘ at the time when God had created him.’ Here the earthly 
Adam is meant, because in that section two Adams are men¬ 
tioned. The first Adam was the mystical earthly Adam, the 
other, on the contrary, the mystic heavenly Adam. 1 The 
earthly is contained in those words where, through the word 
Toledoth , the production of the species is spoken of; the fol¬ 
lowing words, on the other hand, tell prophetically of an 
Adam that was created later.” This is the Messias, for even 
the rabbins taught that in the Messianic time the disposition 
to sexuality will no longer prevail. 2 Here we are evidently in 
the midst of the Jewish Gnosis. The flaming sword waves 
before the Garden of the Adon. 3 All things are the progeny 
of one Fire. The Father perfected all things and delivered 
them over to the Second Mind whom all nations of men call the 
First. 4 Fire and the Cherubim are the symbols of Saturn. He 
baptizes with fire and the holy breath of life. 5 When an idea 
became wide-spread in the orient it did not take long to im¬ 
personate the same in the oriental imagination: of course a 
statement of the doctrine of the impersonated one followed 
next, and then his life and history. 

The Call of the preacher in Medbar : Prepare a way of Ia’hoh, make level 
in Arabia a highway for our Alah, ... A voice says, kara, Call!—Isaiah, xl. 
3, 6. 

The names Medbar and Arabah denote Arabia, where we know 
that there were Desert-preachers. Compare Dunlap, Sod, II. 


ets prophesied by Bal (Bel).—Jeremiah, ii. 8. The image of the Adon was enclosed 
in a tree; and Justin Martyr wrote (1st Apol. p. 151): The Lord was ruling from a 
tree. Adamas the Hermaphrodite, Hermathena, is the two-sexed Adon.—Dunlap, 
Sod, I. 31. The eunuchs.—Isa. lvi. 3-5; Lucian, Dea Syria. 

1 “ The mystery of Adam is the mystery of the Messiah,” said the rabbins. Ben- 
geli’s gnomon, p. 44, ascribes the words ‘ Great King ’ to psalm xlviii. 2, 3. The same 
expression, which is in Matth. v. 35, is in the psalm mentioned in connection with 
Zion in the Sides of the North , which is where the prophet located Eden. The Messiah 
was said to come out from the fifth house in the Garden of Eden. Bengeli says that 
the words Great King, in Matthew, mean the Messiah. Compare Matthew, xxv. 34. 

8 Nork, Rabbinische Quellen and Parallelen zu Neutestamentlichen Schriftstellen, 
p. 263, 264. 

3 Adana, Adania, Aden, Odin, Edin appear as forms of Adan, Adon, Don. 
Adanos is son of earth and sky. In the Kabalah the Messiah goes out from the Garden 
of Eden. 

4 Chaldean Oracles.—Psellus, 24; Piet. 30. 

6 Compare Matthew, iii. 11. Evangel of the Hebrews lights up Jordan with fire at 
the baptism of the Healer by the Ascetic Baptist. 


THE NAZARENES. 


525 


pp. xxxii. xxxiii. xxxiv. 11, 12, 14, 33, 34, 37, 40, 50. The 
Nazarene sect was before Christ, and knew not Christ.—Epi- 
phanius, I. p. 121. They were called Iessaeans (that is, The- 
rapeutes) before they were called Christians.—Epiphan. I. 120. 
The Mandaites too were descendants of the Nabathaeans. 1 
They regarded Abel Zina (Abel the Glorious) as Gabriel and 
Son of God begotten upon light, the first Apostle and Messen¬ 
ger.—See Dunlap, Sod, II. 56-61. Gabriel is the Angel of 
Fire.—Bodenschatz, Kirchl. Yerfass. d. Juden, III. 160. All 
things are the progeny of One Eire. The Father perfected 
all things and delivered them over to the Second Mind, 3 whom 
all nations of men call the first.—Cory, Anc. Fragments; Psel- 
lus 24 ; Pletho 30. 

From Genesis 3 and 2nd Kings xxiii. to the successors of Si¬ 
mon Magus we find the doctrine of Angels and Powers of the 
heavens, the Chaldaean-Sabian heavenly host. It is most 
prominent in the gnosis, the Bible and the Kabalali; and 
2 Kings, xxiii. 12, shows that this Angel-theory is Sabian- 
astronomical.—Colossians, ii. 18. But our mind, when it Clial- 
daised, meteorologising (handling supernal things) the kosmos, 
was riding around (compassing) the active Powers as Causes; 
but becoming an emigrant from the Chaldaean dogma I knew 
that it was guided and governed by a Commander of whose 
sway it bore the look.—Philo, Mutat. Nominum, 3. The demi- 
ourgus is merely a mythological representative of Universal 
Mind (Nous), which evolves itself in the form of the kosmos. 
This is Plato’s view. 4 The Logos is the Demiurgus, 5 and in 
Matthew, xxv. 31, 34, 40, the “ King” is identified (John, i. 1-4) 
with the Logos. Philo (Mutation of Scripture names, 3) men- 

1 Chwolsohn, I. 111. 

2 The Lamb (AriSs) is the porta deorum. • The Messiah goes out from the Garden 
of Eden (which some placed in the moon). A river of living water issues from the 
throne of the Lamb, the river of Orion, which is situated immediately below Aries. The 
Lamb was the chief of all the signs, princeps signorum, and the Persians began their 
year at the vernal equinox.—Mankind, 496, 536, 566, 654, 465. On March 25th in the 
Persian Mysteries a young man, apparently dead, was restored to life. Man reenters 
paradise by the gate of Aries, the Gate of the Lamb, where the Chelub Perseus stands 
with his flaming sword to defend Aries. The Garden of Delights was in Aries, where 
the River of Orion issues from the throne of the Lamb. 

3 Dunlap, Sod, I. 121. Dionysus is Hades; Hades is Aidoneus, Osiris and Serapis. 
Adamas is the unconquered Herakles, the Mithra Invictus, the Adonis-Aidoneus. 
Osiris is Saturn, Kronos, and Adam.—See Palmer, II. 622, 624. 

4 ‘ Academy,’ May 19, 1888, quotes R. D. Archer-Hind’s Timaeus of Plato. 

5 John, i. 3; Matthew, xxvii. 43. 


526 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tions the Kingly Power, as one of God’s Powers. The Anointed 
(Christos) is identified with the holy ghost by Matthew i. 20, 
iii. 16 (Luke, i. 35), and with the King (the King appeared, 
being from the Beginning, but not yet become known to the 
soul.—Philo, Mut. Nominum, 3) by Matthew, xxv. 31, 34, 40 
(and perhaps Matthew, iv. 11). Philo, born not far from b.c. 
12-20, was full of gnosis and kabalah. He begins his “ Creation 
of the world ” by a reference to the Archetypal model, the idea 
of ideas, the Logos of God (de opificio mundi, 6); so St. John 
commences his gospel by saying that God was the Logos (J ohn, 
i. 1). Philo’s gnosis bases itself on the Judaism of the Old 
Testament with hidden wisdom, the allegorical method, and 
commentaries. He calls the unseen and noetos (mind-per¬ 
ceived) divine Logos and Word of God also an image of God; 
and the image of this image is that intelligible (mind-per¬ 
ceived) light that is the image of the divine Logos. Hence 
St. John, viii. 12, ix. 5, calls the Logos (Word) the Light of the 
world. “ The mind-perceived Light existed before the sun.” 
—Compare Gen. i. 3, 16. We have said enough to indicate 
that Philo Judaeus is one of the sources of the 2nd century New' 
Testament gnosis. Philo, Leg. Alleg. II. 21 says that the most 
generative of all things is God ; and, in the second place, the 
Logos (Word) of God. So that the New Testament is gnosis. 
Philo’s gnosis is Nazarene enough to have pleased the monks 
of Mons Nitria, for he says that God hates pleasure and the 
body.—Legal Alleg. III. 24. The divine Logos is the Steers¬ 
man and Governor of the universe.—The Cherubim, 11. These 
matters, O mystae, purified as to your ears, receive in your 
souls as mysteries really sacred, and talk of them to none of 
the uninitiated, and storing them up within yourselves, guard 
a treasury in which not gold and silver, perishable things, are 
laid up, but the most beautiful of real possessions, the knowl¬ 
edge of the cause and virtue; and, in the third place, of the 
generation of the two.—The Cherubim, 14. Gnosis is the 
knowledge of causes! But Philo is before the date of Matthew% 
vi. 19, 20. The Logos of God is the instrument by which the 
world was made (Philo, de Cherubim, 35); compare Colossians, 
i. 16, wdiich reinforces Philo’s idea. It is necessary that the 
sacred and mystic account of the Unborn and His Powers be 
kept secret, since it does not belong to every one to keep the 
deposit of divine mysteries.—Philo, SS. Abel and Cain, 15. 


THE NAZARENES. 


527 


With this compare Coloss. i. 26, 27, on the Mystery hidden 
from ages and generations which is now made manifest . . . 
Christos in you! That Light which is perceptible only by the 
intellect!—Philo, fragment (Bohn, iv. p. 227). Philo (Bohn, iv. 
210, 392) regards the Logos as Second God, the Word (Logos) 
of the Supreme Being. This is a portion of the gnosis of the 
Valentinians.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. p. 135. Philo on Fugitives, 
18, 19, refers to the Powers; he says that the Logos holds the 
reins of the Powers: further on, he mentions the Logos, the 
Creative Power and the Kingly Power of the Governor. Philo’s 
statement that the Most Ancient Logos of the Primal Being 
(the Father) ‘ puts on the world as a garment ’ is an exact de¬ 
scription of the relation of Osiris to the world, in Egyptian 
theory. We here have the Logos 1 identified with the Christos, 
the King, and the Holy Pneuma. In Philo, Confus. Ling. 28, 
the Logos is called the Firstborn ; the Oldest of the Angels, 
the Great many-named Archangel, the Arche (Beginning), and 
the Name of God.—Exodus, iii. 2, 6, 16. This is all substan¬ 
tially repeated in the Epistle to the Hebrews, 1-14. So that 
Philo Judaeus supplied a large part of the entire New Testa¬ 
ment gnosis ; which is really Jewish and Alexandrine-Jewish. 
Instead of stopping at Simon Magus, we must go back for a 
foundation to the Semite antecedent gnosis, the Old Testament 
gnosis, and the Alexandrian gnosis. The Jewish writers of 
the New Testament have a decided Alexandrian tinge. Kerin- 
thus was trained in Egypt.—Hippolytus, x. 21. The Holy 
Spirit was really regarded as the power and the wisdom of the 
God; Paul called the Christos the power and the wisdom of 
the God; John says that the Baptist absolutely saiv the Spirit 
rest upon him ; and Kerinthus admitted something, how much 
we do not know. 

Among all works the highest is the perception of the spirit. This is the 
preferable in all sciences ; for it leads to immortality.—Mann, xii. 85. 

Recognising Him who is the Breath of Life and whose ray is in all beings, 
a man becomes a Wise Man, one whose action is confined within himself, one 
content in himself. Through truth we must grasp the spirit, through complete 
cognition, and by penance, and by abstinence.—Mundaka Upanishad, III. 1. 

The Healer was a teacher of those that receive with pleasure 
the truths ! So says the contested passage in Josephus, xviii. 

1 Compare Harnack, Dogmengesch. 1886, p. 218. Justin tries to find it all in the 
Old Testament. 


528 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


3. 3. Gfrorer, Das Heiligthum, p. 120, says: We first learn 
something of the human appearance of Iesu after the Baptist 
has given his testimony that Iesus is the Messias, which ac¬ 
cording to the opinion of our evangelist (John) is as much as 
saying that the Logos dwells in him. The Paulinist, too (2 
Cor. iv. 4), mentions the glory of the “ Anointed ” who is an 
Image of the God. 

.The God is everywhere, because stretching his Powers 
through Earth, Water, Air and Heaven, he has left no part of 
the world desolate.—Philo, Confus. ling. 27. 

Lo, a Man whose name is the East (—Philo, Confusio ling. 
14). That incorporeal who does not differ from the Divine 
Image. This the Oldest Son, the Father of the beings brought 
to light, whom elsewhere he named Eirst-begotten.—Philo, 
Confus. of tongues, 14. When the Lord is seen by Abrahm, it 
was one of the Powers surrounding the Cause of all things.— 
Philo, Mut. Nom. 3. 

The Logos of the God is his Son, who is also called Angel 
and Apostle.—Justin, 1st Apol. p. 160. The angels in connec¬ 
tion with Jewish gnosis and kabalah in the time of Kerinthus, 
the Old Testament Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan ben 
Usiel, and the Synoptic Gospels are also in close relation to 
the New Testament gnosis. “We believe in a certain Logos, 
man crucified, that he is first-begotten to the Unborn God.”— 
Justin Martyr, 1st Apol. p. 156. Matthew mentions a multi¬ 
tude of the heavenly host and more than twelve legions of 
angels; Irenaeus tells of the Angels in connection with the 
doctrines of Kerinthus and the early Gnostics; the Kabalah 
occupies itself with the Angels and Demons, with the throne 
of Iahoh the thousand thousands of good angels surrounding 
it under the presidence of Metatron the King of the Angels, 
also with the innumerable devs of the Persian Ahriman. Mark, 
v. 10, says: “ My name is Legion, for we are many.” Metatron 
is Mithra (Mettron) and fulfils a position analogous to that of 
the Christ in Matthew, iv. 11. In his place the Targums of 
Onkelos and Jonathan give us the “ Word ” of the Lord, as in 
Philo, John, i. 1, and Justin Martyr. Here we reach the acme, 
the central point, of contest with the doctrine of Matthew, who 
teaches that Iesu was born of a virgin. But he never says who 
told him so! He never gives his authority for saying so. 
Could he have got it from John the Baptist on whose shoulders 


THE NAZARENES. 


529 


is placed the responsibility for many miracles,—that grim foe 
of the Pharisees ? Returning to the legions of angels and 
devils in the time of Simon the Magus, there were, according 
to him, Virtutes (Powers), Potestates (Thrones), Angels gov¬ 
erning the world, and Angels without number: Thus Daniel, 
vii. 10: 

A river of fire emanating and going out from before Him, thousand thousands 
ministered to Him and a myriad of myriads stood before Him. 

The Son of the Man shall come in the glory of his Father with the angels 
the holy.—Mark, viii. 38. 

No wonder that Matthew speaks of baptising the Pharisees in 
that river of fire! No wonder that Menander, like Simon, 
taught that the world was made by Angels, that Saturninus 
exhibited the Unknown Father with his Angels, Archangels, 
Powers, Governors, the world made by Seven Angels; or that 
Basileides talked about Powers, Thrones (principes) and 
Angels, whom he also calls the First. Going back to Philo 
Judaeus in Alexandria (where Basilides lived) we find him, too, 
writing about the Powers. It is the Jewish gnosis blossoming 
out under the warm sun of the Oriental Philosophy into those 
vagaries of the human mind that the opponents of free thought 
have termed heresies. The Oriental Philosophy is at the bot¬ 
tom of it all. “ The nations all were destitute of the true God, 
serving works of hands ; but Jews and Samarians having the 
Logos from the side of the God handed down to them by the 
prophets and always having expected the Christ, did not 
recognise him when he was come, except a certain few, whom 
the holy prophetic spirit, through Esaias, preordained should 
be saved.”—Justin, 1st Apol. p. 156. Justin, Apol. I. p. 161, 
gives us the positive gnosis when he says that the Apostle of 
God is Iesous the Christos, the Logos formerly, sometimes ap¬ 
pearing in the ideal (image) of fire and sometimes in image of 
incorporeals (supernaturals). 

“ When Celsus says the Christians are flighty, believe with¬ 
out logic, like those who follow soothsayers and Mithrae and 
others, and who glory in the foolishness of faith for faith’s sake 
(I. 9), no one w T ill deny that this represents the dissension be¬ 
tween the educated man and the illiterate religionist of the 
present day. His remark is fair; and who that knows the 
position of the Catholic pastor at the present day must not 
admit that ‘ the teaching of the multitude to believe without 
34 


530 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


reasons ’ which the Father defends is a practice without which 
the work of the Church could not go on ? Origen assumes 
that man must believe in some sect or other, must beg the 
question in favor of this or that teacher; and there was no 
third between him and his critic, to maintain, like the modern, 
Je n’en vois pas la necessity. But Celsus so far ‘ holds the 
field ’ that it is clear, if the question must be begged, it should 
be begged in favor of the old wisdom over the new. How in¬ 
dispensable it was to the Christiani to appropriate the Old 
Testament, on this very ground—the need of the sanction of 
Antiquity—we have seen from Justin. We have seen this 
again in Origen; but his attempt to maintain the assumption 
of Jewish wisdom over that of the Hellenes, and the indebted¬ 
ness of the latter to Moses, and again the originality of circum¬ 
cision with the Jews, rather than with the Egyptians, only 
suggests reflection and inquiry. In truth this urgent need of 
the support of Jewish antiquity, so clearly revealed in the 
leaders of the Catholic movement from Justin onwards, as dis¬ 
tinguished from the Gnostics, seems to prove the dominance 
of Hellenised Jews in that movement—in other words, the 
ascendency of Philo over Pythagoras at the end of the second 
century. Through the instinct of self-preservation—the strong¬ 
est instinct we know—and by dint of hard assertion a position 
was conquered for the Old Testament in Christianity, or for 
Christianity in the Old Testament, which has so long remained 
unassailed. The results of modern exegesis of the Old Testa¬ 
ment have shown more and more clearly, what is patent from 
the apologists themselves, that the dependence of the new re¬ 
ligion on the prophets was from the first forced and artificial. 
Not an unsound exegesis but the passion for antiquity on the 
part of the anti-Gnostic, anti-Hellenic party among the Chris¬ 
tiani accounts for their extraordinary enterprise of depriving 
the Circumcision of their right to enjoy and interpret their 
sacred books in their own way. The dilemma was consequent 
enough—‘ either you must remain a Jew, and follow the Jewish 
interpretations of the Scriptures or you must be a Gnostic 
Christian and find an independent basis for the new religion.’ 
But school logic is not the governing power, neither in political 
nor in ecclesiastical life, and Catholicism continued to occupy 
the centre between the ‘ right wing ’ of Ebionitism and the 
‘ left wing ’ of Gnosticism. 


THE NAZARENES. 


531 


“ To return to Celsus’ criticism. Peculiarly instructive are 
the pictures which he gives of the progress of the new religion 
among the masses, so closely paralleled by what we have seen 
of the progress of Methodist and Salvationist sects in our own 
time. It is, he says, the ignorant and the unintelligent, it is 
slaves, women, and children who make the best converts. 
There is a strong prejudice even against education; and the 
popular teachers of the market-place would not venture near a 
meeting of wise men (3. 49). 1 And the Father in effect admits 
that there must be milk for babes, as strong meat for men of 
understanding .” 1 2 * 

Mitlira was the Babylonian Elohim, Bel Mithra. His mys¬ 
terious name (Iao, Iaholi) as Only begotten suits Bel Mithra 
(the Zeus-Belus, ‘ Helios Noetos,’ the Chaldean and Philonian 
Logos, the Logos of John, i. 1-4). See Movers, I. 553-555. 
This Mithra-Bel is mentioned in the Old Testament. We have 
Abel (Gen. iv. 4) the Good Principle. In Crete Abelios was a 
name of the Sun (—Piinck, Belig. Hellenen, 1.175, note; Hesy- 
cliius, s. v.: a Dorian name of the Sun was Apelldn.—I. 175). 


1 Celsus does not approve that ignorant artisans, the local preachers of the time, 
who would not venture to open their mouths in the presence of their lords, assume a 
tone of conceit and dogmatism with women and children, and stir up in them contempt 
towards their natural superiors. In the shops of the leather-sellers and the fullers, 
and in the gynaikeia, these things were going on.—Antiqua Mater, 276. The author 
thinks they did some good in restraining women from vice, theatres, dancing, and 
superstition, and youths from the temptations of their age. 

2 Ant. Mater, 274-276. Among Jews of rabbinical training at the beginning of 
our era the resurrection of the body was a necessary part of the system of theological 
and moral ideas. And this being so, as these ideas gradually shaped themselves into 
the form of a personal history, it was an equal necessity of belief that the Christ had 

risen again. The ‘ apostolic ’ preaching of the risen Christ was from the first a theo¬ 
logical manifesto. As the time had not yet come w r hen the 4 apostolic ’ teachings were 
assigned to individually named apostles (the ‘ Epistle of Barnabas ’ forms no real 
exception, internally considered), still less had the time come when they were ascribed 
to one Authority, the utterances of one Voice. They stand before us on their own 
intrinsic evidence, utterances of the anonymous Heart of Judaism, breathed upon by 

the spirit of wisdom and holiness.—Antiqua Mater, 180, 144. Had it been the an¬ 
nouncement of a fact, certified from the first by eyewitnesses, nothing could have dis¬ 
pensed with the necessity of the continued reference to those witnesses. It is the 
silence of our literature on this point that speaks. What is clear beyond dispute is 
that the idea of the general resurrection is organically connected in belief with the 
particular resurrection of the Christos; and the latter is a logical deduction from the 
former, standing or falling with it.—ibid. 180, 181; 1 Cor. xv. 18. Also John, xx. 0 
holds that the scripture prophesies his resurrection. Trypho retorts that Justin’s 
interpretations are artificial.—Ant. Mater, 39. And so are some of Tertullian’s, 
utterly arbitrarv. 


532 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Now we find ‘ Great Abel ’ (—1 Sam. vi. 18) at the SuN-temple 
(Beth Shems) of the Philistians ; and ‘ Habol ’ and Bal (Bol) or 
Baal quite frequently in the Old Testament; so that we know 
that the Phoenicians very early carried the name Abel, Apellon, 
Habel or Habol (Apollon x ) to Greece, as a name of the Intel¬ 
ligible Sun, Mithra ; ‘ and Eliaho spoke to the nabiai of Habol.’ 
—1 Kings, xviii. 25. When the people of Dor in Southern 
Phoenicia sailed to the Aegean Sea they bore with them the 
Name Habel; hence the Cretan name ’At re'AXwv. 2 So we find 
Bel Mithra on the Jordan with his Babylonian garments and 
his Mithrabaptists. Mithra probably (like Adam of the Cle¬ 
mentine Homilies) contains in the Elohim both sexes. 

The proximate cause that a Messias-community sprung up 
is to be found first in the Babylonian and Jewish gnosis and 
subsequently, in the national disaster about the year 70 : “ huius 
(Ebionaeorum) factionis exordium post Hierosolymitanae urbis 
excidium coepit.”—Epiphanius, Haer., xxx. 2. And Clemen¬ 
tine, Homily II. 17 says : “ Pirst a false evangel by a certain im¬ 
postor must come, and then in like manner after a destruction 
of the holy place a true evangel be secretly sent.”—A. D. Lo- 
man, p. 83. The Ebionites were Jews (Titus, i. 10, 14) and 
adored Jerusalem as the abode of God.—Acts, i. 4; Matthew, 
v. 35. Moreover some of them did not deny the resurrection 
of Iesu, as a Jew selected as the Messiah.—Library of Univ. 
Knowledge, Y. p. 236. The Ebionites were Judaist without be¬ 
ing Jews proper, and adhered to the Law of Moses.—Luke, vi. 
20, 21; Matth. v. 17, 18. The Evangels attack the Pharisees 
and are Ebionist. The Ebionites and Jews and Iessaioi (Es- 
senes) used baptism, like the Mithraworshippers. 

1 In the Baths of Titus a picture was found representing Apollo with the nimbus 
surrounding his head.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 365, note. Atys in Phrygia was fast¬ 
ened to a tree, in ligno snspensus.—ibid. 363. So likewise Krishna in India. 

2 If Kreta from a political standpoint appears already before the beginning of the 
time of the Dorians completely in the background so much the more powerful seems 
the influence which it has exerted in the succeeding centuries upon Grecian life and 
especially on the formation of the religion. The worship of Zeus (Sios) in its peculiar 
connection with Kronos and Rhea proceeded from Kreta to Olympia, and Elis. Arkadia 
adopted the Kretan legends of the birth of Zeus. The other Pelasgic forms begin to 
come to the foreground already in the time of Hesiod in refined and altered conception. 
This oldest layer was from time to time flooded with new additions. The Epos had by 
preference expanded and formed the human side of the deities (Herakles is one in¬ 
stance) and especially inclined towards the Ionian ‘deities of Light,’ Apollon and 
Athena.—Milchhoefer, Anfange d. Kunst in Griechenland, 202, 203. In Homeric 
Hymn, V. 123, Demeter at Eleusis states that She comes from Kreta. 


THE NAZARENES. 


533 


Babel shall not endure, and conquered will be Media’s kings, the Heroes of 
Ionia shall not remain, rooted out will the Romans be, 

No more tribute shall they gather from Jerusalem.—Chaldee Version of 
Habakuk, iii. 17. 

The book of Revelations, chapters xvi. xvii. calls Rome 
Babel, and foretells her ruin in the End of all. The Epistle of 
Barnabas makes allusion to Adrian’s intention to rebuild the 
temple, after the ruinous war with Bar Cochebah.—Antiqua 
Mater, p. 88, note 2. All apocalypses are suspicious, as Renan 
says; but by the Apocalypse of Esdras he attempts to define 
the date of the Apocalypse of John. The affliction of Sion 
(Esdr. vi. 19, 20) might end, and the world with it. 

Come Lord Iesou !—Rev. xxi. 20. 

The Lord shall redeem thee from the hand of thine enemies.—Micah, iv. 10. 

According to Renan, Nero preceded John and Esdras; both 
must then have known about him, yet only John refers to him. 
Both recognise the destruction of Jerusalem (—Rev. xi. 1, 2). 
Both speak of a City in the heavens. The measuring the 
temple and the altar (Rev. xi. 2 ; Jahn, p. 443) was intended as 
a preparation for a new one in Trajan’s time. If the temple 
was “ holy to Iahoh,” the dimensions of the old one would be 
regarded in reference to the temple of the New Jerusalem. 
There is no very apparent evidence to fix the date of either 
book, and the plan of each work is, in the main, dissimilar. 
The second century produced a John, the Synoptics, Justin 
and perhaps a Paul. One might suppose that the Ebionite 
Revelations were quite near to the earliest gospels. Renan 
claims that John (of Revelations) is permeated with Joel, ii. 
1-17 and the Prophets, above all with Ezekiel, the two Isaiahs, 
and the author of Daniel. “ Already in the second century 
the history of the church of the first century is entirely mythi¬ 
cal ; ” 1 only in the first century there were ideas of the Christos, 
the Son of the God, and Messianism afloat. The whole litera¬ 
ture of the second century among heathen, Jews and Christians, 
was of a spurious character. 2 Yerses vii. 28, 29, in Esdras IY. 
are spurious and were inserted about the beginning of the 
third century. Four hundred years would delay the Jewish 

1 Hausrath, quoted by Loraan, p. 108. 

s Loman, 108. 


534 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Messiah considerably! The passages vi. 59 and yii. 46, 47, 48 
evidently demur to being forced to wait so long for relief from 
their wretchedness, and to suffering the results of the sin of 
Adam. 1 Morever, in verse 55 the abstinent doctrine of self- 
denial looms up plainly, as in Matthew and among the Marki- 
onites of the 2nd century. Esdras, verse 56, dislikes the pun¬ 
ishment after death, but this was no new doctrine to the 
Egyptians and Jews; viii. 1 has the same doctrine of Mat¬ 
thew, xxii. 14; viii. 8 has the ancient notion (conformably to 
the philosophy in Diodorus Sic. I. 7) that the vivified body in 
the matrix is preserved in fire and water,—a Jewish notion 
confirmed in Wagenseil’s Sota, Excerpta Gemara, pp. 72, 73. 
Esdras, viii. 29 refers again to the Law; viii. 49 is like Mat¬ 
thew, v. 5, 20, for the meek, and against the self-righteous; 
viii. 50 refers to the End of the world; ix. 7 preaches salvation 
by works and faith whereby ye have believed. This is the 
doctrine of Paul, Justin Martyr and the Jews. There is noth¬ 
ing in this to interfere with dating the Apokalypse of Esdras 
as late as a.d. 125. Esdras, ix. 13 has some analogy with 
John’s Apocalypse, vi. 9; xix. 4; Esdras, ix. 1, 2, suits with 
Matthew, xii. 38, 39; xxiv. 24. The argument from analogy 
would tend to place the Fourth Esdras not quite contem¬ 
poraneous with the first two gospels. And, to confirm this, 
Esdras, ix. 31-33 goes back again to the Jewish Law; ix. 31- 
37 says : We that have received the law perish by sin. . . . 

Nevertheless, the law perishes not, but continues in force! 
This savors of St. Paul’s style, and seems to be Ebionite- 
Judaist. 

1 The Persians and Magi (like the Jews) divide Iao (Iouem) into two parts, trans¬ 
ferring his nature, regarded as the substance of fire, to the images of each sex, both of 
a man and a woman. And they make the Woman with triple face, binding her with 
monstrous serpents.—Julius Firmicus Maternus, de Errore, 5. This of course suggested 
the idea of Eua tempted by the serpent. Gen. iii. That Iao was thus regarded as 
supernal fire is not only clear from psalm, 1. 3, which mentions Alahi’s devouring fire, 
but also from Genesis ii. 23; because AS and ASah, in Hebrew, mean fire male and fire 
female (compare the Mystery of the two principles, in the Simon Magus theory) in 
that connection. Iao and Iahoh are Dionysus the Sun. Iao and Iahoh (the tetragram- 
maton) are the Phoenician-Chaldaean-Jewish mysterious and ineffable names of Ala- 
him (Elohim) of the Old Testament Judaism. Iao is the Intelligible Light and Life- 
principle, Dionysus. One Divine Power, One supreme and eternal spirit, must, as first 
cause, contain within himself the male and the feminine sources or archetypes, like the 
Adam, the Man, the Monad from the One ! So that in Judaism we have the best 
Babylonian, Arabian, and Semite Religious philosophy. This was the Judaism of the 
1st century. 


THE NAZARENES. 


535 


Sion, our Mother, is grieved in the sorrow of all, and is humiliated with 
humiliation, and mourns very greatly ; and now we all mourn and are sad.— 
Esdras, x. 7, 8. 

What are the Calamities of Sion ! Be consoled in the view of Jerusalem’s 
sorrow. For thou dost see that our sanctuary is made a desert, our altar is de¬ 
molished, and our temple destroyed, and our psaltery is abased, and our hymn 
has ceased, and our rejoicing is abrogated, and the light of our Candelabrum is 
extinguished, and the ark of our Covenant is plundered, and our sancta are de¬ 
filed, and the Name that is named over us is as it were profaned, and our chil¬ 
dren have suffered contumely, and our priests are burnt, and our Levites gone 
into captivity, and our virgins are defiled, our wives ravished, our just men car¬ 
ried away, our little ones lost entirely, our young men slaves, and our strong be¬ 
come weak.—Esdras, x. 20-23. 

This is the ruin of Jerusalem.—ibid. x. 48; so xii. 44, 48 ; xiv. 32. 


Now comes the resemblance of Esdras, x. 27, 54 (ix. 24) to Rev. 
xxi. 10 ; xxii. 6. It consists in this chiefly that each writer has 
his New Jerusalem in the heavens, each prophesies the End of 
the world and vengeance upon Rome. The twelve wings of the 
Eagle are 12 Caesars, the last of the twelve being Trajan. The 
Lion is the Lion of Judah, the Anointed, and Coming Mes¬ 
siah ! For all this Messianic expectation the fall of the Holy 
City is responsible. And the date of Esdras IV is in the reign 
of the 13th Caesar (Esdr. xi. 19), who is the 13th, beginning 
with Julius Caesar. Adrian began to reign in 117 ; so that we 
have from 117 to 130, in which troublesome period we have to 
locate the author of the Fourth Book of Esdras. In chapter 
xiii. 11, 26-37, 49, the Man whose countenance made all things 
tremble destroys all his opponents. He stands on a moun¬ 
tain that he made of rock, and fire from his mouth, lips and 
tongue consumes them. It is the Son of God mentioned in 
Daniel, viii. 13. The verses 23, 26 resemble Matthew, xxiv. 
14, 16, 22. There appears to be an intimate Ebionite connec¬ 
tion between Matthew, xxiv., the Fourth Esdras, and the 
Book of Revelation. It shows Matthew to be the last of the 
three. 

As befitted the character of the Ebionite Messiah, Mat¬ 
thew seems to have almost had in view only the Children of 
Israel in chapter x. 6, 16. The 12 disciples like the 12 angels 
in Rev. xxi. 12, 14, typify the 12 tribes of Israel (Iaqab), and 
the 12 shall sit in the Messianic Kingdom on 12 thrones judg¬ 
ing the 12 tribes of Israel.—Mat. xix. 28; Luke, xxii. 30; Su 
pern. Rel. III. 129. And in the Apokalypse, xxi. 14 we find 


536 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the same Judaist traces. 1 “Everywhere in the Epistles of 
Paul and in the acts of the Apostles we find traces of an op¬ 
position between the Jew and the Gentile, the circumcision 
and the uncircumcision. The author of ‘ Supernatural Reli¬ 
gion ” considers that there must have been within the Church 
itself a Jewish party urging upon the members of the Church 
the performance of a rite repulsive in itself, if not as necessary 
to salvation, at any rate as a counsel of perfection, seeking to 
make them in Jewish language not merely proselytes of the 
gate, but proselytes of righteousness.”—Supern. Rel. III. 313. 
Now this position indicates that Pauline Christians in Asia 
were in a later stage of Christianity,—later than the Judaic 
(Ebionite) form thereof.—ibid. III. 315, 316. The Ebionites 
denied that Paul was a Jew. (—Epiplianius; in III. 316). 
There was a concerted and continuous opposition to him. 2 — 
ibid. III. 314; Galatians, ii. 6-21. Paul, being of Tarsus, was 
likely to be more Gentile than Jew, more of a Gentile than of 
a Jew Christian.—Apok. iii. 9. The author of the Apokalypse, 
being a Judaist, and yet writing to Asian-Greek Churches, and 
being known to Justin Martyr as John merely, we are thus 
introduced to the Greek, Ephesian, or Western phases of Chris- 
tianism represented in the Pauline Epistles. The date of the 
Apokalypse which we have assigned to it, within a.d. 125 and 
135, is not late enough to admit of the author of 1 Corinthians, 
ii. 10 being mocked or satirised in Rev. ii. 24. He was said to 
have been the child of Gentile parents. The Book of Acts is 
supposed to misrepresent the very status of uncircumcision we 
have just pointed to. Justin Martyr, following both the Pau¬ 
line Epistles and the John of the Apokalypse, knows the last 
but takes no notice of Paul. 3 The author of Revelation was 

1 See Romans, xv. 8, 10; Isa. xi. 10. With all that Isaiah says against the idols, 
Paul (as a Gentile) goes against the Judaist prejudices in regard to eating food offered 
to idols. This points to a later period of Christianism at Antioch and among the Gen¬ 
tiles of Asia. 

The Alogians (Epiphanius, de Haeres. 51) held that the Church at Thyatira was 
not yet founded in the first century; and Epiphanius admits the fact.—Gibbon, I. 
chap. xv. p. 441, note 154. This puts the Apokalypse late, as well as the Churches of 
Asia Minor.—Rev. ii. 18, 24. Paul’s mention of the crucifixion is therefore late. 
Daniel does not speak of crucifixion ; but Paul and Justin do. 

2 Jowett, Epistles of St. Paul, i. 332 f. is quoted in Supernat. Relig. III. 313 
note. 

3 Justin (contra Trypho) p. 54 is very severe against those who confess ‘Iesu Cruci¬ 
fied’ as Lord and Christ, but do not teach his doctrines,—meaning Paulinists or Paul 
himself. Justin forbids eating things offered to idols, idolatrous sacrifices.—p. 54. 


THE NAZARENES. 


537 


Judaist.—Rev. vii. 4-8 ; xiv. 1, 8; xvi. 12, 19 ; xviii. 10, 11, 19. 
Both John and Justin were Logos-Cliristians ; Justin was born 
in Samaria, but yet he does not favor the side of circumci¬ 
sion, which he deems unnecessary, as Abrahm was uncircum¬ 
cised. 

He that has not given up all that he hath cannot be my 
disciple. 1 The celebrated Nikolas evidently took this doctrine 
to mean that he must, on the principle just announced, re¬ 
nounce the exclusive possession of his wife. No wonder the 
Eastern Ascetics got excited: “ Christus denies that one is his 
disciple whom he has seen possessing anything, and that one 
(eum) who does not give us all his possessions.”—Origen. 
“ Thou liatest the actions of the Nikolaitans, which I too 
hate.”—Rev. ii. 6. The Awakened call patience the highest 
penance, long-suffering the highest nirvana; for he is not an 
anchorite who strikes others, he is not an ascetic who insults 
others! Not to blame, not to strike, to live restrained under 
the law, 2 to be moderate in eating, to sleep and eat alone.—Bud- 
ha’s»Dhammapada, 184, 185 ; Max Muller, Science of Rel. 245. 
Woe to him that strikes a brahmana, more woe to him who 
flies at his aggressor.—Budha’s Dhammapada, 389. Resist not 
evil; but whoever shall hit thee a rap on the right jawbone, 
turn to him the other also. . . . Love your enemies.—Matthew, 
v. 39, 44. He who, leaving all longings, travels about without 
a home, in whom all covetousness is extinct, him I call indeed 
a brahmana. He who fosters no desire for this world or for 
the next, has no inclinations, and is unshackled, him I call a 
brahmana. Who has traversed this mazy, impervious world 
and its vanity, who is through and has reached the other 
shore . . . him I call indeed a brahmana.—Budha’s Dhamma¬ 
pada, 410-416. Max Muller. We see here that self-denial in 
India apparently preceded self-denial on the Jordan. 3 

1 Luke, xiv. 33. 

2 He is not a Striker. 

3 Matthew, xvi. 24 ; Luke, ix. 23 ; Matth. vi. 19, 20. The result of the philosophy 
of spirit and matter was, first, Eastern Monachism, second, Palestine Monachism and 
Essenism, third Christian self-denial, Iessaean Nazoria ; and Christian monks. Bas- 
nage, Hist, des Juifs, II. c. 20-23, has demonstrated in spite of Eusebius, II. 17 that 
the Therapeutae were neither Christians nor monks.—Gibbon, xv. p. 443. Basnage 
proved that the account of them was composed as early as the time of Augustus.—ibid, 
p. 443. In Colossians, iii. 5, 12, 13, we find Iessaianism (Essenism). The Ebionites 
thought all the Epistles of the Apostle Paul ought to be rejected, calling him an apos¬ 
tate from the Law, and using only the Gospel according to the Hebrews.—Supernat. 


538 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


As Philo speaks of the Logos, the Oldest Angel, and is not 
inclined to be Messianic, while the Prophets and psalms are 
Messianic (recognising a Euler, an Anointed king to come, and 
Justin Martyr enhances and overestimates the evidences in the 
Prophets in favor of his own conception of a Logos-Christos 
(who is, in his preaching, the Iesu Christos), and as the Tar- 
gums of Onkelos and Ben Usiel are decidedly for the Memra, 
we are confronted with a conflux of varying conceptions from 
John the Baptist (and his Aeons V) down until after the De¬ 
struction of Jerusalem (c. 70) and the first use of the name 
Christian at Antioch to designate the party previously known 
under the names Baptists and Jordan Nazoria. Within this 
conflux of ideas the Babylonian theory of the Father and Son 
(Mithra) has to be included, Daniel, iv. 34; vii. 13, 14, and the 
text Micah, v. 2. “The references to the risen Christ are 
slight in our early literature ; and an emphasis is not laid upon 
the fact equal to that laid mpon the Cross and the sufferings. 
As we have seen, there is no organic connection between the 
life of the believer and the resurrection of Christ; but He is 
firsts fruits of the general resurrection by logical consequence 
from that belief. The belief itself appears to have come from 
Persian Mazdeism more than from any other source ; 1 even as 
the Messianic ideas in the Talmud are strongly coloured by 
Persian influences. The idea of a Messiah, or Anointed of 
Jehovah, is in the psalms ; but not the idea of a risen Messiah. 
Indeed the passages in the Old Testament, which in any sense 
contemplate a future revival, are so few and slight that the 
Pharisees in conflict with the Sadducees were constrained to 
resort to general analogies in defence of the belief. 2 Mithra 
is Mediator between Light and Darkness ; and„a Sunrise from 
on high to give light to those sitting in darkness and the 
shade of death.—Luke, i. 78, 79. “ The Great Light of Mithra.” 

Rel. I. 423. It is clear from the words of the Apostle in 2 Thessalonians, ii. 2, iii. 17 that 
his epistles were falsified, and, setting aside some of those which bear his name in our 
Canon, spurious Epistles were long ascribed to him, such as the Epistle to the Laodi- 
ceans, and a third Epistle to the Corinthians.—ibid. II. 169. There is in 2 Thess. ii. 
2, 3, as in Rev. xxii. 20, mention of the Second Coming of Christ. Only, the author of 
the last work expects it sooner than Paul does, apparently. Colossians, iii. is as 
Paulinist as Galatians is. 

1 Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, 1877. pp. 226, 328. 

2 Ant. Mater, 210 ; Wuensche, Neue Beitriige, 258. The Persians believed that 
men should live again and be immortal. Then should the dead arise.—Antiqua Mater, 
210. Comp. Matthew, xxvii. 52. 


THE NAZARENES. 


539 


Tlie Light of the world. Comp. John, Yin. 12; ix. 5; vii. 40 ; 
i. 1, 4, 5. 

Heresies among yon.—1 Cor. xi. 19. How could there be 
any new ones in Christianism within 30 years of a.d. 33 ? Cle¬ 
mens Alexandrinus uses the letters of Clemens Romanus, of 
Barnabas (whom he calls “ Apostles ”), the Shepherd of Her¬ 
nias, the Sibylline (Verses), the Books of Hystaspes. Hence in 
a.d. 220 the canon of the New Testament was not yet closed. 1 
From a.d. 80-160 was the transition period of Messianism. 
The latest phase always effaces the earlier landmarks. The 
writer of the Gospel of Luke, ix. 53, x. 31-33, attests the hatred 
existing between the Jews and the Nazorians (Ebionim), for 
he holds priest and leuite up to condemnation in the most 
pointed manner, at the same time that he praises the virtue 
of a Samaritan ! The eclectic Matthew, x. 5, 6 does not favor 
the Samaritans. The Gospel writer is more bitter against the 
Samaritans than Acts, viii. But Simon himself was baptized, 
indicating that earlier the two wings of the gnosis were nearer 
together than later in the time of the Clementine Homilies. 
—Acts, viii. 13. Antiqua Mater holds that Christianism came 
from the gnosis. 

The fact that Serapion in the third century allowed the 
Gospel of Peter to be used in the church of Rhossus 2 shows 
at the same time the consideration in which it was held, and 
the incompleteness of the Canonical position of the New Tes¬ 
tament writings. The whole history of the Canon and of Chris¬ 
tian literature in the second and third centuries displays the 
most deplorable carelessness and want of critical judgment on 
the part of the Fathers. Whatever was considered as con¬ 
ducive to Christian edification was blindly adopted by them, 
and a vast number of works were launched into circulation 
and falsely ascribed to Apostles and others likely to secure for 
them greater consideration. Such pious fraud was rarely sus¬ 
pected, still more rarely detected in the early ages of Christi¬ 
anity, and several of such pseudographs have secured a place 
in our New Testament. 3 

“ Man erlebte eben was man glaubte und erleben wollte.”—Hausrath. 4 

He is nigh, at the doors.—Matthew, xxiv. 33. 

1 Scholten, p. 121. 

2 Eusebius, H. E. vi. 12. 

3 Supern. Religion, II. 167, 169. ed. 5th London. 

4 Loman, Theol. Tijdschr. xx. 109. in 1886. 


540 


TEE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Ends of the Times are come unto us!—1 Corinth, x. 11. 

The last days ! —James, v. 3. The final days ! 

It seems to them that the Kingdom of the God is about to appear at once.— 
Luke, 1 xix. 11. See Rev. xiv. 14 ; xxii. 6, 7, 20. Compare Matthew, xiii. 49. 

The Coming One will come, and will not tarry.—Hebrews, x. 37. 

The End of all is near.—1 Peter, iv. 7. 

The doctrine of the Logos and of the Preexistence of Jesus 
was enunciated long before the composition of the fourth gos¬ 
pel.—Sup. Eel. II. 255. But evidently the Apokalypse was 
not as early as a.d. 69. Eenan himself (lAntechrist, p. 405) 
allows that part of the apokalyptic vision can be retrospective ; 
and the prophetic style of writing history seems to have been in 
vogue among the prior writers of Jewish Prophetical Books as 
well as in this case. Eevelation, xiv. 15, expects the destruc¬ 
tion of the Babel Eome ; but the time of the evacuation of 
Jerusalem by the troops of Cestius Gallus (a.d. 65) was too 
early for the Churches of Asia to have been formed (Eev. i. 11; 
xxii. 16) and for the Jewish Messianism and the New Jeru¬ 
salem exhibited in the Apokalypse. Josephus and Justus of 
Tiberias mention no Christians gathered for the defense of 
Jerusalem. The Apokalypse speaks of the Logos ! It is not 
to be readily admitted that an Ebionite (as the author was,— 
Eev. ii. 9; vii. 4; xii. 6, 17; xx. 4; xxi. 12; xxii. 15, 16) be¬ 
lieved Iesous to be the Logos before a.d. 135. Philo Judaeus 
indeed speaks of the Logos, and Mithra in Babylon was the 
Logos. In the time of Adrian there was a tremendous excite¬ 
ment among the Jews in the 2nd century just before Bar Co- 
cheba’s rebellion,—when Ebionite Messianists were probably 
to be found. Nabatheans, Idumeans, Galileans, Zealots, Sikarii, 
Bobbers 2 were enumerated among those united in the year 69 
in defense of Jerusalem, but not a single Christian, according 
to Eenan (l’Antechr. 237). Where then was the author of the 
Apokalypse, with his * White Horse * (of Mithra) and £ the 
Logos of the God ’ (Eev. xix. 11-14) whom he connects with 
Iesous (xx. 4) ? It is safer to date the Apokalypse in the 
2nd century, for the Seven Caesars and ten generals (seven 
heads and ten horns.—Eev. xvii.) were as likely to have been 


1 Luke, xxi. 20, 31, 32. History, conveyed in the style and form of prophecy. 

2 Of the Robbers crucified by Felix and of those arrested for participation that he 
punished, the number was endless.—Josephus, Wars, II. xiii. 2; John, xvii. 40 says 
Iesous Bar Abba was “ a Robber.” 


THE NAZARENES. 


541 


known to an Ebionite Judaist (as well instructed as the John 
of the Apocalypse) in the second century as to M. Benan, or 
any other modern writer. The information was still within 
reach. But if the Apokalyptist wrote before Titus destroyed 
Jerusalem and when this John was foretelling Borne’s destruc¬ 
tion, what he should be doing with a New Jerusalem when he 
had the Old one still safe is itself a mystery! The expression 
New Jerusalem implies the Holy City’s fall before the writer 
wrote! With all their friends and neighbors there, from 
Galilee to Nabathea, Josephus did not see any Christians. He 
mentions none. Eleazar was there in arms. Messianists were 
there. The Christians were nowhere! There is no evidence 
that they went to Pella at that time, 1 before Jerusalem was 
taken. 

Come out of her, 2 my people, that ye may not share in her sins nor partake 
of the blows she gets ; for her sins have been glued up to the heaven and the 
God remembered the wrongs she did. Return to her what she delivered.— 
Rev. xviii. 4-6. 

These words might have been written after Nero’s death as 
well as before. They suit Bar Cocheba’s time. The Apoka- 
lypse, in this chapter, has been regarded as written not long 
before the years 130-138. 

The unmanifested God is an abstraction. He is from all 
eternity the Ancient of the Hays, the Occult of the concealed. 
He is the no thing, the Ain, the Ain Soph, the All, and nothing 
is beside him. He manifests himself by his wisdom and was 
regarded as the Cause of Causes. Ain Soph manifests himself 
first in a primal principle, Macrocosm, called Son of God or 
the primitive Man (Adam Kadmon) the human figure in Ezekiel 
(Gen. i. 26 ; Ezekiel, i. 26). From this Adam Kadmon (Colos- 
sians, i. 15, 16) the creation emanated in four degrees or worlds 
which the Kabalists call Azilah, Bariah, Yezirah, Asiah. In 
the world Azilah we find the operative qualities of the Adam 
Kadmon, powers and intelligences. From Azilah comes the 
emanation Beriah which contains spirits. It is the commence¬ 
ment of creation. The third world emanating from these 
spiritual essences is named Yezirah, contains angels, incorpo- 

1 It is highly probable that the Ebionites first became an organised body or sect at 
Pella on the eastern side of the Jordan to which place they went on the breaking out 
of the Roman-Jewish war at the time of Hadrian.—Library of Univ. Knowledge, V. 236. 

2 Babylon, Rome. 


542 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


real beings, but individuals, surrounded with a luminous en¬ 
velopment. The last emanation is the world of fabrication 
called Asiah ; it is the world of matter, the world in which we 
live and perish, the world of evil, of appearance and deceit, 
changing eternally the forms. The highest glory which the 
prophet exhibits is Marah Adam, the vision of the Human 
Form regarded as the World of Emanation (Ausfluss). In all 
this the spirit is intermingled among the cliioth or cherubim. 
The doctrine that the world is all unreal, only the spirit is real, 
certainly is Hindu kabalah. It is the Hindu philosophy. 
Further, the spirit is identical with Adam Kadmon (Gen. i. 
2-4; Coloss. i. 15, 16; Ezekiel, i. 4, 12, 20; viii. 2, 3. Adam 
Kadmon is the Highest Crown, he is prior to all Aziluth, an¬ 
tecedent to it. From this, Matthew derives the expression 
“ King ” in Matthew, xxv. 34. Philo, On Dreams, I. 25 has the 
Archangel Lord ; and in de Profugis, 18, 19, mentions the Gov¬ 
ernors Logos (Word) and his Creative and Kingly Power : in 
Quaest et Solut. II. 75, he mentions the Kingly Power again. 
Thus the Philonian gnosis precedes the entire New Testament 
gnosis and kabalah. Iesu (according to Ernst von Bunsen, 
Symbol d. kreuzes, 8) was called the Anointed because he was 
the organ of the divine spirit. The King receives his power 
direct from God. He is connected with the Sun and Cross in 
Syria and Egypt.—ibid. 9-17. Still, the Kabalist idea is as 
early as any. 

This Man of the Naaseni, Sethiani, and Peratae in the 
second century of our era belongs to the Jewish Gnosis in 
Ezekiel, i. 26 f., Genesis, i. 4, ii. 7, 21-23, Exodus, iii. 14, Eze¬ 
kiel, viii. 2, 4, John, i. 1-4, Clementine Homily, iii. 17, 20. 
The Light of the Anointed is protended down until it is at last 
revealed in flesh in the Jewish Messiah, who had come and 
was slain. Here we have the thread of the primitive Christian 
dogma protended out from the Jewish gnosis. The Man is 
masculine-feminine (—Hippolytus, V. 138), the female is Eua 
(in the Greek Mysteries) the Mother of every living thing 
(—Gen. iii. 20), the Aphrodite of the Greek Mysteries. For 
the Samothracians in their Mysteries hand down (that) Adam 
as the Archanthropos, the primal Man. Attis is called Child 
of Saturn, or of Blessed Zeus, or of Rhea. His names are 
Adonis, Osiris, heavenly horn of Men (Lunus), Sophia (Wis¬ 
dom.—1 Cor. i. 24), Adamna (in Samothrakian Mysteries), the 


THE NAZARENES. 


543 


multiform Attis.—Hippolytus, V. 8, 9, 109, 119 (Miller, 152, 
168) Duncker et Schneidewin. The Logos is the Son of the 
Man. —John, i. 1. Thus the Jew of the Diaspora had the alter¬ 
native of some Messiah, or the Logos Anointed. He could 
preach either one or both. If we read for Iessaeans Iesu we 
then shall in Matthew v. and vi. have the Essaean (Iessene, 
Essene) dogmas; for the Iessaeans cultivated a remarkable 
piety towards the God, and unusual love towards the members 
of their order. 

The Jews had many Chaldean and gnostic notions. They 
had got hold of the theory of the Monad from the unit, the 
Logos as the Son of God (—Justin, Apologia, finis, p. 160,161), 
Mithra and Apostolos, Son of the Man (see Daniel, vii. 14) and 
the Gnosis. The Book of Acts (a.d. 180 ?) aims to show that 
Peter and Paul were in perfect unison, and in so doing contra¬ 
dicts the Epistles of “ Paul.” Another consideration is that 
“ Paul ” must have written at or about a time when martyrs 
and martyrdom were to be had, otherwise he would not have 
endeavored so strongly to lay his claims before the Christians 
of Corinth (2 Cor. xi. xii.). This is another reason for putting 
the four Pauline Epistles late. Again, Barcocliebas rose in 
rebellion about a.d. 132, and failed a.d. 134. The Jew of 
Tarsus was practical enough to say decidedly, after a glance at 
Rev. xxi. 2, 10, 11, 23: 

These are the two Covenants, one indeed from Mt. Sina—begetting into 
servitude—which is Agar, 1 for the Sina is a mountain in Arabia, and corresponds 
to Jerusalem as she is now, for she is a slave with her children. But the Je¬ 
rusalem on high is free, who is Mother of us ! For it is written : 2 Rejoice thou 
barren Woman that barest not, Break out and cry aloud, O Thou that hast not 
the pains of child-bearing, for many more are the children of the Deserted than 
of her that has the husband !—Galat. iv. 24-28. 

After thus improving Isaiah’s conception (Isa. liv. 1) we cannot 
doubt that the “ Paul ” wrote after the Destruction of Jeru- 
salem and quoted the Apokalypse. 3 For no Jew was allowed 
by Hadrian to live there! But “ Paul ” used the Christian 
faith in Iesous in order to superpose upon it a series of ser¬ 
mons derived, partly at least, from Hebrew spiritualism. He 

1 Compare the name Kharu. k = g = ch. Ha Karu, Hagareni. 

2 yeypanrat ydp. Justin, Trypho, p. 125, uses graphe to signify Hebrew Scripture, 
Isaiah, lxv. 9-12. 

3 Romans, xi. 11, 12, 15, mentions Israel’s fall. 


544 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


preaches the doctrine of spirit and matter in Romans, vii. 14; 
viii. 5. He that sows from the Spirit into the spirit shall gather 
everlasting life.—Galatians, vi. 3. The Jewish scholar, Joel, 
had remarked, without questioning the current view about Paul, 
that we do not hear of him until the time of Markion, A.D. 159- 
170, who was known to Justin Martyr, a.d. 160-170. The Hel¬ 
lenic philosophy through Philo and the Gnostics streamed in 
upon the mind of the educated world. The historical Gnostics 
taught from before Kerinthus down to Markion and his follow¬ 
ers through the whole of the 2nd century. Markion’s heresy 
was known in Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Syria and Cyprus. At 
the close of the reign of Trajan the Antinomian and Anti- 
tempelian movement breaks out. Of this movement Paul is 
the last ideal expression. We can find no proof of his his¬ 
toric reality. If the mere name of ‘ Paul ’ in superscriptions 
and salutations, be, as Tertullian argues, no evidence of the 
existence of such an apostle, then it will be difficult to find sat ¬ 
isfactory evidence of the fact elsewhere. The only fact we can 
ascertain is that the Markionites produced ten epistles as 
apostolic in their sense. One of the strongest pieces of nega¬ 
tive evidence that the Paul who has so long captivated our ad¬ 
miration and love is not historical, positively, that he is the 
product, like all similar figures, of religious passion and imag¬ 
ination, is that Lucian, whose glance embraced the great seats 
of supposed Pauline activity, betrays no knowledge of any 
such vigorous personality as having left his mark upon the 
Christian communities from a century before his time. 1 Lucian 
muses and moralises over the human appetite for lies. 2 We 
cannot find Paul in Justin, unless we determine beforehand 
that he must be there. But we do find Markion with whom 
Paul is connected, for the Markion enumerates Paul’s epistles, 
nearly all of them. 3 We have Tertullian’s testimony to Mark- 
ion’s sanctity. The practice of the noblest teachers corre¬ 
sponded to their -preaching. Paul is the apostle of the Gnos¬ 
tics and of Protestants. But he never lived and can never die. 4 
This is the opinion of the author of “ Antiqua Mater.” 

1 Antiqua Mater, 240, 252-254. 

2 ibid. 254. 

3 Distinguishing what Tertullian says from what he knows , he knows certain epistles 
ascribed to Paul, which he ventures not to reject, and which give color to Markionite 
views.—Antiqua Mater, 236. 

4 ibid. 287. 


THE NAZARENES. 


545 


Starting with Adamas, the Gnostic Naaseni divide him in 
three parts, mental, spiritual, and earthy; and consider the 
perception of him to be the beginning of the cognition of God, 
when they say thus : The beginning of perfection is the cogni¬ 
tion of man, but the cognition of God is absolute perfection. 
But these all, the rational, the psychical, and the earthy, go 
forth and come together into One Man, Iesous the one born of 
Maria : and these three men (anthropoi) spoke together at the 
same time each from his own personal nature to his own. Of 
the universals there are three sorts, angelic, psychical, earthy ; 
and three congregations (ekklesiai), angelic, psychic, earthy ; 
their names, elect, called, captive. These are the heads of very 
many discourses which James the Lord’s brother delivered to 
Mariamna. In order then that the wicked shall not tell lies 
against Mariamna or James or the Saviour himself let us come 
to the Mysteries (from which they have the myth), if you like, 
to the foreign and the Greek, and let us see how these collect¬ 
ing together the hidden and undivulged Mysteries of all the 
nations telling lies against the Christ, deceive those that do 
not know these Mysteries of the Gentiles. For since the foun¬ 
dation of their argument is the Man Adamas and they say that 
it is written concerning Him : ‘ Who shall describe his birth ? ’ 
learn how taking in part from the Gentiles the undiscovered 
and unpublished generation of the man they put it on the 
Anointed. After Hippolytus has quoted from the various 
Mysteries regarding the first Man, he refers to Oannes among 
the Assyrians and the Adam among the Chaldeans. He then 
says that they seek the soul’s origin not from the Scriptures, 
but from the Initiated in the Mysteries. And then the Naa¬ 
seni flee to the initiations of the Assyrians, taking into consid¬ 
eration the division of the man in three parts ; for the Assy¬ 
rians first regard the soul as tripartite and one. For every 
sort of soul has different desires. Every nature of heavenly 
beings, or those on earth, or of those in the regions under 
earth, desires life (soul). And the Assyrians (Syrians) call 
this very thing Adonis or Endumion. And when it is called 
Adonis, Venus loves and desires the life of this Name. Venus 
is Generation, as they think. But when the Persephone and 
the Kora is in love with the Adonis, the life, a certain thing 
about to perish, is separated from Venus. And so Hippoly¬ 
tus continues on into the Mysteries of Attis. The reason we 
35 


546 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


have quoted so much from Hippolytus 1 is that he confirms 
other evidences that show how intimately connected with the 
doctrines of the Initiated in the Mysteries was the origin of 
Christianism in the first and second centuries of our era. It 
is not necessary to penetrate further into the Mysteries than 
the rites of Adonis or the Mystery of Adam, to be en rapport 
with the original sources of Christianism and its Mysteries. 
The death of the Mourned Adonis the Anointed Light of the 
world, the death of Osiris in the Osirian Mysteries and his 
Resurrection, were probably regarded as real events instead of 
symbols in the Mysteries of Light and Darkness. At any rate, 
they suggest similar alternations of hope, despair, and resur¬ 
rection in later Mysteries. Rhodes seems to have been con¬ 
nected in its erane with the Syrian Mysteries. 

The first Man Adam became a living soul, the last Adam a spirit that makes 
to live ! But the pneumatic was not first, hut the psychical; after that came the 
pneumatic. The first Man was of the earth, earthy, the Second, from heaven. 
As the earthy one so are the earthly, and as the one in the heaven so too those 
in the heaven ; and so as we have worn the image of the earthly one, we shall 
carry the likeness of the heavenly.—1 Cor. xv. 45. 

The three Greek words here in “ Paul,” pneumatikos, choikos, 
and psuchikos recall the same words, spiritual, psychical and 
earthy, among the Naaseni in Palestine; so that 44 Paul ” had 
a precedent for his doctrine among the Jews, and his pneuma 
(spirit) is evidently the spirit of the anointing. 4 That which 
has preceded them is also what has produced them.’ 

But we chatter Wisdom in the perfected . . . hut we speak wisdom in 
mystery, the hidden, which the God ordained before the Ages unto Our glory ; 
which none of the rulers of this aeon knew.—2 Cor. ii. 6-8. 

It would appear from 1 Cor. xv. 45 that the Paulinist had 
the idea of Adam-Christ, such as it is in the Clementine Homi¬ 
lies. 44 In these words, 2 in which Paul has spoken, is contained 
all their hidden and unspeakable mystery of the blessed de¬ 
light, for the Evangel of Baptism is no other, according to 
them, than introducing into unfading pleasure him who is 
baptised, according to them, in living water and anointed 
with ineffable chrism. They say that the mysteries not of the 

1 Hippolytus, a.d. 211-220, We must keep an eye upon his theological prejudices 
as bishop of Rome. 

2 Romans, i. 27. 


T1IE NAZARENES. 


547 


Assyrians only but of the Phrygians besides are proofs of 
what they say concerning the blessed at once hidden and re¬ 
vealed nature of what has been, are, and will be yet, which he 
calls the, within man, sought for Kingdom of the heavens, 
concerning which they deliver distinctly, in the Evangel in¬ 
scribed after Thomas, saying thus : Who seeks will find me in 
little children of seven years, for there being hidden in the 
14th Period 1 1 am made manifest. But this is not Christ’s, 
but it is Hippokrates that says: A boy of seven years is half 
of a man; hence those placing the primitive nature of all 
things in a primitive sperma, paying attention to the Hippo- 
kratic dictum that a child of seven years is half a man, say 
that He is revealed in the fourteen years according to Thomas. 
This is to them ineffable doctrine and belongs to the mysteries. 
They say, therefore, that the Egyptians having been more 
ancient than all men after the Phrygians and who are admit¬ 
ted to have both imiiarted, first, initiations and mysteries of 
all Gods and to have revealed “Ideas” and “Powers” to all 
other men, hold the mysteries of Isis sacred and venerable and 
not to be betrayed to the uninitiated; but these are nothing 
else than Osiris’s emblem carried off and searched after by Her 
dressed with seven skirts on and in black. But they call 
Osiris water. But Nature seven-skirted, having around her¬ 
self and having been robed in Seven Aitlierial dresses (for so 
they allegorically name the Wandering Stars, calling them 
Aithereal) is exhibited by them as the transformed generation 
and creation metamorphosed by the ineffable, the unimaged, 
unconceived and amorphous.” 2 Here we see Naasene Gnosis, 
which professed the doctrines of the Greek philosophers and 
the mysteries,—whence starting, according to Hippolytus , they 
made heresies. 3 And Lenormant states that Isis, when she 
lamented in the Mourning for Osiris, and Venus, when she 
wept for Adonis, is covered with seven habiliments, nature 
being adorned with seven habits, clothed in seven ethereal 
stolas. 4 


1 A lu>p; 

2 Hippolytus, v. 7. p. 142. 

3 ibid. p. 131. 

4 The orbits of the Seven Planets.—Lenormant, il mito, p. 23. The Jews keep Sa¬ 
turn’s day. Philo, de profugis, 18, gives five Powers to the Logos, one of them the 
Creative Power through whom the Maker created the kosmos by a word. John, i. 3, 
and Colossians, i. 16 ascribe the creation of the world to the Logos whom Philo (like 


548 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Why Plato should know more than others about the consti¬ 
tution of this world is not clear, but in Plato the Divinity and 
Matter eternally coexist. Matters is moulded by the Supreme 
Artificer after the Ideas. Matter is an eternal and infinite 
principle and never suffers annihilation. He calls it the re¬ 
ceptacle of forms, by whose union with matter the universe 
becomes perceptible to the senses. He held that in Matter 
there is a blind, refractory force the source of disorder and de¬ 
formity, the cause of all the imperfection that appears in the 
works of God, and the origin of evil. He appears to have 
thought that Matter resists the will of the Supreme Artificer. 
Hence the mixture of good and evil in the world. When the 
orientals got hold of Plato, they at once repeated : There was 
God and Matter, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, utterly 
adverse one to the other. Then they fell back on their doc¬ 
trine of the inactivity of the primal entity, that he was Mind 
(Logos) in a state of rest, that he did not touch matter person¬ 
ally, but that some intermediate Angel or Logos did that, or 
that the Oldest Angel, the Great Power, did the work as the 
Demiourgos (Maker), or that Seven Angels created the world. 
Here we connect immediately with Saturninus, Oualentinus, 
and Markion (whose Creator, the God of the Jews 1 was en¬ 
thralled in Matter, and was the opposite to the true God). Plato 
and Philo probably had more weight at Antioch than any evi¬ 
dence connected with Iesu, else how came Markion to adopt a 
Christos purely ideal and pure spirit, and entirely severed 
from the flesh % Psalms ii. and lxxxix. mention an anointed 
king of Dauid’s line ; but a Jewish Messiah was Logos.—Dan. 
vii. 13, 14, Rev. xix. 11, 13. Clemens Alexandrinus found be¬ 
tween the Markionite gnosis and that of the Alexandrian 
School sure points of contact, positive motives to mutual 
approximation existing, and that this relative relationship 
probably in the closest manner was connected with the sym¬ 
pathy of both for the Paulus of the ten Epistles. The most 

Colossians) calls the Image of the Invisible God. Thus the New Testament follows 
the Philonian gnosis. Philo gives its philosophy, its raison d’etre. Philo, in cap. 19, 
however, makes the Logos the Charioteer of the Powers. Then he gives us the Logos, 
the Creative Power, and the Kingly Power. 

1 The Church laid down the doctrine that the God was in Jewish history and re¬ 
vealed in the Hebrew Bible. While there is in Genesis a reference to a good deal of 
Arabian relations, there is also there a reference to a perished mythology in the Jacob 
legends. 


THE NAZARENES. 


549 


immediate cause of agreement seems to lie in tlie application 
of tlie Old Testament allegorism (which was in vogue in the 
Alexandrian School from antiquity down), favored by Paulus 
canonicus, and for the Markionites (in their opposition to the 
Jewish practices) among the Christians 1 was welcome. If one 
notices the unmistakable fact that the theology of Paulus 
canonicus has an Alexandrian tint, if we keep in view how 
small was the positive influence which the Alexandrian writers 
exerted on the way the Palestine theologians considered the 
scripture, if we reflect that the Alexandrine theology, as it is 
represented by Philo, did not take up the Messianic expecta¬ 
tions into the circle of their speculation, if one further remarks 
that the oldest document of the Christian gnosis, whose date 
and Alexandrian origin is completely proved, the Epistle of 
Barnabas, which was written under Hadrian 2 first becomes 
intelligible for us when we place it before Paulus canonicus, 
then it seems that there is some ground for assuming that the 
combination of all these facts is simplified by the throwing out 

1 The Christians were divided into sects.—1 Cor. xi. 18, 19-22 ; Justin, Trypho, p. 
89. If Justin p. 105 could refer to Peter and the sons of Zebedee why should not the 
“ Paul ” of Galatians be able to do the same ? 

2 Volter considers the original Epistle of Barnabas to have been written under 
Nerva (96-98), and he finds the Chief Epistles of Paul used in it, especially that to the 
Ephesians, which itself again presupposes the Hauptbriefe (the first four Epistles).- - 
Volter, p. 268. Neither the authenticity of 1 Galatians’ nor its early date can be proved 
from Irenaeus, Clemens Alex., and Tertullian ; and if not from them, not at all.— 
Ant. Mater, 238. We can find no proof of his historic reality.—ibid. 240. Lucian, 
whose glance embraced the great seats of supposed Pauline activity, betrays no knowl¬ 
edge of any such vigorous personality as having left his mark upon the Christian com¬ 
munities from a century before his time.—ibid. 254. Who were the first Christians ? 
The Gnostics, who from about the beginning to the middle of the second century bore 
and propagated the Christian name. It was they who were the real depositaries of the 
evangelical tradition ; it is to them that we owe the statement concerning the 15th year 
of Tiberius and the descent of Jesus at Capernaum.—ibid. 282, 283. Prior to the or¬ 
thodox Christianity of Justin and the Fathers there was a Hellenic, Gnostic, Gentile 
Christianity. In the system of Basileides, Christ, so far from being the Messias of 
the Jews, was the firstborn Nous (Mind) of the unbegotten Father, and his mission 
was to deliver the faithful from subjection to the ruling powers of this world. To be¬ 
lieve in ‘ the crucified one ’ was still to be under the dominion of those powers. The 
Nous did not endure to be crucified.—Antiqua Mater, 218, 260. The Pauline writer 
preaches Christ crucified ! Of course, for the Roman Church (through Pauline Epis¬ 
tles) to counter Basileides in this way renders the Pauline writer (1 Cor. i. 23 ; Gal. ii. 
20) posterior to Basileides. If the author of the Clementines had heard of Paulus apos¬ 
tolus he disdains to own him, and deliberately identified him with Simon Magus. If he 
had not heard of Paulus, then we must conclude that this name is of quite late origin. 

_Ant. Mater, 240, 241. Acts, ix. 27 shows that “ Paul ” was represented as later 

than the Twelve.—Tertullian, adv. Markion, I. chap. 20; V. chap. 1; Galat. i. 18. 


550 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of the now generally accepted hypothesis that we have in our 
canon Epistles from the time and from the hand of Paul his- 
toricus (the Paul of history). The opposition to the canonisa¬ 
tion of the Pauline Epistles proceeded not alone from the Jew- 
christian party, that is, the Old-Christian salvation people, but 
also, on account of wholly other motives, from the circle of the 
Ebionites allied with Markion. If we bring this fact in con¬ 
nection on the one side with the known desire of the Old-Cath¬ 
olic Church for the to her agreeable and for her object very 
promising productions out of the post-apostolic time to can¬ 
onise as Apostolic scriptures ; on the other side, with what is 
apparent from the existence of a tradition concerning Paul as 
an apostle highly favored in Nazarene, i.e. Jew-Christian or 
Old-Christian circles ; then it is not difficult to draw from it as 
legitimate conclusion this proposition : The external proofs 
for the genuineness of the Epistles standing in Paul’s name 
are of the same intrinsic value as those for the apostolic origin 
of the fourth evangel.—Loman, 99, 100. Volter considers that 
1 Corinthians, xv. 29-49 has experienced an extensive interpo¬ 
lation.—Theol. Tijdschrift, xxiii. 313, 314. Other instances in 
Corinthians are given, pp. 315, 316, 318, 321, 324, 325. 

It was the time when to the Church of the Presbyters the 
Monarchia (episcopal rule) succeeded. If we assume the fol¬ 
lowing order, Gnostics, Simon, Menander, Nikolai, Karpokra- 
tes, Kerinthus, Paul, John of the Apokalypse, Justin, we find 
that the Apokalypse mentions the Nikolaitans and the 12 
Angels ; the Gospels mention Peter, the Nazarenes and Ebion- 
im, “Paul” of our canon mentions Peter, James and John, 
Justin mentions Peter, the sons of Zebedee and the Apoka¬ 
lypse, that is, a John ; so that “ Paulus canonicus ” comes rather 
late and is not readily admitted into the canon ; but the four 
gospels are written on a post-presbyter basis. Justin makes no 
mention of any Paul. No wonder that the Nazarenes and 
Ebionites of the so-called Petrine party (see Iren., I. xxvi.) re¬ 
jected our canonical “ Paul,” for he makes short work of those 
that were still under the Law of Moses. 1 He is the Syrian or 
Greek of Antioch, not the Jew, nor the Nazarene, nor the 
Ebionite.—Galatians, ii. 6. How could “ Paulus ” have penned 
his rhetorical words: Where is the Wise man (the chacham), 
where the scribe (grammateus), where is the disputant of this 

1 Epistle to Titus, i. 10, 14. 


THE NAZARENES. 


551 


age, if the chacham, the scribe and the Pharisee had been pres¬ 
ent to answer this posterior man out of their Law ? The 
Alexandrian Philonian gnosis was, that from the being (toG ovtos) 
proceeds the Logos the Spermatic Ousia, or Vital Eire, Vital 
Essence. That which is first is the prior to the One and Monad 
and Arche. But from the divine Logos, just as from a spring, 
are separated the two Powers, the Creative Power and the Bill¬ 
ing Power, called Kurios (Lord).—Tischendorf’s Philonea* p. 
150. Now “ Paulus ” of our N. Test, canon has just Philo’s 
idea, as it is expressed by “ the Power of God and the Wisdom 
of God.”—1 Cor. i. 24. So that Paul of Antioch and Tarsus 
and Syria, or rather, Paulus of Borne, our Paulus canonicus, 
has to make Philo his sponsor the same as Justin Martyr 
of Samaria is forced to do, with much the same theory of justi¬ 
fication by faith. The first epistle to Timothy was not calcu¬ 
lated to please Markion and the Encratites, particularly, iii. 
16, and iv. 3-5 ; vi. 20, 21; but there is gnosis still left in it. 
—1 Tim. iii. 16. Justin says that some say that there is no 
resurrection of the dead but that as soon as death occurs their 
souls are taken up into the heaven; Justin says that those hold¬ 
ing such views are not Christians. But some Paul in 1 Thes- 
salonians iv. 17 expresses just such an idea ! Justin wont men¬ 
tion that Paul! But the Jews continued to hold that very 
doctrine.—Bodenschatz, Kirch, Verf. II. 192. 

The results which we have won regarding the Epistles to 
the Corinthians harmonise entirely with our results obtained 
from the Epistle to the Bomans. All the passages in which 
with reference to the Cliristology the preexistence - notion 
comes to be expressed have also shown themselves in the Epis¬ 
tles to the Corinthians as interpolated (so 1 Cor. viii. 5 h , 6 b ; x. 
4 ; xv. 47 ; 2 Cor. iv. 4; viii. 9). The chief Antinomist passages 
and pieces, as 1 Cor. ix. 20, 21; xv. 56 and 2 Cor. iii. 6-47 a have 
likewise shown themselves interpolations, while the passages 
1 Cor. vii. 19, ix. 8, 9; xiv. 34 have remained as characteristic 
for the position of Paulus towards the Law.—Volter, p. 324. 
Coming from the Jordan to Antioch the Messianist Nazarenes 
undoubtedly brought with them their aeons, and at Antioch 
they found the Philonian gnosis at the beginning of the 
second century. The Nazorine continued to be Nazorene (Acts, 
xxiv. 5), but the Messianist became at Borne or Antioch, grad¬ 
ually a Philonian, ultimately denominated Christian. This 


552 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


must have occurred at a rather late period since Acts describes 
Paul as stirring* up commotions among all the Jews in the 
world ; therefore we may date Paul about 150 a Nazarene 
Christian at Rome or at Antioch. From the name 4 Iesu 
Christos 5 it is clear that ‘ Christos ’ was added to Iesu. When 
were the 12 apostles added to Iesu ? Certainly not before the 
title Christos, because this, being solar , carries the number 12, 
as the title ‘ Logos ’ would, or ‘ King ’ (Matthew, xxv.). Con¬ 
sequently Peter, John, James, the Lord’s brothers, etc. all be¬ 
long to the period in or after which Iesu was called Christos. 
There is no reason why Hegesippus should have known any 
more than the rest of the party chose to tell him. A wide¬ 
spread body of ignorant enthusiasts, all orientals, their powers 
of credence were practically unlimited, so that they did not 
need any Iesu to pin their faith to, so long as they were 
worried about the sins adherent to flesh and the doctrine of a 
bodily resurrection. They could have made one up for them¬ 
selves in their own imagination, or if they could not do it 
themselves enough could be found to do it for the rest. They 
had the Nazorene gnosis and the Philonian gnosis at Antioch 
pushing them further. But they stuck to the ‘ man ,’ as Ire- 
naeus wished us to see in the case of Kerinthus; and they im¬ 
bibed the gnosis besides, as we see in the case of the Apostle 
Paulus. Those that joined themselves to the doctrines of the 
Jordan partook of the superstitions of the Jordan, a belief in 
demons and a place of torment. Those that added themselves 
as supports to the literal interpretation of Jewish ecclesiastical 
texts have believed in witches and witchcraft, as in England 
and Massachusetts. The Hebrew biblion was the work of the 
more learned scribes ; while the three Synoptic Gospels and 
the Book of Acts bear distinct marks of having been entrusted 
with the superstitions of the vulgus regarding demons, cures, 
sins, and resurrections. Lucian, 1 born at Samosata on the 

1 A native of Commagene in Syria.—Antiqua Mater, 244. The author of Ant. 
Mater says there is no trace of the execution of Iesu in the public records, in Philo, in 
the life of Josephus, nor among the calumnies of Apion. Only a questionable notice 
in the Antiquities , instead of a volume. Lucian, (c. 160) alludes to ‘ the man who was 
impaled in Palestine; ’ a discrepancy which hints the vagueness of the notions which 
prevailed at that late date respecting the mode of the death of the Auctor nominis 
(Christianus).—ibid. 41. Lucian was an advocate in practice at Antioch. The word 
Ohristianos does not occur in ‘Barnabas.’—Antiqua Mater, p. 54. But it mentions 
Iesu as the “ Son of God.”—ibid. 72. The Epistle of Barnabas appears to the author 
of Antiqua Mater, 88, as forged. In the Shepherd of Hermas the words Christ and 


THE NAZARENES. 


553 


Euphrates, not far from a.d. 120, gives a very amusing account 
of how Peregrinus Proteus humbugged these simple, credulous 
people,—showing that in the gnosis, as elsewhere, the proverb 
‘ ne sutor ultra crepidam ’ applies. But it is very singular that 
Justin and Lucian (who practised law at Antioch and mentions 
the Christians) know nothing of such a remarkable writer as 
St. Paul. It is still a question whether ‘ Paul ’ more ‘ hebraises ’ 

Jesus do not occur in the book; but the expression Son of God is in it.—Antiqua Mater, 
160, 162. It is by no means certain to our mind that there was any Christianism ex¬ 
cept Messianism before 98 or that any Paulus wrote before a.d. 125-135. If Satur- 
ninus is the first who is found to use the word Christos in the sense of the spirit- 
anointed u Son of the God,” Philo is not; for he does not use the term Christos of the 
Logos. He says that the Kosmos Nogtos (the Intelligible World) is nothing else than 
the logos of God who now is world-making (See Rev. xxi. 1, 2). And the unseen and 
mind-perceived divine Logos is an image of God.—Philo, de Opificio inundi, 6, 8. He 
nowhere uses the word Christos in reference to the Logos. The word xp tcrT °s is not in 
Philo. Consequently we have to look for the first use of this word, as applied to the 
Nazarenes, in the period posterior to Philo and at Antioch. And the first one to use 
the word Christos appears to have been Saturninus, and the one to clearly separate 
the Iesu and Christos (in doketic fashion) seems not to have been Kerinthus or about 
his time (contra Irenaus, I. xxiv., xxv.) ; Kerinthus holds that the world was not 
created by the God of the Jews but by a Power very separate and distant from Him 
and who did not know him ! Then comes Colossians, i. 16, 17, attributing to Iesu the 
Christosship, and the unbounded power of the Logos, the Word and Son of the God. 
Philo does not do so. Markion’s doctrine is prominently like that of Saturninus whose 
Christos (since he makes out the God of the Jews one of the Angels) must have been 
(being incorporeal) Markion’s Christos.—Comp. Irenaeus, I. xxii. ; Tertull. adv. 
Markion, iv. 7. That Iesu was the son of Joseph and Mary appears to have been the 
old belief.—Antiqua Mater, p. 217. We do not find it in Daniel. The/process of the 
formation of the narrative Christian legend, in which named teachers gradually take 
the place of the proverbial aits and aiunis , the ‘ says he ’ and ‘ say they ’ of ordinary 
quotation (Antiqua Mater, 134), would in time, among orientals, be very likely to make 
itself felt when Mithra, the Christos, the Sun, Herakles and Jacob are (like the Logos) 
all connected with the number 12. Justin Martyr says that the 12 apostles were sym¬ 
bolised by the 12 bells on the Highpriest’s robe ; as if that helped the matter any ! 
“ When we look to the quarter whence the antiidolatric movement came, whence sprung 
the love of the Nations, the propagandist zeal for the universal Kingdom of God 1 and 
the reign of righteousness, must it not still be maintained, and that most gratefully, 
‘ Salvation is of the Jews ’ ? Apart from their Scriptures, the Christiania whom Justin 
champions, had neither a basis for a creed, nor a code of morality, nor the materials 
for the construction of a historical genesis of their faith. “ To state that the morality 
of the Didache and of the Epistle of Barnabas is borrowed from the New Testament 
is to beg an important question, and that in opposition to the prirna facie evidence. To 
say that this morality is neither Jewish nor Pagan, but distinctively Christianas also 
to assume something about the name Christian which our previous inquiry does not 
warrant us in assuming. Nor can we find, amidst many striking coincidences, a prob¬ 
ability that Seneca furnished these ‘ apostles ’ with their ethical stock. Far more 
justified, as we may believe, on the ground of affinity, of imagery, of style and treat¬ 
ment, is the comparison with the writings of Philo.”—Antiqua Mater, 146. 


1 Compare Matthew, xxviii. 19. 


554 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


or more 4 hellenises,’ or whether so-called 4 Paulinism ’ be not 
a heterogeneous mixture of conservatism and innovation; 
whether the current portraits of this latest 4 apostle ’ do not 
present variations irreconcilable with the hypothesis of a his¬ 
toric individual. 1 

Loman points to the unreliable testimony of the Church 
and its pretension that it admitted into its canon only docu¬ 
ments dating from the apostolic period. Easily can we say 
that the Churchmen who towards the end of the second cen¬ 
tury exhibited so much zeal for the apostolic character of the 
official doctrine, at one time to utter all sorts of fogginess 
about the all or not apostolical origin of any writing circulated 
at the time, well understood this word 4 apostolical ’ taken in 
historical sense. A number of proofs are cited for the propo¬ 
sition. For him who is no stranger to the Christian literature 
of this time the series of evidences continues to grow. No 
wonder! Looking at the canonised writings of the New Tes¬ 
tament themselves, this conception of apostolicity was made 
up out of two heterogeneous component parts. The apostles 
were both authorised and unauthorised witnesses for the true 
Christendom. Their authority was alternately affirmed and 
denied in the most emphatic manner. In this duality the con¬ 
sciousness of the Church speaks out that they wanted for their 
present faith another basis of authority than that of the primi¬ 
tive tradition recognised through Salvationsmen (Behouds- 
mannen) as the only apostolic. Thus is explained the canoni¬ 
sation of the longest lived of the 12 and of his Logos-evangel. 
And in the same light, I am sure of it, could also the canoni¬ 
sation of the Last of the Apostles (1 Cor. xv. 8) be placed, 
should we at last once come out of the chaos in which we still 
always find ourselves with our conceptions in regard to the 
cording (origin) of the Old Catholic church.—Loman, p. 102. 
Against the idea that the effort of the Catholic party for the 
canonisation of the Paulus epistles has been opposed because 
of the apostle’s unpopularity in the church he says: For the 
unpopularity there is no one tenable argument to be adduced. 
We might just turn the thing round and say that the popular¬ 
ity which the historic Paul possessed in Christian circles can 
serve as an explanation of the undeniable fact that so many 
treatises destined for clerical use were forged in his name.— 

1 Antiqua Mater, 234. 


THE NAZARENES. 


555 


Loman, p. 104. “ Already in the 2nd century the history of 

the church of the first century is completely mythic.”—Loman, 
p. 108; quotes Hausrath, p. 133. Loman falls back on the 
aphorism of Des Cartes, de omnibus dubitandum. 

The Syrian Church had always been inclined towards spirit¬ 
ual control and ecclesiastical dominion.—Uhlhorn, 425, 426, 429, 
432. So too the Hebrew, Jewish, and Roman Churches. Pe¬ 
ter’s name was authority in East-Syria.—Uhlhorn, 431. Mat¬ 
thew, xvi. 18, has the same purpose in view, a Church (and 
power with it; as in Egypt). So too Genesis, xli. 48, 56, xlvii. 
20, 22, 23, 24; Exodus, xxviii. 36; xxiv.-xxix.; Ezekiel xl.-xlv.; 
note also the domination of Ecclesiasticism in Egypt. Com¬ 
pare the High Priests of Amon. Founding the Church on a 
rock means Ecclesiastical Power; and if the author of the 
Euangelion according to Matthew had not possessed the Sy¬ 
rian tendency towards ecclesiastical aggrandizement he would 
not have written in Greek. It was not for the convocation of 
the Essene presbyters that they thirsted, but St. Peter’s pre¬ 
dominance, the foundation stone and rock of episcopacy. It 
is the ignorance of the masses, whether in Europe, Asia, or 
America, that is the fruitful source of Episcopal predomi¬ 
nance. 

An apostolos who was blessed with a vision of Iesua-Chris- 
tos outside of the Gate of Damaskus would not need to go 
after Peter, James and John, eVen if he was the last of the 
Apostles. But, as he claims acquaintance with them on the 
ground that they “ seemed to be pillars,” he must have been 
late. “ Since men held as real Christian corporations, already 
existing before 40, the Christian communities mentioned in 
Galatians, i. 22, 23, men were positively compelled to accept 
the consequences resulting from this view, and accordingly 
involved themselves in a mesh of contradictions from which 
the exegesis of Gal. i. and ii. has in vain endeavored century 
after century to free the captives.” In a Church record that 
has come down from the time of Irenaeus, the Acta Martyrum 
Scillitanorum, the Christian martyrs name the Epistles of 
Paul those of a ‘ Holy Man,’ next (e?™ tovtois) our volumes (at 
*a.9’ /3t/?Aot), which shows to conviction that at that time 

(c. 180) these epistles were not yet placed on an equality with 
the Sacred Writings proper of the Christians (see Hilgenfeld, 
Zsclir. f. W. Theol. 1881. pag. 383). Justin (c. 150) could not 


556 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


yet on the whole make use of the Paulina as Apostolic docu¬ 
ments.—A. D. Loman, Th. Tijdsclir. 1886. pp. 395, 406. 

It was hitherto generally unjustly supposed, Loman thinks, 
that the opposition to Paulus historicus was a radical op¬ 
position made on the part of the conservative element. It 
was made against the canonisation of the Pauline epistles. 
Loman adds another fact still less undeniable, that the said 
opposition dates from the same time when the Catholic par¬ 
ty earnestly took in hand the canonisation of the Bibliotheca 
Sacra Novi Testamenti. What gave the impetus to this can¬ 
onisation, what was admitted as motive for the assumption 
or exclusion of any writing coming into notice herewith, is 
not necessary to be stated in full because it may be con¬ 
sidered as generally known that the history of the Old- 
Catholic Church is inseparable from that of the canon and the 
one is illustrated by the other, so that the two can be said to 
have grown up from one root. We know what to think of the 
pretension of this Catholic Church when it shall have in its 
codex sacer admitted only documents out of the Apostolic 
time. We can calmly say that the churchmen who towards 
the end of the 2nd century exhibited so much zeal for the 
Apostolic character of the official doctrine to once utter all 
sorts of fogginess about the all or not apostolic origin of any 
writing then in circulation well understood this word “ apos¬ 
tolic ” taken in historical sense. Many proofs are alleged for 
the proposition. For the person who to the Christian litera¬ 
ture of that time is no stranger the chain of proofs is contin¬ 
ually increasing. No wonder! As to the canonised writings 
of the New Testament the conception of apostolicity was made 
up out of two heterogeneous components. The apostles were 
alike authorised and unauthorised witnesses for the true Chris¬ 
tianity. Their authority was alternately most emphatically 
affirmed and denied. In this dualism speaks out the conscious¬ 
ness of the Church that it for its present faith needed another 
basis of authority than that of the primitive tradition, recog¬ 
nised by the salvationsmen as the sole apostolical. Thus is 
explained the canonisation of the longest living of the Twelve 
and his logos-evangelium. And in the same light, “ I am 
sure of it,” could the canonisation of the “ last of the apostles ” 
be placed, if we should only once come out of the chaos in 
which we still always find ourselves with our propositions re- 


THE NAZARENES. 


557 


garding the creation {wording) of the Old-Catholic Church. 
Regarding the synoptic evangels, the first traces of ecclesias¬ 
tical stamp appear already in Justin, and therefore in this 
connection stand on the same line with the Gospel of John. 
The newer criticism has here, “ in my opinion,” meted out 
with two measures when it considered what seemed dangerous 
for the genuineness of the fourth evangel irrelevant with refer¬ 
ence to the authenticity of Paul’s epistles. They reasoned 
thus : “For the first Christians the idea of Scripture coincided 
with the idea of primitive record of revelation out of the pre- 
christian time. The need of authoritative documents besides 
the Old Testament concerning the existence of Christianity 
came first when the disagreement in the bosom of the Chris¬ 
tian community itself had proceeded to a dangerous height 
and threatened the Church with entire destruction. The first 
thing was to arrive at complete certainty concerning the ipsis- 
sima verba Domini (the very words of the Lord) and at the 
same time possess an entirely trustworthy witness of his say¬ 
ings aiid doings. The character of undoubted certainty was 
borne by the gospels in circulation so far as they were thought 
to have come down from the Apostolic time and through the 
authority of their Apostolic writers to be properly warranted. 
It was to do about the logia kuriaka, lechthenta kai prach- 
thenta Iesou (the oracles of the Lord, the sayings and doings 
of Iesu), as if they had taken up and preserved the written and 
verbal tradition as from the preaching of the Twelve. That a 
book like our fourth gospel is neither by Papias nor by Justin 
named or recommended can surprise none of us after the late 
origin of this book has come to light. Even less, how*ever, 
can the expert wonder at it that first thirty years after Justin 
wrote his Great Apology they thought of canonising the Epis¬ 
tles of Paul. In part the same difficulty existed here as in 
the case of John the Evangelist, to wit, the late origin of some 
of these epistles. Yet there too where this motive was not 
present, as in the case of the genuine epistles, was the late 
date of their canonisation perfectly evident whenever one 
gives attention either to the systematic opposition that the 
Pauline ideas had from the first encountered, or to the parti¬ 
cular and local character of these epistles which in form and 
contents are nothing more than occasional writings, or finally 
to the circumstance that the need of codification of the teach - 


558 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


mg must be felt first after that of the proper ascertaining 
(fixeeren) of the logia kuriaka was satisfied.” The weakness 
in this reasoning is not difficult to show. The contrast be¬ 
tween logia kuriaka and apostolic doctrine is not just. On the 
one side, to be sure, the logia kuriaka in the main form the sub¬ 
stance of the apostolic doctrine and the canonic evangels bor¬ 
row their authority only from the tradition of the apostles; on 
the other side Paul canonicus will mainly execute nothing else 
than the command of the Lord and thus his testimony for the 
community is, so far as this asks for antiquity and apostolic 
derivation in the accounts of what the Lord requires of it, of 
not less importance than the oldest evangels with their dubi¬ 
ous titles. Further should be remarked that the difficulty 
springing from the special and local character of Paul’s epis¬ 
tles may be called of small account because the whole was 
neutralised, more than outweighed, by the solemn and official 
way in which the writer of the epistle as apostle of Jesus 
Christ us does utter the authority of his writings. Finally, 
also the assertion, as should the evangels for ecclesiastical use 
be earlier come into notice than the apostolic mandates in 
epistolary form, which are found in the New Testament, leaves 
in justice something more to desire. Indeed next the account 
of Justin respecting the public reading of the apostolic me¬ 
moirs or evangels stands the (out of equally sure sources flow¬ 
ing) communication about the custom in vogue among the com¬ 
munities of the growing Catholic Church, to regularly read 
out the Pastoral Epistles of influential ecclesiastical persons 
or corporations in the practice of divine service. 

The thing which all the preceding comes to is this, that 
we give us due account of the prime-motives by which the 
contending parties in the Church were led to the adoption 
and rejection of writings that came into notice before the canon. 
No proposition can be more incorrect than this, that the 
struggle of the Catholic party for the canonisation of Paul’s 
epistles has been made difficult by the apostle’s unpopularity 
in the Church.—Loman, 102-104. Is it not as if Paulus, who 
to be sure needed in truth to give to the Galatian Christians 
no description of his person and office, seizes this opportunity 
in order to give a knowledge also to wider circles of the work 
laid on him by God ? Any one who is convinced that he is 
fulfilling a divine call presses to the front, sets himself on a 


THE NAZARENES. 


559 


height which places him in condition to make his word pierce 
through to judge aright; in that there is nothing strange, but 
in this that such a person, above all, whenever he, as is here 
the case, communicates the most important matters in the 
most impressive manner, finds neither echo nor direct contra¬ 
diction among his hearers. If we suppose, on the contrary, 
that we here have to do with a later piece forged 1 in Paul’s 
name, proceeding from the Church party which followed the 
at that time customary way in order to signal their opin¬ 
ion of Christianity as the true Pauline , and if we discover 
that against this attempt to make the new ideas through au¬ 
thority of an older name fipd more general acceptance the 
opposition immediately shows itself in the circles of those 
that are distinguished for their adherence to the Old Tra¬ 
dition, then the aforesaid difficulties disappear and the re¬ 
maining facts and phenomena known to us become at once ex¬ 
plicable. 2 

The Adonis-myth had already borne fruits in India, before 
Christ, possibly in the Buddha-story and the Krishna-myth. 
What prevented it in that age of peculiar gnosis being ex¬ 
tended to an ideal conception of an Essene Founder of the 
sect ? The Sabian fundamental view was that the Mediator 
between God and man must be a spiritual being, not a human 
prophet. 3 An ideal was required. 

O Sabians, according to your view, Hermes the Great has ascended to the 
world of spirits so that he has been taken up into their order, and if the Ascen¬ 
sion of man is conceivable why is not the Descent of the Angel conceivable ? 
And if it be true that he has laid aside the veil of humanity, why should it not 
be possible that the Angel puts on the covering of mortality ? The orthodoxy 
consists then in the assumption that perfection is present in this covering, 
namely the veil of mortality, but Sabaism means the assumption that perfection 
lies in the laying aside of every covering; but then they (the Sabians) required 
this not further until they assumed the covering of the spirits of the heavenly 
bodies 4 in the first place and secondly of the figures and images.—Sliahristani. 5 

Hermes is Asada, the Divine Messenger ; hence el Sadi, Mer- 
kurial Messenger of fire. In Homer, Hermes raises the souls. 
—Odys. v. 47. 

J gefingeerd. 

2 Loman, Quaest. Paul. 107. 

3 Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, II. 709. 

4 See Colossians, ii. 18. 

6 Chwolsohn, II. 437. 


560 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Lo the days are coming 1 and I will hurt all circumcision in praeputio : 
Egypt, and Ieudah and Edom and Beni Amon and Moab and all that are shaven 
on top who dwell in the desert; for all the Goiim 2 are uncircumcised, and the 
entire house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart.—Jeremiah, ix. 24, 25. 

The dogma of Vishnu’s incarnations 3 had already formed it¬ 
self three hundred years before the birth of Christ, although 
their number and order of succession have been first settled 
later. 4 Ies is the mystic name of Apollo and Bacchus! 

Iesous the God of the Nazaria !—Assemani, II. 58. 

The Hebrew Saviour Angel was called Malach Iesua. 5 The 
Iatrikoi of India, the Therapeutae of Egypt’s Sarapis, the 
Arab, Syrian and Jewish Essenes, Sabians and Christians all 
performed the cures. 

According to the Veda 6 the soul is eternal, but the body of 
all creatures is perishable. 7 It follows from the statements of 
Megasthenes 8 that Krishna was worshipped as Vishnu 9 among 
the people of the plains; and he seems to have originally 
been the Second Avatar. 10 Arrian, viii. 5, mentions the name 
Harikrishna, chief of the Suraseni, born at Mathura, and 
Ptolemaeus names Mathura the city of the Gods. 11 At the time 
of Megasthenes, therefore, Krishna, in the character of Vishnu, 
had been adored for a long time. 12 On the other hand Mithra 
is a Vedic deity, oftener named than Vishnu. 13 Mithra is repre¬ 
sented on the coins of the Turushka-kings with a circular nim¬ 
bus surrounded by pointed rays, 14 in oriental garb, consisting 


1 the word of Iachoh. 

2 Goiim are the outside Nations. 

3 Verkorperungen. 

4 Lassen, Ind. Alt. II. 1126. 2nd edition. 

5 Bodenschatz, Kirchl. Verf. d. Juden, II. 191. 

6 The soul is the life. Iachoh (Iachos) is the Hebrew Lord of the chiim. 

7 Max Muller, “India, what can it do,” 104. 

8 Ambassador to India in B.C. 302. 

9 Compare John, vi. 62; vii. 26-28; viii. 42 ; Mark, xiv. 61, 62. 

10 Lassen, Ind. Alt. I. p. 921. 2nd edition. 

11 ibid. I. 796. What Gods? Brahma, Krishna and Siva? Probably.—ibid. 925. 

12 B. c. 360-400 perhaps; as Homer’s Black Herakles in Hades. 

13 Asan, Ashan (Shanah), Oishnu, Vishnu, San, Sun, Sonne. See Dunlap, Ves¬ 
tiges, 67. 

14 The Essenes respected the Rays of the Deity.—Josephus, Wars, II. 7; Movers, 
Phonizier, 552; Photius, Bibl. p. 339. It means the 7 rays of the Intelligible Sun, 
Mithra, who rolls the planets round.—Movers, 551-554. 


THE NAZARENES. 


561 


of a close-fitting robe with a white mantle over it, extending 
the right hand, holding the handle of a sword with the left. 
He carries this, without doubt, as the victorious God over¬ 
coming the bad. 1 

Sakia Sinha, the Hindu Herakles, the Lion of the moon, is 
the active energy identified with Budha. 2 Compare Siva, with 
the moon on his head. Gabariel is lunar angel, and Gabriel is 
the Messenger, like Hermes, the Lunar Potence. On Kanun 
2nd, the 24th day, 3 the Sabians kept the birthday of the Lord, 
the Moon, 4 Allah Sin ; they also at the same time celebrated 
the Mystery of Shemal. 5 This is the Mithra-worship ; for 
Adonis, entering the Moon, loses definite sex, and Lunus is 
hermaphroditus. Jt is the feast of Mithra, born December 
25th. The 27th of every lunar month the Sabians made a 
blood-offering and a burnt-offering to their Allah Sin, their 
Lunus. 6 The Sabians of Harran asserted that a temple of 
Mars 7 and an idol of Tammuz were in Jerusalem. 8 

Your new-moons and your (sacred) sabbaths.—Isaiah, i. 13, 14. 

Burnt offerings and libations were offered on the new moons. 9 
The Jews were a “ holy people ” 10 because they were initiated 
Saints of Iacchos-Ia’hoh. 

The graves were opened and many bodies of the Saints that slept arose 
and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the Holy 
City and appeared to many.—Matthew, xxvii. 52, 53. 

The initiated in the Osirian-Iacchos Mysteries of Egypt be¬ 
longed to Dionysus. The Iessaean and Christian initiations 
were based upon the Mithra Mysteries that preceded them. 11 


1 Lassen, II. p. 834. Astronomically, Mithra is the producing Sun borne by the 
Equinoctial Bull, the Seed-preserver.—Creuzer, Symbolik, i. 249. Mithra is Belus. 

2 Upham, Hist, and Doctrine of Buddhism, p. 12. 

3 about Christmas eve. 

4 Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. 35. 

3 ibid. II. 35, 331, 390, 680, 681. 

6 ibid. I. 403. 

7 “Ia’hoh is a man of war.”—Exodus, xv. 3. 

8 Chwolsohn, I. 260. 

9 1 Chr. xxiii. 31; Ezek. xlv. 17. 

10 Compare the circumcision, the evidence of Initiation into the Mysteries of Syria 
and Egypt. See Galatians, ii. 3, 7, 8, 12, 14; v. 6. 

11 Dunlap, Sod, preface; Pauthier, la Chine, I. 117; Cox, Arian Mythol., p. 354; 
Hippolytus, v. 7. pp. 97-99, 104, 115, 143, 144. Miller. 

36 


562 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Manicheans held that the Sun, who is Mithra, is Christ 
himself. The initiations into the Mysteries, the teletai , are men¬ 
tioned in the Septuagint Bible, while the Syrian and Persian 
Mysteries preceded Pharisee, Sadukee and Christian. “ The 
sacred 9 , the Egyptian symbol of life adopted by these early 
Christians, frequently occurs here instead of the cross of their 
more orthodox successors.” 1 Jaguth Chunga Gangooly said 
that the dead in Hindustan are still marked with the spear of 
Siva, which is a cross. The hieroglyphs = Life Ba Kha (Liv¬ 
ing Sun soul) are the inscription on the sarcophagus of Pepi 
Merenra of the 6th dynasty. 

The Christian religion was divided by the early Fathers, in 
its secret and mysterious character, into three degrees, the 
same as was that of Eleusis, viz. Purification, Initiation, and 
Perfection. This is openly declared, among others, by Cle¬ 
mens Alexandrinus. At the time of the transfiguration the 
secret Gnosis which was, at least in part, the knowledge of the 
/xi/a apxq 2 and Pater Agnostos, 3 was believed to have been con¬ 
ferred on the three, James, John, and Peter, and this is on the 
authority of Clemens Alexandrinus. 4 In Mosheim’s commen¬ 
taries 5 the secret doctrines of Plato and Moses are compared, 
and it is shown that by Clemens Alexandrinus and Philo 
they were held to be the same in every respect; and it is 
also held that they both are the same as the esoteric doc¬ 
trines of the Christians, which indeed is true, if the early 
Fathers of the Christian Church and the plain words of the 
gospels can be admitted as evidence of what was the nature of 
the esoteric doctrines of Christianity. Who can deny that 
Pater Agnostos, the Father whom no person hath seen except 
the Son, alludes to the Gnosis ? 6 The ao is Gnostic, like the 
Iao, and the Iesous is so likewise. 7 The letter I described the 
sun, A the moon, O represented Saturn. 8 

Every one sees the body of the Sun, not one its soul.—Plato, Laws, x. 9. 

1 Wilkinson, Mod. Egypt, II. 369. Ruins of el Khargeh. Necropolis. 

2 Sole beginning. 

3 Unknown Father. 

4 Mosheim, Com. Cent. ii. sect. 35. 

6 ibid. 

6 Mankind, 317, 318. 

7 Massey, II. 388. 

8 Asada, the Messenger of Saturn.—Chwolson, Alt. Bab. Lit. 136, 156. Chthonian 


THE NAZARENES. 


563 


We have already seen that the Elchasites rejected the 
apostles altogether.—Euseb. H. E. vi. 38. It is to be noted 
that according to Irenaeus, I. xxiv., xxv., neither Karpokrates 
nor Kerinthus is charged with having any knowledge of the 12 
apostles such as is implied in the Dialogue of Justin Martyr, 
which mentions Peter and Zebedee’s children. The Elchasa- 
ites had the book of Elxai. And since Eusebius calls it an ‘ un¬ 
godly and wicked error of the Helkesaites ’ it would be within 
the limits of possibility that this book was one of the Siphri ha 
Minim (Books of the Haeretics) referred to in the Talmud, 
Schabath, fob 116, that Delitzsch has referred to. This book 
of Elxai was popular among the Nazorene sects beyond the 
Jordan. They all had it; and if it had no knowledge of the 
twelve, the Nazorenes and Ebionites were not likely to have 
known any more about them. That the Elkesaites ‘rejected 
the apostles altogether * is probably a Eusebius way of stating 
the matter. The reason this disputant mentions them at all is 
that their rejection of the account in its reference to the apos¬ 
tles tended to discredit the story of the supernatural birth and 
the crucifixion, as well as the resurrection. Note how vaguely 
this much abused churchfather refers to Elxai’s haeresy in only 
nine lines. That is one of the ways of the controversialists in 
the days of the sophists and civilisation. Irenaeus does the 
same, makes up his accounts short,—in order not to spread the 
infection! Where does he venture to relate that Diodorus 
found out in the Egyptian cosmology that the sun was the 
source of fire and spirit ?• Yet Matthew’s Gospel, iii. 11, xvii. 2 
leads straight up to that very inference. If anything were 
needed to show that the Ebionim (Sabians) beyond the Jordan 
were neither Jews nor Christians, Matthew, xv. 3, represents 
the Ebionite Nazorians in direct opposition to the traditions of 
the Pharisees. But Matthew could speak plainly after the fall 
of Jerusalem and the exit of the Pharisee from power. The 
Sabian religion held that Dionysus is Sun and spirit. He 
makes the raving prophesy the future.—Euripides, Bacchae, 

Hermes, presiding over the Father’s Powers, be to me, entreating, Saviour and Helper. 
—Aeschylus, Choephorae, 1, 2. 

My flesh also shall live in hope, 

For thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. 

Neither wilt thou allow thy Chaste to see corruption.—Psalm, xvi. 9. 10. 

Iahoh saves his anointed.—Ps. xx. 6. 

On the third day he will raise us up to live in his presence.—Hosea, vi. 2. 


564 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


line 300. The spirit gives life.— 2 Cor. iii. 6; Luke, i. 35, 37. 
Dionysus diphues is the solar and lunar pneuma. The Adam 
is diphues.—Gen. ii. 23. Simon Magus also held the two 
powers, the Kurios and the Kuria,—one male, the other, fe¬ 
male.-—See Clementine Homilies. The name Elxai is closely 
interwoven with the history of gnostic Jew-christianism.— 
Uhlhorn, p. 392. The doctrine of the Homilies arose out of 
gnostic Jew-christianism coming in contact with Greek culture 
in Syria, Edessa and Seleucia.—"Uhlhorn, 422. The Peshito 
version belongs to East Syria, probably to Nisibis; while the 
Apostolical constitutions point to Syria.—ibid. 426. The 
Pseudo-Clementines are most likely of Syrian origin and es¬ 
pecially East Syria.—ib. 428, 429. According to Herodotos, 
the Arabs held that 4 Dionysus and the Ourania ’ (Astarta, 
Aphrodita) c are the Only God ’ which corresponds with the 
Male-female principle of the Highest God of Simon Magus, 
just mentioned. 

If Rothe saw that Iessaism (Essaism) made an important 
foundation for the Clementine ideas of Church government he 
is confirmed by Epiphanius I. 117 who says that 44 the Nazo- 
raioi (the Nazoria) come next to the Kerinthians being at the 
same time with them, whether also before them or with them 
or after them nevertheless sunchronous (contemporaneous); for 
(he says) I am not able with more exactness to say which suc¬ 
ceeded to which. . . . And all Christians at that time were 
equally called Nazoraioi (Nazoria).” 44 They were called Iessae- 
ans before they were called Christians.”—Epiphanius, I. 120. 
ed. Petau. Now that Epiphanius touched the matter with a 
sharp needle is plain from 44 Who is the liar if not he (Kerin - 
thus) who denies that Iesus is the Christos.”—1 John, ii. 22. 
44 Every spirit that confesses that Iesou Christos came in flesh 
is from the God, and every spirit that does not confess that 
Iesou Christos has come in flesh is not from the God.”—1 John, 
iv. 2, 3. This leaves no doubt about the date of the Clemen¬ 
tine Homilies (a.d. 160-210) because the 44 Grundschrift,” the 
fundamental piece on which the remainder of the work has 
been gradually superposed in layers, contains an attack on 
Basileides, and is dated by Uhlhorn not earlier than a.d. 150. 
This writing that forms the basis of the subsequent superstruct¬ 
ure had its origin after 150, the Homilies followed after 160 
and the Recognitions are dated by Uhlhorn p. 435 later than 


THE NAZARENES. 


565 


a.d. 170. When therefore we see (Matthew, ix. 35) that the 
Healer (the Iesu) “ went about all the cities and the villages ” 
healing every disease and sickness in the people, this Iessaean 
was engaged in making what was then termed the ‘ travels ’ of 
the Essaean Healers. We have to consider whether this ap¬ 
plies merely to Essaeans (Healers) in general or to some par¬ 
ticular Iesu. It is a description generally applicable to many 
wandering Exorcists or to a single Healer. “And they fol¬ 
lowed him.”—Matthew, ix. 37. And the Healer went about in 
the Galilee healing every disease and ailment among the 
people, and his fame went into all the Syria and they brought 
to him all those unwell taken with various diseases and suffer¬ 
ings and demoniacs and lunatics and paralytics, and he healed 
them. And many crowds followed him from the Galilaia and 
(the) decapolis, and Ioudaia, and beyond the Jordan. And 
calling together the ib disciples of him he gave to them power 
over impure spirits so as to cast them out and to heal every 
disease and every ailment. Then he sent them forth on the 
travels that Josephus mentions among the customs of the Es- 
senes. The Iessaean said Go not off into the way of the Gen¬ 
tiles, and into a city of Samaritans enter not (because of Si¬ 
mon the Gittite and Menander); but go rather to the sheep 
the despoiled of the house of Israel.—Codex Sinaiticus, Mattli. 
x. 5, 6. A decidedly Ebionite view of the situation; and pos¬ 
terior to the Destruction of Jerusalem, if the word ‘ despoiled ’ 
has any significance here. The “ attack on Basileides ” shows 
that he carried no grist to the Christian mill. The reason that 
the author of the Apokalypse hated the Nikolaitans is because 
they seemed to him to be immoral, to transgress the strict rules 
of the Essaians and Iessaians founded on the contrast between 
Spirit and Matter. It was held essential to contradict or in¬ 
jure the body, and repress its inclinations.—Matthew, xix. 12. 
The gnostics taught this doctrine, and the followers of Niko- 
laos were gnostics. Nikolaos had a beautiful wife, and was 
accused of being jealous. To parry this thrust, so offensive to 
a spiritualised gnostic, the man was willing that any one who 
wished should marry {yw aL ) her. He took the ground “ napa- 
Xpr/o-aoScu rrj vapid Set,” it is necessary to mortify the flesh. But 
the affair created a very great sensation, and his friends were 
mortified too; so that at last John of Bevelations expressed a 
decided opinion on the matter. The singular thing about it is 


566 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


that these things occurred in times of persecution by the 
Satan: “Fear not what you will suffer. See, the Devil will 
cast some of you into prison. ... Be faithful unto death, and 
I will give you the crown of life. Who hath ears, let him hear 
what the spirit saith to the Churches! ” The spirit said 
enough to lead the poor unfortunates to martyrdom. The 
blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church! And so it 
was in Smyrna. He that loses his life for my sake shall find 
it! For what profit is there for a man if he should gain the 
entire universe and be punished in his soul ?—Matthew, xvi. 
25, 26 ; x. 16-24. It looks as if St. Matthew himself had heard 
all about these persecutions. Which would make him out 
late. 

The belief of the Christians in the middle of the 2nd century 
rested upon a foundation purely ideal. 1 It is a simple fact 
that nearly two centuries elapsed before it occurred to any one 
that any book of the New Testament ought to be called Script¬ 
ure or was either of Divine or inspired origin. 2 There is not 
a distinct trace of any one of the first three Gospels during 
the first century and a half after the events they record. 3 It 
must be admitted that Christian ethics in their details were 
not either new or original. 4 They were founded in asceticism 
which is itself a strict deduction from the dualist philosophy 
of the Jewish religion. Christianity cannot be separated from 
an ascetic view of life. Lessing was well aware that to talk of 
the religion of Christ is to put oneself out of the pale of Chris¬ 
tianity, because such a notion is based on the discovery of the 
true humanity of Christ, a discovery which, though sanctioned 
by criticism, stultifies the primitive ages of the Church; 5 
whose ideal was asceticism and monachism. Everything has 

1 Antiqua Mater, 84. Matthew, x. 17-22, 32-40 is suited to 2nd century persecution 
times. 

2 Rev. H. R. Haweis, Thoughts for the Times, Sixth ed. London, 1874, p. 139, 
quoted in Westminster Review, July, 1875, p. 26. 

3 Westminster Review, 1874, p. 98, quotes the writer of “ Supernatural Religion,” 
II. 481. 

4 ibid. II. 487. 

6 Westminster Review, 1874, p. 104. The Christians in the 2nd century believed in 
an “Anointed spirit,” the Christos. The Intelligible Sun is Mithra.—Movers, 1. 553. 
The Emperor Julian refers to the Intelligible Sun as ‘ the Unseen,’ 6 d$ai/r}?. It is diffi¬ 
cult to consider how great the Unseen (Sun) is, reckoned from the seen.—Julian, Oratio, 
iv. It is just this Mithra-Sun (Massiacha) that the Iessenes adored on the Jordan. 
Mithra, the Logos, the Intelligible Sun. 


THE NAZARENES. 


567 


its root, of course, and Christianity must have had its origin, 
its beginning; but this seems to have been on the Jordan, 
among Nazorian Ascetics in the Persian Mithraworship, which, 
through the Babylonian intercourse, had permeated at least 
Southern Syria. If the gnosis had not supplied the theory of 
an Angel Iesua (Metatron), a Saviour, 1 he would never have 
been clothed with the flesh. The probable explanation of the 
theory of a crucified Iesu is the use of the sign upon the fore¬ 
head at Baptism and on other occasions, and this seems to have 
been derived from the religion of Mithras.—Antiqua Mater, 
204; Tertull. de corona mil. 3; de praescr. H. 40; Dunlap, 
Sod, II. 120. Mithra celebrates the oblation of the bread, and 
puts on the similitude of the Resurrection. Tertullian, xl. 216, 
217 ; Spiegel, Avesta, II. lxxii., lxxix. The Manicheans held 
that the Sun who is Mithra is Christ himself.—Seel, 437, 457; 
Augustinus, abhandl. 34. p. 534. This was unquestionably the 
view of the Essenes and Therapeutae ; for before the sunrise 
the Essenes spoke no secular word, and revered the Sun and 
Light. The word Kurios identifies Christ with Mithra, just as 
the gnostics said.— Milman, Hist. Chr. 280, 281; Plutarch, de¬ 
fect. orac. vii. The dogma of the suffering Christos is the in¬ 
dication of the great crisis of the second century.—Ant. Mater, 
205. Here the author of Antiqua Mater draws the distinction 
between the Jewish Messiah and the Christian Christos whose 
identification with the Messiah of the Jews appears to have 
been never other than artificial and of mere verbal suggestion. 
—p. 205. There were persons called ‘ adelphoi,’ Brothers, in 
the Epistle of Peter to Iakobos (James), ‘ Our Brothers ’ (he 
says) and there were among the people of Palestine persons 
sent out, “ aj30stles ” dispatched from Jerusalem by the San¬ 
hedrin. Of course these could not fail to be of consequence, 
like our politicians, and in religious matters real leaders. It is 
of little consequence how these “ apostles ” sprung up at An¬ 
tioch or elsewhere. 2 The Iessaeans had their “ select men,” like 
the towns in America, and most likely their “ apostles,” and 
among the sect of Nazorians the “ Brothers ” were brothers in 
the Lord. Mr. Gibbon has argued that there could be no 
brothers of a child of the virgin ; but, at any rate, the expres¬ 
sion Brothers in the Lord could readily change in common 

1 pneuma 6 theos : Spirit is the God.—John, iv. 24. 

3 Periodoi, Journeys, Travels.—Matth. x. 5, 16, 21, 22 ff. 


568 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


usage into the Lord’s Brothers. If the sect of Nazorian Iessae- 
ans in Northern Arabia and along the Jordan had “the Broth¬ 
ers ” (—Matthew, xxviii. 10) they would soon enough have 
“ apostles ” whether called Iakobos, Kephas, Iochanan, or by 
any other name. Therefore Irenaeus says (III. p. 245) “ tradi¬ 
tion, therefore, which is from Apostles being thus in the 
Ecclesia and permanent among us, let us return to that shew¬ 
ing (or presentation of doctrine) which is from the scriptures 
(or writings) of those apostles who have put together (in writ¬ 
ing) the Evangel.” Compare Irenaeus, III. v. 245. In III. viii. 
249, Irenaeus names Apostles and Prophets together: Neque 
Prophetae neque Apostoli alium Deum nominaverunt. The 
author of ‘ Antiqua Mater ’ considers the Christian Religion 
the work of the “ apostles ” among the Nazorenes. Matthew, 
xix. 20, gives the doctrine of the Iessaian Nazoria: The Healer 
(Iesu) says to the young man If you wish to be perfect, go sell 
thy property and give to the poor, and you will have treasure 
in heaven, and come follow me! This is just the Nazorian 
doctrine in Acts, ii. 44, 45. So that it is the Nazorian apostles 
under the name Iessaeans that have healed the sick, raised the 
dead, cast out the devils, and made the Christian religion what 
it is. They were all Brothers like the recluses in the Essaean 
habitations in the Desert. A genuine third party growing in 
influence subsequent to Jerusalem’s destruction the year 70, 
“ the Brothers ” display a curious hostility towards the Scribes 
of the Pharisee sect, saying: On the seat of Mouses sat the 
Scribes and the Pharisees: all, then, that they might say to 
you, do ; but do not according to their actions, for they speak, 
but do not perform.—Matthew, xxiii. 2-8. Neither of the three 
sects mentioned by Josephus uttered these sayings. They 
came out of the mouth of the Iessaeans (Physicians, Healers), a 
branch of that great order of the Nazoria that John the Bap¬ 
tist washed from sin in the currents of the Jordan. 

At Antioch, no one has the exact date, the Nazoria, being 
full of the Palestine gnosis, knew something about a promised 
Messiah, and had heard of Philo’s Eternal Logos and his 
Kingly Power (i.e. the Christos), and it did not take the Na¬ 
zoria (there in Antioch, a Greek city), Iessaeans, apostles and 
all, a long time to repent, and experience a change of mind 
(^cTavoowres) and a change of name. When a lawyer has no evi¬ 
dence he does not usually attempt to prove by evidence his 


THE NAZARENES. 


569 


case, but he argues it. Now all the prophecies the Jews ever 
made would not show that an alleged event had happened. It 
has to be proved by testimony ; eye-witnesses have got to be 
summoned, put on their c voir dire ’ and their character for good 
and correct judgment tested. In the first place all theology 
and angelology is oriental gnosis; secondly, all the most 
known Sacred Books of the East are as gnostical as possible ; 
thirdly, gnosis is all imagination and poetry largely infused 
with ignorance, nonsense, and trickery ; fourthly, the immense 
Jewish literature on theology is as gnostic as the rest; fifthly, 
it is as easy to write the history of past occurrences in the 
prophetic style as it is to write it in the modern historical 
style; sixthly, Justin Martyr and Tertullian took their evi¬ 
dence from the Old Testament, and from passages that, as far 
as this author has read, do not support their interpretations of 
these passages. Moreover, the method is a false one. To find 
out in a.d. 160 whether such a person as Iesu ever lived one 
would suppose that Justin Martyr and the “ apostles ” could 
have (if they could have found any testimony at all) got it a 
little nearer than the Books of Moses and Isaiah all of which, 
even the Psalms, are supposed to antedate the Christian era. 
Instead of proving the fact by judicial examination or sound 
testimony St. Paul (according to Acts, xvii. 2, 3) tries to prove 
it out of Jewisli Scriptures that by many years antedate the 
Christian era. Apollos followed the same method, according 
to Acts, xviii. 28. Because you cannot cross-examine a proph¬ 
ecy in court is no reason for misapplying it, and then be¬ 
lieving it after it has been misconstrued. The Delphic Oracle 
was once a part of ancient religion. 

The orient is about the last place to go to for science, truth, 
information, or correct notions. In referring to the curt no¬ 
tices (in Irenaeus, I. xxv., xxvi.) it must be remembered that 
Irenaeus was a partisan of the inspiration of the Gospel of 
Matthew. As a specimen of what partisans in theology did, 
we have only to observe that one in the night altered a Ms. 
which was important evidence in a case before the pope in St. 
Jerome’s time.—Diet, of Christian Biography, III. p. 33. It 
is a matter of doubt whether Kerinthus had ever heard the 
name of a man Iesu regarded as the Christos or Great Arch¬ 
angel. If Kerinthus (as Irenaeus says) held that the Christos 
was not the fleshy the doctrine of the Apokalypse is concerned 


570 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


mainly with the Logos, one like a son of man, who holds the 7 
Stars in his hand; very little is said of Iesu ? and that may 
have been an improvement in a gnostic manuscript. The 
Apokalypse does not give the name of a single apostle. That 
shows that their names were not fixed before a.d. 135. Ire- 
naeus, III. xi. p. 257 says that the Nikolaitans held that the Cre¬ 
ator is one indeed, but the Father of the Lord some one else ; 
and that the son of the Maker is one indeed, but the Christos 
is another of the beings on high, who continued impassible 
(without suffering), descending into Iesus son of the Maker, 
and flew back again into his own Pleroma: and is the begin¬ 
ning indeed of the Onlybegotten ; but that the Logos is true 
son of the Onlybegotten. . . . But according to some of the 
Gnostics this world was made by Angels and not by the Word 
of the God ; but according to the followers of Yalentinus again 
not by the Word, but by the Demiurgus. For he caused such 
likenesses (similitudines) to be made in imitation of those on 
high, as they say : but that the Demiurgus perfected the fabri¬ 
cation of the creation. For they say that he was sent out by 
the Mother as Lord and Creator of that orderly arrangement 
(dispositionis) which is according to creation (conditionem), 
through whom they mean that this world was made. . . . Some 
again held (Irenaeus, III. xi. 257) that Iesus, born of Ioseph 
and Maria, was descended into by the Christos one of the 
beings on high, without flesh and existing incapable of suffer¬ 
ing. Here we find Gnostics of the school of Kerinthus ! The 
note to Irenaeus, p. 490 calls Kerinthus a most desperate 
scoundrel, to whom the Alogians and Theodotiani dared to 
assign the book called the Apokalypse. But, while in the 
passions of that singular period the main point of the vera 
liistoria of the origin of Christianism has been almost en- 
gulphed, it will not do to entirely overlook Irenaeus’s words 
‘ eius dispositionis quae est secundum conditionem,’—which 
recall the words of the veritable old Jewish kabalah, ‘ statum 
dispositionis.’—Kabbalah Denudata, II. 246 ; Dunlap, Sod, II. 
119. The light makes transit through Adam Primus the 
Occult even into the state of disposition (i.e. grouping of the 
creation). Epiplianius (I. p. Ill) is engaged in fighting Kerin¬ 
thus ! Calls him a false apostle (—I. 112). Charges Kerinthus 
with saying that Christos (read Iesu) suffered, and was cru¬ 
cified, but is not yet raised from the dead (—Epiplianius, I. 


THE NAZARENES. 


571 


113); for, says he, koI ov tov ’I rjcrovv eivai XpLdTov, ‘ the Iesu is not 
Christos. 5 —ibid. I. 111. When therefore one reads in Smith 
and Wace Diet, of Christian Biography, I. 448, that “he 
(Kerinthus) allowed that the human body of Iesu had been 
raised from the dead,” we see that this does not conflict with 
the statement in Epiphanius, since Christos and Iesu were not 
the same to Kerinthus. Some preached that the Christos was 
not yet arisen.—Epiphan. I. p. 114. Again, p. 115, Epiphanius 
contends, against Kerinthus, that the Christos was not from 
the seed of Iosepli. Why does Epiphanius not say Iesu ? 
Nobody is deceived by his word Christos; we know that he 
means Iesu all the time! In using the word Christos he 
dodges the question whether a man is the King of heaven. 
He calls him by the Gnostic name of Christos the King, thus 
forestalling the eternal question ! The word Iesu was admitted 
by the Church to be the name of a man who had brothers and 
sisters on earth , not in heaven.—Mark, vi. 3. By using the ex¬ 
pression Christos, it is taking advantage to ask ‘ is not the 
Christos (the Logos) the King of heaven.’ The Palestine 
gnostics admitted that; but did not so readily confess Iesu 
(regarded as the son of Iosepli) to be the Son of the Man, or 
the King of heaven, or the Angel-king (Matth. iv. 11). We 
must not forget that the gnostics started christianism, and 
that after more than a century of gnosis the Church in Borne 
turned under Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others against the ex¬ 
cessive Gnosticism that had been developed into ultraism in 
many cases. The doctrine of the Saviour Angel Iesua being 
in Isaiah (the scriptures being always in the custody of the 
scribes) must be as early as the first century before Christ; in 
the gnosis of Philo Judaeus we find the Logos and the Kingly 
Power and the Mediating Power. The Iessene Ebionite Na- 
zoria probably in a.d. 30-50 (while holding with the Essenes 
some doctrine of Angels, Powers, or Aeons) had no idea of the 
Saviour except the Chaldean Logos or the Presence Angel 
Iesua before the Throne of Fire on high. These Nazorenes then 
or subsequently at Antioch acquired the Name Christos (mean¬ 
ing, probably, the Kingly Power of the Logos of Philo Ju¬ 
daeus). Up to this time the Saviour was the Angel Iesua, a 
being of pure spirit on high. In some way the point was 
raised (in connection with the idea that a Nazorene Messiah 
had come about a.d. 30-33) that there was such a one as the 


572 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


Messiah prophesied in Isaiah as a human being. The Messiah 
was to be a saviour. The name of the Saviour Angel Iesua, or, 
more likely, the name of the Nazorene Iessaeans, supplied the 
name Iesu for him. It had all been foretold in Isaiah the 
Prophet. In the times after Titus had taken Jerusalem the re¬ 
membrance of what occurred about the year 30 was a mere 
nullity,—excepting Herod and Iudah the chief of a sect, Iudali 
the Galilean,—the memory of that period had become faint 
among a population whose scribes and lawyers were the only 
ones given to much reading. The populace knew not the law,— 
because they could not read it. With them tradition was every¬ 
thing, but a prophesy more to be relied on than anything 
else. Now these Nikolaitans (who long preceded Kerinthus 
and held his views) are set down next after Simon Magus, 
Menander, Saturninus and Basileides by Pseudotertullian, 
Epiphanius, and Philaster. — Lipsius, zur Quellenkritik des 
Epiphanios, p. 6. But Irenaeus, III. xi. p. 257, distinctly says 
that the Nikolaitans were multo prius, much previous, to 
Kerinthus, as might perhaps he inferred from Bev. ii. 6, 16. 
The difficulty we find is this. That if w T e put Kerinthus as far 
back as 115 (which the author of Antiqua Mater does, and prob¬ 
ably on sound grounds) then Kerinthus is taken out of the 
sphere (after 133) in which the idea of a founder of the Iessae¬ 
ans was brought forward. But when Irenaeus, id. 257, goes on 
to say that the Nikolaitans said that the Christus underwent 
no suffering, descending into that son of the fabricator (crea¬ 
tor), and flew back again into his own pleroma, it is impossible 
not to notice a scintilla of Irenaeus’s description of Kerinthus, 
where he says: “ in fine autem revolasse iterum Christum de 
Iesu .” But it is as well to remember that Irenaeus is here 
speaking of the Nikolaitans, and that the Nikolaitans in the 
churches of Asia were not so remote from Kerinthus that 
Irenaeus could not connect them together. So that, on sound 
or unsound grounds, he could be led to attribute to the Ebion- 
ite Kerinthus the Nikolaitan haeresis and gnosis. The main 
point is that the Ebionites lived beyond the Jordan and were 
circumcised ; but that Matthew’s Gospel is Ebionite and 
Nazorene (Matthew, x. 2, 5, 6 ; xi. 13, 14; xvi. 18) knowing the 
Ecclesia and Peter its Leader, and avoids all mention of cir¬ 
cumcision. The later Ebionites gradually ceased to require 
circumcision. Acts, ii. 42-45 ; v. 1-4, is Essaian, Matthew, v. 


THE NAZARENES. 


573 


fc 

36, 37; xix. 11,12,19, 21, is Essaian and Iessaian-Ebionite. But 
it was preceded by the Gospel according to the Hebrews and 
therefore not so early. Besides it leaves out all mention of 
circumcision, which the Ebionites neglected towards the last, 
as did the author of Romans, ii. 25. Moreover, Matthew, ii. 1 
-4, xxi. 25, refers directly to John the Baptist as the first Na- 
zorene, just as the Nazoria of Bassora referred to the same 
John in works as early as the 4th century. And Justin Mar¬ 
tyr evidently quotes a Gospel (supposed to be the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews.—see Matthew, x. 5, 6) resembling 
the Gospel of Matthew in many passages. Therefore while 
this last Gospel may look early, it seems late. — Compare c Su¬ 
pernatural Religion,’ I. 421. If Delitzsch finds the ‘ Sifri ha 
Minim ’ mentioned in the Talmud Tract Sabbath fol. 116 before 
a.d. 130, it should be borne in mind that there were such Minim 
as Simon Magus, Menander, Saturninus, Kerinthus and others 
whose heretical books were probably more worthy of being 
consigned to the flames than the Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews. By the name Books of the heretics , therefore, we can 
hardly recognise that Sifri ha Minim are identified as the 
‘ Gospel according to the Hebrews.’ Observe the great differ¬ 
ence between Matthew, x. 5, 6 (where the disciples are sent not 
to the Nations nor into a Samaritan city, but rather to the lost 
sheep of the house Israel) and Matth. xxviii. 19 (where the dis¬ 
ciples are told to go and teach and baptise all the Nations). 
How can this last be reconciled with Matthew x. ? This last is 
narrow-minded Ebionite ; but Matthew, xxviii. has the true 
Pauline universalism that the Hellenist Judaist of Tarsus in 
Kilikia preached in Acts xvii. 26. Paulinism and late Ebion- 
ism were at last drawn more together, and, the one being late, 
it was getting for the interest of the other to be more like it. 
Hence the Gospel of Matthew was late ; but it retained the 
foundation principles of the Nazorian-Ebionism, the Essene 
doctrines, the Ebionite exclusiveness, and the Iessaean mir¬ 
acles, while it made a bid at the close for the dominion of the 
Gentiles. One may be sure that the last addition was made 
after a.d. 133. Irenaeus and his followers Hippolytus and 
Epiphanius differed. Irenaeus said that the Ebionites thought 
differently from Kerinthus about the Lord (Christos); but the 
two followers say that Kerinthus and the Ebionites agreed in 
opinion about the Christos; consequently it is just possible 


574 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


that neither of the three knew what Kerinthus thought. Es¬ 
pecially as he is dated at about 115 by the author of Antiqua 
Mater. While any hope of defeating the Romans remained as 
it did in the Barcochebah campaign it is hard to see how the 
Jews or even the transjordan Ebionim could believe in a Mes¬ 
siah of a hundred years before and his crucifixion. Therefore, 
how could Kerinthus have believed in it ? According to the 
text of Hippolytus, Lipsius, p. 119, 141, finds that Kerinthus 
held that a Power descended on the Christos from above, and 
that the Christos is not distinguished from the man Iesu; 
also that Ebion thought the same things as Kerinthus, but 
differed only by adhering to the Law in all things. There is 
no doubt that Hippotytus mixed up Iesus and Christos inter¬ 
changeably. 

Philo (Confusio ling. 14; Creatio mundi, 6, 8) declares the 
Logos to be the Archangel (1 Tliess. iv. 16), but among the 
gnostics the Angel Gabriel takes the place of the Logos.— 
Irenaeus, I. xii. p. 86. According to Irenaeus, III. 257 the Niko- 
laitans held that the Father of the Lord is different from the 
Creator, and that the son of the Maker is not the Christos, who 
continued impassible (i.e. did not suffer), descending into Iesu 
the son of the Creator and flying back again into his own Plero- 
ma; and (that he) is the beginning indeed of the Only-begotten, 
but that the Logos is the true Son of the Onlybegotten. 1 Here 


1 Isaiah’s A1 Gabor seems to be late Jewish Messianist; and this view is supported 
by the disturbances which the Jews at Rome raised on account of Christus,—‘impul- 
sore Christo.’ Delitzsch, Messianische Weissagungen in Geschichtl. Folge, 101, 102, 
should be compared in reference to A1 Gabor. 

It seems reasonably open to doubt (distrusting Irenaeus) what Kerinthus admitted 
concerning Iesu, or if he acknowledged any more of the 2nd person of the Christian Trin¬ 
ity than the Angel Iesua the Salvator, the God of the Salvation and Resurrection of the 
good. Satuminus evidently did not go further than to admit the Salvator, solely as a 
deity. The change of the Syrian word Iesua into the Greek ISsous and the Latin 
Iesus would have a tendency to assist in the transposition of the Angel into the man 
Iesus, following the original hopes centred in David’s line; and so the conscience as 
well as the theology of many a partisan would be satisfied. Matthew, xvii. 2 trans¬ 
figures Iesu. When Budha died he entered Nirvana, the sun.—Bunsen, Angel-Mess. 
49. Philo regarded the sun as a symbol of the Cause.—Philo, de Somn. I. 16. The 
Chaldean Saturn had his Sun or Logos, and Philo borrows it.—Movers, I. 553. 

If the Logos was the true Son of the Onlybegotten (as the Gnostics said) and the 
Angel Gabriel takes the place of the Logos (as the Gnostics said), then the Gabriel (of 
Luke, i. 26, 35) was the Angel of the Lord, the Great Archangel Lord (the Kurios) of 
the Nazoria and Ebionim beyond the Jordan. The point we make is that in the eyes 
of these Gnostics Gabriel would then have been Son of the Onlybegotten, whereas 
among the Nazoria of the “ Codex Nazoria ” the Gabriel was Son of the God, begotten 


THE NAZARENES. 


575 


we see how near Kerinthns and Karpokrates must have been 
to the Nikolaitans who were Gnostics and hated by the author 
of Revelations, ii. 15. Here we reach in the second century of 
our era a common ground on which the quasi Judaists men¬ 
tioned in Rev. ii. 6, 9,13-15 could stand with the Karpokratians, 
Kerintlius, Saturninus and Markion. Thus at Antioch and in 
Asia Minor there would seem to have been a Gnostic Chris- 
tianism different from what Tertullian’s Christian party pro¬ 
fessed, and this Christianism of the first part of the Second 
Century would seem to have been gnostic in a measure repre¬ 
sented by Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerintlius and some quasi 
Jews ; later, about 150-170, by Markion and Apelles; but of 
course with certain minor differences in individual views. One 
result which we obtain is that Rev. ii. 6, 15 was written well 
into the Second Century of our era, after a.d. 115-128. Rev. 
xviii. 20 speaks of martyred apostles and prophets, but not of 

upon Light, and performs the part which John, i. 3 assigns to the Logos.—Dunlap, 
Sod, II. p. xxvii.; Codex Nazoria, I. 165, 247, 267, 287, 291. The Chaldean Logos doc¬ 
trine preceded the Logos of Philo and the Memra of the Targums (Nork, II. 278). 
Isaiah and Philo were Jews, not Tessaeans proper. Isaiah lxiii. 8, 9, speaks of the Angel 
of the Divine Presence as the Saviour, and Luke, i. 19, 26, 47, says that his name is 
1 Gabriel who stands before the face of the God’ and that the God is the Saviour of 
Mariam. But Philo, who preceded not the Nazoria but the Iessaeans of the 2nd cen¬ 
tury, has the following rather unreliable passage confirmatory of Luke's Gospel in 
regard to Gabriel. 

What refer to the genesis of the Unborn are a long way off, even if very much ap¬ 
proximated, following upon the ‘attractive favors’ of the Saviour.—Ex Iohanne 
Monacho. Philonis Opera Omnia, Lipsiae, 1853, Tomus vi. p. 253. 

That this is Philo’s, may be conjectured from ‘what concerns the Unborn and His 
Powers; ’ and Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9, shows that the Jews acknowledged (in their Kabalah 
and Gnosis) a Saviour Angel (lesua) ‘in the presence of the God ’ who by his mercies 
(oAkcu? x° L P L<rL ') drew up towards him the souls of men. While Philo speaks of this 
Archangel, he never mentions the word Christos, but only Logos, Great Archangel of 
many names, Oldest Angel, etc., while late in the 2nd century we find the Angel-king 
among the Iessaeans.—Matthew, iv. 11; xxv. 34; Luke, ii. 9. Now if little children 
had their representative angels in heaven in the Father’s presence (Matth. xviii. 10) 
what hindered some to consider that the Angel lesua in heaven represented the Messiah 
on earth?—Matth. xvi. 16; Luke, ii. 11; Codex Nazoria, I. 266, 164, 282. The Kab- 
bala is a valuable remnant of an Oriental philosophy of religion. The Hebrew Sohar 
was composed from the writings of Simeon ben Iochai who lived in the 2nd century 
The Sohar is full of Messianic passages, so that almost all the Christian doctrines 
preached by Paul and the other apostles are to be found in it.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 
p. 89. The Sohar names Metatron the First-born Being and Beginning of all creatures. 
Metatron will be conjoined to a body in places of burial. All postbiblical Jewish 
studies in Palestine are only gotten from Babylonia.—Fuerst, p. 11. Exodus, iii. 2, 6, 
14, Philo, Vita Mosis, I. 12, and Matthew, iii. 11, represent the Logos (Angel Tahoh) as 
the image of the Primal Being, as Angel, as the Angel of the Providence from God, 
and as Son in the Codex of the Nazoria. 


576 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Peter and Paul. The writer of the Apokalypse places himself 
in an attitude hostile to the heathen-christians. Volkmar says 
(Commentar zur Offenbarung Johannis, p. 42): The rabbinical 
learning and art which reigns through the entire book is hardly 
to be referred to the Pisherapostle (compare Holzmann in 
Schenkel’s Bibellexicon, III. p. 337. Scholten, p. 8 f.). . . . The 
Christus conception which meets us here seems to presuppose 
such a free conception as belonged only to the later Christian- 
ism (comp. Scholten, p. 9) : “ The apotheosis of Iesu is too 
strong to be ascribed to a contemporary and disciple of Iesu. 

. . . The fire of his soaring flight, the youthful force of imag¬ 
ination, which enlivens the book bearing date a.d. 68, is hardly 
natural in a contemporary of Iesu living so late. Hoekstra 
(p. 367 f.) says: The whole spirit and learned contents of the 
book speak against its composition by one of the most trusted 
disciples of Iesu, not only in so far as according to this book 
Iesu, only unwillingly and compelled by the events of the time, 
will not impose on his followers the burden of the Law of 
Moses, in so far as the same was already laid aside, ii. 24 (see 
Acts, xv. 29); . . . but also because this book utters no single 
thought that lifts in principle (principiell) Christianism above 
Mosaism. ... If in reality the spirit and character of the his¬ 
toric Christos, as John had learned to know him personally, 
have been the foundation on which he has built his idea of the 
heavenly Christos, then there is left scarcely anything of the 
full of love and loveworthy human-son (Menscliensolines) that 
the Synoptic Evangels depict” (comp. Scholten, p. 9, 130). 
And Scholten, p. 10, adds to this the objection that the Apoka- 
lyptic writer puts himself in an attitude hostile to the Heathen- 
christians.—Hermann Gebhardt, Lehrbegriff der Apokalypse, 
Gotha, 1873, p. 8. Like the Nikolaitans, Paul, 1 Cor. viii. 10, 
11, evidently objects to the heathen custom of idolatry, eating 
meat in an idol’s temple, which excites the ire of the author of 
Rev. ii. 20. The Pauline writer thus coincides with the author 
of the Apokalypse in this particular; so that if one wrote in 
the 2nd century the other probably did. In addition to all the 
testimony accumulated in this chapter w T e must take into con¬ 
sideration the statement found in the work of Josephus (if 
genuine) that the sect of Judas the Galilean survived as late 
as a.d. 100. Is not this statement intended to bolster up the 
hypothesis on which the sect of the Iessaean Nazoraioi (Na- 



THE NAZARENES. 


577 


zoria) was subsequently founded ? The remark is calculated 
to support an interest in the patriotic efforts of the natives of 
the region that Rome had crushed. Now the story of Iesu is 
directly based on the status in Palestine in the time of Pilate. 
All the ingredients of interest belonging to that period are 
interwoven or in some way referred to in the New Testament 
narratives of the Synoptic gospels, and these gospels followed 
upon a set of prior Gnostic narratives. The gnosis was the 
first motor, and the Four Gospels responded to its inspiration 
in Palestine, Antioch, and Asia Minor. If the sect of Iudah 
the Galilean continued even only to the year a.d. 100 it would 
naturally become affiliated to the Ebionites and Nazoria beyond 
the Jordan. The writers of Matthew, xii. 5 and John, viii. 5, 
xii. 34 must have been Ebionite Nazoria since they still relied 
on the Law of Moses and the authority of John who baptised 
the Nazoria in the Jordan. 

Both Karpokrates and Kerintkus, if we can trust Tertul- 
lian, held that the world was created by a lower order of angels 
and Powers far distant from the upper Powers. 1 Irenaeus says 
very little of Kerinthus, and gives us perhaps the ideas of the 
‘ Kerinthians of his time ’ rather than those of Kerinthus him¬ 
self. Moreover he credits Kerinthus with a complete admis¬ 
sion of the attributes of the heavenly Angel Iesua or Salvator, 
but a denial that the man Iesu is the Christos. The antithesis 
between the acceptance of a Messiah-Christos and the negation 
of the claims of a man Iesua is so striking that we cannot 
avoid suspecting that there was no such individual, since to 
assert that there is a Saviour and simultaneously to deny that 
the man Iesu is the Saviour Christos is so summary and com¬ 
plete as to imply a radical distinction between the two,—so 
radical as to make it doubtful whether Kerinthus ever held 
any opinion at all about the man Iesua. Did Irenaeus super¬ 
add the lesus part ? Irenaeus (about 40-55 years later) said 
that Kerinthus denied that lesus was the Angel-King, the 
Messiah, the Logos, believing in an Angel-King, an Angel 
Iesua, a Salvator. His statement amounts to this, that Kerin- 


i Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Tertullian, Vol. III. p. 465. As Kerinthus 
taught similarly to Karpokrates, the words ‘ ab illis ’ probably refer to ‘ those ’ lower 
angels and powers, that, according to Karpokrates, created the world. “ In the arro¬ 
gant name of the Gnostics they promise a certain new scientia.”—Origen contra Oel- 
sum, V. p. 489. ed. Paris, 1619. 

37 


578 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tlius made a distinction between the Christos and Iesu. 1 Con¬ 
sequently he believed in the Jewish Messiah alone, not in 
Iesus. The statement of Irenaeus amounts to charging Kerin- 
thus with a knowledge of the existence on earth of a Iesu,—i.e. 
of what was dogma after a.d. 145-160. As to Kerinthus 2 being 

1 Matthew, xxvii. 46, affords a clue to this idea, which was more likely to be known 
to Irenaeus than to Kerinthus, since, according to the author of ‘‘ Supernatural Re¬ 
ligion ” and for reasons of evidence elsewhere stated in this work, there is no reason to 
think that the Gospel of Matthew is as ancient as a. d. 130 or 140, while ‘ ‘ Anti qua Mater ” 
dates Kerinthus about 115. An upper class apostle at Antioch was capable, in a.d. 
160 of writing the Gospel of Matthew in Greek. But there is reason for thinking that 
the Gospel of the Hebrews (Gospel of the Nazarenes) preceded ; and, if Irenaeus is ex¬ 
act in his account of Basileides, Karpokrates and Kerinthus, then these must all have 
known this Gospel, and the crucifixion doctrine probably contained in it. But neither 
Simon Magus, Menander, nor Saturninus (according to Irenaeus) seem to have known 
anything about either. Although there were numerous gnostic scriptures in Babylon, 
India, Egypt, and on the Jordan, Origen, c. Cels. V. p. 489, says that the Simonians 
(not Simon himself) refuse to confess Iesus to be the Son of the God, but call Simon the 
Power of the God. It looks here as if Simon Magus himself had never heard of Iesu, 
in spite of the Acts of the Apostles, since Simonians deified himself. 

2 There were two sorts of Ebionites, one described by Tertullian, the other by 
Irenaeus. They aimed to correct the life and to abuse the flesh. Tertullian’s Ebionim 
held that Iesus was a man born just like other men. So far, we see an agreement be¬ 
tween Kerinthus and the Ebionites; the Ebionim of Irenaeus I. xxvi. held that ‘ the 
world was made by the God ’ (which Kerinthus denied), and regarding the Lord (Iesus) 
they differ from Kerinthus and Karpokrates (whom Irenaeus describes in I. xxiv. xxv. 
as holding that Iesus was the son of Ioseph and Maria). Irenaeus’s Ebionim use only 
that gospel which is according to Matthew (we read elsewhere in Epiphanius that the 
Kerinthians used only a part of Matthew’s gospel, ex parte, non ex toto.—See Note to 
Irenaeus, I. xxv. p. 127). And the Ebionim of Irenaeus rejected Paul as an apostate 
from the Law.—ibid. I. xxvi. According to Neander, the Ebionites differed in opin¬ 
ions, some agreeing with Karpokrates in denying the supernatural birth, yet not deny¬ 
ing his resurrection. One sort (the stricter kind) were beyond Jordan and continued 
down to the 5th century at Pella. They were little different from Jews.—Compare 
Matthew, v. 17 ; also Library of Univ. Knowl. Art. Ebionites. But the Ebionites 
around Beroea in the 4th century were more liberal; they still continued to circumcise 
and keep the Sabbath. Tertullian says that Ebion believed the Iesus to be a mere 
man. But which sort of Ebionites does he mean ? Probably the Ebionites beyond 
Jordan, who were almost Jews, would not take up any opinions about Iesus at all, until 
after a.d. 160. They would be able to assign Essene doctrines (as in Matthew, v. vi. 
vii. chapters) to the Iessenes (or Essenes) not to Iesus. Kerinthus, Irenaeus I. xxv. 
says, separated the Christus from the Iesus ! How could Kerinthus distinguish be¬ 
tween the Christos and Iesus, and leave anything of the latter ? Saturninus does 
not mention Iesus, but only the Salvator (Christus, Metatron, Angel-Iving and Angel 
Iesua). Karpokrates and Kerinthus immediately follow Saturninus (in Irenaeus), and 
he puts the Ebionites after Kerinthus in his order of arrangement ; as if be was think¬ 
ing of the later Ebionites around Beroea. It looks very much as if there had been a 
gap “before Antioch” that some Christian party was anxious to fill in. Irenaeus 
adroitly draws attention to the later Ebionites of the Beroean sort, and the word ‘ Iesus’ 
in the end of I. xxv. forms a quasi connection with the word Dominus in the reference 
(I. xxvi.) to the later Ebionites. 


THE NAZARENES. 


579 


a Judaist Gnostic at Antioch, what is gnosis, if the account of 
the marriage of the Sons of God (the Angels) with the daugh¬ 
ters of men, in Gen. vi. 1-4 and in the Book of Henoch, is not 
Jewish gnosis ! What else is Ezekiel, i. except gnosis ? 

The work, Antiqua Mater, decides substantially as follows : 
That Pliny’s letter to Trajan in the autumn or winter of 112, 
the letters of Pliny and Trajan being externally unattested, 
not quoted by Justin Martyr, causes serious doubts of its 
genuineness; that Tacitus writing about 112-115 and speaking 
of Christiani confounds the Christians with the Messianists 
(Jews) in the time of Nero, the two words Messiah and Chris- 
tus being equivalents. Tacitus simply dates back the Chris¬ 
tians of 112 to the Messianists of 64. The Christiani of Trajan’s 
time were making themselves felt; and the word Christiani, 
according to Justin, covered a number of gnostic sects, Kerin - 
thus himself being called a false apostle, although believing 
in a Christos. But the Messianists of a.d. 64, while trouble¬ 
some, were not yet Christians. 

There was a false Messiah in Judea in a.d. 60-63, and 
another as early as 45.—Jahn, Hebrew Commonwealth, 368, 
374. Tiberius Alexander, succeeding Fadus in 46, crucified 
the two sons of Judas the Galilean.—ibid. 368. Suetonius, a 
contemporary of Tacitus, tells us that the Christiani were 
severely punished in the reign of Nero, a.d. 65. Suetonius 
says: “ Judaeos, impulsore Christo, assiduo tumultuantes Boma 
expulit.” An impostor, or false Messiah, assembled a body of 
armed men at Tirabatha to go to Mt. Garizim, whom Pilate 
attacked and dispersed.—Jahn, p. 358. The author of Antiqua 
Mater considers that Tacitus could have known nothing of 
the distinction between those that looked for a Messiah and 
such as believed in the Iesus as Christos. There were others 
(gnostics) accepting Iesus and proclaiming themselves Chris¬ 
tians, yet keeping the Law and living in the customs of the 
Jews: to wit, Ebionites of two sorts, either confessing with us 
Iesus born of a virgin, or not so, but like other men. Origen, 
c. Cels. V. p. 489. 

The Apokalypse mentions the Lion of Judah, and the 
Archangel Michael had the lion’s head. The Lion was, says 
Porphyry, worshipped as God. 1 The lion is the symbol of 
Herakles, Adonis, Horus, Apollo, Mithra and Yislinu. At the 

1 de Abst. iv. p. 54; Exodus, xxvii. 31. 


580 


THE O HE BE US OF HEBRON. 


time of Alexander’s invasion, the Hindus adored Dionysus and 
Herakles, who are Vishnu and Krishna. Some of the rock- 
hewn temples where Krishna was worshipped reach back to a 
period prior to the Christian era. 1 Brachmans followed Alex¬ 
ander to near Babylon. One burned himself alive at no great 
distance from it. Thus, before our era, the followers of Mithra 
and Krishna had reached Babylon. 2 The Brahman Manu was 
known there probably as soon as Moses was. 

Let him abstain from honey and meats of all kinds . . . Let him avoid 
woman, and every thing fermented.—Jacolliot, Manou, p. 75 ; Manu, II. 176, 
177. 

The dwidja who aspires to sanctity ought to follow the example of sanctified 
personages and to abstain even from permitted meats. He who lives only on 
cereals, vegetables and fruits avoids all the evils that afflict this world below.— 
Jacolliot, Manou, p. 217. 

The Brahmans of the South of Hindustan, supporting them¬ 
selves upon this law, prohibit meat entirely. 3 The Jewish nazer 
was forbidden the use of wine and spirit. 4 The Brahman 
Nazarenes were before our era, like those of the Syrians and 
Jews. Let him deny himself (—Matthew, xvi. 24) like the Ies- 
saeans. 


His food was locusts and wild honey. 5 —Matthew, iii. 4. 

Behold the birds of the heaven that they sow not, neither do they reap nor 
gather into barns, yet your heavenly father feeds them ! Are you not of much 
more value than they ?—Matthew, vi. 26. 

Thus the Brahman appeared in Syria, bearing on his forehead 
the sign of his sect. The followers of Mithra were so marked ; 6 
and in the Christian Mystery 7 the army of Saints bears the 
sign upon the forehead . 8 The Great Baptist appears on the 

1 Krishna. The incarnation of Vishnu. 

2 So Movers, Phon. pp. 551, 553; Julian, Orat. v. in Matrem Deorum, p. 172; 
Dunlap, Sod, II. 27. The cock was sacred to Demeter, wherefore the Initiated do not 
eat it, nor were domestic birds, fish or beans eaten at Eleusis. The orthodox Jews 
lived on bread, milk and honey. The Pharisees despised delicacies in diet. 

3 Jacolliot, Manou, p. 217. 

4 Numbers, vi. 2, 3, 4. The Syrians are said to have anciently abstained from the 

animals. —Porphyry, de Abst. iv. p. 57. 

6 ne\idypiov, it is somewhere said, is not honey at all. 

6 Tertullian, de praescript. xl. 

7 the Apokalypse. 

8 Rev. xiv. 1; xx. 4. 


THE NAZARENES. 


581 


Jordan in all the strictness of Manu’s precepts, eating only 
wild food. 1 

Bel being the Lord of the world dwelling in the temple of 
the Sun, is consequently the Chaldaean and Hebrew Logos, 
whom Philo, Allegories, I. 30 calls Adam, on the ground that 
Adam, who he says is the “ Nous," gives names to and com¬ 
prehends all things. The Hindu ascribed this office of ‘ nam¬ 
ing the creatures ’ to Brahma. Now Adam (Christos) in Gen¬ 
esis, ii. 4, 7, is brought into connection with the generation of 
the heavens 2 and the earth, so that it is easy to see where the 
Ebionite got his Adam-Christ of the Clementine Homilies. . . . 
But, ^is Bel set his abode in the temple of the Sun, so the 
Hebrew Creator, according to the Septuagint and the Yulgate 
psalm xix. placed his tabernacle in the sun. Before the sun 
rose the Essenes spoke no ordinary word ; like the Jews and 
Therapeutae they beheld the Deity in the sun.—Numbers, 
xxv. 4. So did the Iezidi. Josephus describes the leaving 
dead bodies putrefying in the sun as an offense to the Supreme 
King of all, to whom purification is due. The Jewish High- 
priest was not allowed to be ‘defiled for the dead.’ In the 
Babylonian Myth Bel takes off his own head, and with the 
blood that pours forth gives life to man. He is the source of 
the spiritus vitae (see Exodus, iii. 2, 6, 15). The Egyptians 
said that from the sun jDroceeded fire and spirit. The spirit is 
the Creator.—Gen. i. 2 ; ii. 7. El breathes out the breath of 
life (the spiritus, the pneuma) into the nostrils of mankind. 
The Egyptians said that from the sun came fire and spirit. 
But the sun, according to Philo, Quis Heres, 53 ; Yita Mosis, 
39, de Somn. 13,14, 15, 16; is the emblem of the Logos who is 
the Greal Archangel of many names.—Philo, Confusio Ling. 
14, 28. The spiritus vitae, the Breath of the lives (of all that 
live) issues from Iaclioh of dual power of life.—Gen. ii. 7 ; 
Exodus, iii. 2, 14 ; Gen. ii. 23, iii. 20. Iachoh is the mentally- 

1 These prophets were wild pastors, wandering in Nabathea. nabaa means “to 
itinerate ” (in arabic) ; nabi means a “ prophet ”: and the Essenes made their “ travels,” 
like the Brahman penitents. The Mysteries required abstinence by avoiding women 
and by fasting; Romans, xiv. 21. “Iesous the Nazarene who became a prophet.”— 
Luke, xxiv. 19. The Opinion of the Nazarenes was before Christ and knew not Christ. 
—Epiphanius, I. 121. The prophet of to-day was formerly called Seer. He goes up 
into the High place to eat. For the people will not eat until he comes ; for he blesses 
the sacrifice. 1 Samuel, ix. 9, 13. 

2 Colossians, i. 15, 16, 27. The Man formed after God’s own image was not placed 
in paradise.—Gen. i. 27; Philo, Plant. Noe, 11. 


582 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


perceived principium of Light and Life, the Eternal “ I am,” 
the Mysterious Divinity lad of the Chaldaeans and Phoenicians, 
—the Iahoh of the Jews! The Izedi (Iezidi, compare Asad, 
Sada a fire-flame, and El Sadi of the Jews) are connected with 
the Hebrews by circumcision, the passover, or a sacrificial 
festival allied to the passover in time and circumstances. To 
this we may add the more direct testimony of ancient Syrian 
authors. Dr. Grant consulted a work (in the possession of Mar 
Shimon) written in 1253 containing a statement that the Izedis 
are of Hebrew descent. 1 The Iezidi adored a solar symbol. 
According to Mani, Christos the Glorious Intelligence, called 
by the Persians Mithra, resided in the sun. The Angel Gabriel 
was the Eireangel, and, besides being the Great Archangel of 
many names, was the representative of the Logos (according 
to Irenaeus, Luke, and Philo) and peculiarly the Archangel of 
the Nazoria, Nazorenes, and Ebionites beyond the Jordan and 
along the Euphrates.—Codex Nazoria, passim ; Luke’s Gospel, 
i. 19, 26, 35; Philo, Conf. Ling. 28 ; On Dreams, 37; Who is 
Heir, 13 ; Allegories, II. 21; Hebrews, i. 2 ; Judges, xiii. 9, 22 ; 
Ezekiel, i. 27. When the Beni Asarel served Bal and Astarta, 
the gods of Moab and the Deities of the Transjordan, no wonder 
that out of the Gheber sun and fire worship Gabariel (Herakles) 
should at last be acknowledged as the Vital Eire, the Word of 
Saturn, 2 and the Fireangel of the Jordan. Logos was God’s 
image through whom the entire World was made.—Philo 
Monarch., II. 5. 

But the power that issues from the fountain of the Logos 
has the spirit. 3 Divine, without form, is the spirit, pervading 
the internal and external of beings, unborn, without breath, 
without heart (manas), shining elevated above the highest and 
unalterable. Out of him comes the breath of life, the mind, 
and all senses. The Mundaka Upanishad. 4 Philo. Vita Mosis I. 
12, 13, recognises the Deity of Exodus, iii. 2, 4, 6, as the Sav- 

1 Syria and the Holy Land, by Walter Keating Kelly, p. 48. 

2 When Philo, de Agricultura, 17, speaks of eucharistia and honor “ of the sole 
Saviour,” he means the Supreme Deity. Philo was not a Christian , although he taught 
the doctrine of a Great Archangel and the Divine Logos. The time for that was not 
yet come. Titus had not destroyed Jerusalem, nor had Adrian revived the place as 
Aelia Capitolina, excluding all Jews. The lost sheep around HaSabun (Heshbon) and 
the mountains of Moab could then come to the front as political and religious adver¬ 
saries of the Pharisees, as soon as Jerusalem was rooted out. 

3 Philo, Quod Deterius. 23. 

4 Wuttke, II. 294. 


THE NAZARENES. 


583 


iour Angel and God the Saviour. Philo, 10 Command., 33, 
ascribes safety, salvation, to the Good Lord (Kurios Agathos) 
and King, Cause of good alone and of nothing evil. 

With the exception of Euhemerus and his party, deities were 
anciently regarded as spirit and not flesh; so the gnostics 
held. Philo represents to us the Chaldean Bel-Mitlira, the 
Logos, Mediator, and also recluse self-denial. The Essaeans 
were on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, as were the Elchas- 
ites, a Sabian or Baptist sect, who at the beginning of the 2nd 
century were blended with the Ebionites; sects floating be¬ 
tween Judaism, Christianity, Baptism and Sabianism were in 
the transjordan region during the first centuries of our era. 
“All that dwell in the Desert are uncircumcised.”—Jeremiah, 
ix. 26. Circumcision is here employed in a political sense ; 
for the Ebionites adhered to the Jewish Law and consequently 
to circumcision.—Irenaeus, I. xxvi. The Ebionites and Nazo- 
ria lived together in the Desert (—Norberg, pref. to Codex 
Nazoria, p. v.), were later called Nabathaeans, and were an in¬ 
dependent people.—ibid. p. v.; Dunlap, Sod, II., 11, 33. The 
Nabathaeans inhabited the southern foot of Mount Lebanon.— 
ibid. 10 ; Jervis, Gen. p. 382. The Jewish priests adored the 
Lord of life in the rising sun.—Ezekiel, viii. 16 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 
11 ; Numb. xxv. 4. So did. the Essaeans.—Jos. Wars, II. 8, 5. 
The Sabians are a people standing midway between Christians 
and Magians. Abu ’Hanifah (c. 750-760) says that the Ssabi- 
ans stand between Judaism and Christianism and read psalms. 
Others say that they worship the Angels.—Chwolsohn, I. 190, 
191; II. 564, 565. Compare the prohibition to worship Angels. 
—Coloss. ii. 18. We can see from this the extreme probability 
that we have to deal (in early Christianism) with transjordan 
and Nabathaean gnosis. Matthew, ii. 1, at once brings the 
Magians from the eastern districts upon the scene ! There is 
no doubt, says Chwolsohn, I. 116, 117, that the Elkasites were 
identical with the Mandaites. These are the Nazoria of the 
4 Codex Nazoria.’—ibid. 117. Abu ’Hanifah came from near 
Bassora, where the Mandaites were. These Elkasites, Ossenes, 
Nazoraioi agreed with the Ebionites (who used the Book of 
Elxai) and Sampsaioi (Sun worshippers), and still lived in 
Arabia in the time of Epiphanius, a.d. 367.—Chwolsohn, I. 117 ; 
Epiphan, xix.; liii. p. 461. In Elxai, Chwolsohn, I. 119, 120, 
sees Persian influences, at home in Arabia. 


5S4 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Iessenes (the Essenes) detested oil as defilement. The 
Iessaean healers (in the New Testament) used it to anoint the 
sick. We have first the Iessenes a sect of self-denying monks 
who practised the healing art 150 years before the Christian 
era. These were succeeded by Nazorian Iessaeans who healed 
the sick and cast out devils. These Nazorian Iessaeans are 
described as making their c Travels,’ just as the Essenes did. 
The Essenes claimed nothing, all was common property within 
the order of Essenes, and therefore when they travelled (made 
the teavels) they carried nothing at all with them but went in 
to the houses of other Essenes that they had never seen before 
as if they were most intimate friends.—Josephus, Wars, II. 7 (8). 
The sect that claimed to be Nazorians or Nazarenes borrowed 
these habits from the Iessenes.—Matthew, x. 9, 10; Luke, x. 
4-10. Epiphanius, I. 117, 120 (ed. Petavius) says that they 
were called Iessaeans before they were called Christians, and 
that all Christians were then called Nazarenes. These Nazori¬ 
ans (just called Iessaeans) were contemporaneous with the Ke- 
rinthians (—Epiphanius, I. 117) and preceded them (about 
which Epiphanius higgles and hesitates, but admits that they, 
for all he knows , preceded the Kerinthians and anyway were 
contemporaneous with them). Epiphanius (bishop of Salamis, 
called Constantia, in Cyprus from 367 to 403) here makes an 
apparently unwilling but a most important admission, which 
shows that, if there were Iessaians before Kerinthus, he did 
not care to know much about it. We know not the exact 
date when they acquired the name Christians at Antioch 
(where Kerinthus was) because the Book of Acts is not relied 
upon for the facts ; but since they were contemporaneous 
with the Kerinthians, we may put them down as early as 105, 
not far from and before the era of the Nikolaitans and before 
the time when the Apokalypse was written. Kerinthus might 
have been a Christian, because he believed in a Christos, but 
he did not believe that the Saviour Christos was Iesus.—Iren- 
aeus, I. xxv. He distinguishes between the two very clearly ; 
for (according to Irenaeus) he considers Iesua Ioseph’s son 
by Mary; but the Christos , he thought, was not crucified. So 
Karpokrates thought, that he was a man like other men, but 
superior. In the time of Philo preceding these two philoso¬ 
phers Iesua is not mentioned. At this Nazorene period were 
the Poor, the Ebionites (Luke, vi. 20 blesses them) and some 


THE NAZARENES. 


585 


one inferred that an Ebion was tlieir founder. 1 So some one 
might have inferred that a Iesua 2 had been the founder of 

1 “ The creation of a head of sect, Ebion, who must be a disciple or successor of 
Kerinthus.'’ “ Out of the parallel passages Philastrius haer. 37. Pseudotertullian 
haer. 11 we recognize that at all events Hippolytus already derived the name Ebionites 
from a pretended Sect-founder Ebion, while nevertheless Irenaeus knew nothing of the 
same.”—Lipsius, zur Quellenkrit. d. Epiphan. 68, 138. We will date a period in the 
life of Hippolytus at 211-217. Irenaeus wrote in circa 188-200. Therefore no Ebion 
was known during the first two centuries as Founder of the Ebionite sect. 

2 If Epiphanius could not positively trace the Iessaeans back further than the 
Kerinthians, how could he trace their founder ? If Hippolytus wrote that Kerinthus 
held that “after the Christos grew up the holy spirit came into him in appearance of a 
dove” (—Lipsius, 119), that involves the complete theology of the Greek Gospel of 
Matthew, i. 20, 21 ; iii. 16, 17. Coming through Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, 
there arises a doubt whether from Saturninus down to Kerinthus any but a spirit Chris¬ 
tos was acknowledged as Saviour. The whole tribe of the Nazoria would appear to 
have been gnostics. Markion was. That Kerinthus, holding to Judaic usages, and to 
the Christos (as a Jewish dogma), should accept at Antioch the doctrine of Matthew is 
surprising, when the Ebionites, as Eusebius says, did not. He was probably Messianist, 
and believed in a Christos or Saviour Angel, the Angel Iesua, as the Jews did. In the 
Apokalypse mostly the Christos is seen. 

Philo’s description of the Essenes could be applied to the first Christian communi¬ 
ties so striking is the resemblance. One can then believe that among them the apostles 
have recruited their first disciples.—Louis Menard, Hermes, lvi. The author of “ Christ 
the spirit ” assumes that the Essenes gave birth to the gospel writers, that Philo knew no 
Iesus, that he might have known the facts reported of him if they had been historical, 
that the Essene sect or some writers belonging to it devised a dramatic representation 
of the murder of the Spirit of the Jewish religion under the Law and the ceremonies, 
that this Spirit has never been a historical person nor does it depend on a historical 
event, that Iesu was not a person in the miraculous portion of his history but a per¬ 
sonification ; that there might have been a real person around whom the myth was 
thrown, but that the real person was a man. But if Iesu was an impersonation then 
the writer deprives him of all the interest that attaches to him in the gospels ; and there 
was no occasion for the author to admit his existence under his point of view. The 
only strong point that he makes is the Essene-Ebionite origin of the New Testament 
Scriptures for which Philo, Josephus, Eusebius and Epiphanius appear as witnesses. 
Since Josephus mentions the Essaean sect in 144 before our era we cannot derive the 
Essene name from Iesu (lesous) ; but we can derive lesu’s name from the Nazorian 
Iessaeans ! In this last hypothesis the sect described in Matthew, i. 21 ; ii. 1 ; iii. 1-7 ; 
iv. 1, 12, 23 ; v. 34-37 ; vi. 19; viii.; ix. 13 ; x. 1-12 were of necessity Iessaean Healers, 
basing themselves on Essaean (Essene) doctrines.—Acts, ii. 44-46. The Essene was 
bound by fearful oaths not to reveal to others any of their secrets.—Josephus, Wars, 
II. 8, 7. What I tell you in the darkness speak in the light, and what you hear (whis¬ 
pered) into the ear proclaim upon the roofs.—Matthew, x. 27. The Iessaean-Nazori 
plays upon the Essene dogma ‘ that the soul becoming initiated into the perfect-initia¬ 
tion ceremonies may not readily divulge the divine mysteries to any one, but, treasur¬ 
ing them up and keeping silence, preserve them in mystery. For it is written to 
make secret cakes ! Because it is necessary that the holy mystic account about the 
Unborn and His Powers should be hidden; since it does not belong to all to keep a 
deposit of divine mysteries.’—Philo, Sacrif. of Abel and Kain, 15. Man is a divine 
animal and is not compared with the other animals of the earth but with those above 
in heaven called Gods. But rather, if it is necessary to take courage and speak the 


586 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Iessaean sect of Healers among the Nazorenes. But Philo 
had never heard of him. The name Iessaeans could not then 
point back to Iesua. They bore their Iessene name because 
they healed the sick and cast out devils. If we can believe 
Irenaeus, Karpokrates and Kerin thus mentioned Iesu; but 
the system of the Nikolaitans did not admit of any except 
spiritual persons in their list of divine personages. The sect 
was gnostic. But the Iessaians, although ascetics, denying 
themselves, were less ascetic than John, consequently not the 
earliest Nazoria, but Resurrection-people, Salvation’s-men. 
They were afterwards less strict about wine and fasting.— 
Matthew, ix. 14 ; xi. 18, 19. There is no positive evidence that 
a new sect of Iessaians were active previous to a.d. 110. They 
preached the great doctrine of the resurrection ; and in preach¬ 
ing it some one may have used the instance of the founder of 
the sect having risen as an evidence of the truth of the doc¬ 
trine. The next thing to do was to date it in the time of Klau- 
dius. But according to Epiphanius, I. 114, some said that the 
Christos (meaning Iesu) was not yet risen! It is of less con¬ 
sequence when and where Iesu was first called the Christos 
than when he was first mentioned as the founder of the sect of 
Iessaians (Healers) whose name was borrowed from the Xes- 
senes. Iessenes are as ancient as the 2nd century before our 


truth, the real man is superior to them, or at least they are equal to one another. For 
indeed no one of the heavenly Gods descends upon the earth, leaving the boundary of 
heaven, but the man ascends into the heaven and measures it and knows its heights 
and the parts that are low, and accurately learns all about it; and, more than all, with¬ 
out leaving the earth he is on high (ai/w). Such the greatness of his mind ! On which 
account we may venture to say that the earthly man is a mortal god and the heavenlj' 
god an immortal man. Therefore through these all things are administered, these two, 
the world and man, but all things are under the government of the One.—Hermes, the 
Key, Parthey, p. 84. This passage is remarkable in its resemblance to the gnostic 
views of Saturninus, Karpokrates and Kerinthus. They all have the One Unknown 
Father and the Gods (or Angels and Powers). Compare 1 Chron. xvi. 25; Exodus, 
xviii. 11 ; psalm, xcv. 3; Colossians, i. 16. Menard Hermes, p. lix. holding that the 
Poimander is anterior to the Gnostic Sects on the ground chiefly that the question of 
the Incarnation of the Logos does not appear in it, although Hermes mentions the gno¬ 
sis frequently. The idea of the incarnation and crucifixion was an afterthought of the 
2d century. Menard, p. lv. holds that the dogma of the Incarnation of the Word is 
the fundamental dogma of Christianism. Apparently, neither Kerinthus nor any one 
before him seems to have believed in it, yet all seem to have believed in the Christos. 
They there had the support of their master, Philo. The doctrine of a Logos must have 
preceded the Incarnation of the Logos. So Kerinthus believed in a Christos first and 
only. The Christos of Saturninus was probably the Sun or Mithra, the Chaldaean 
Heptaktis, Sabaoth, Logos, and Saviour.—Rev. i. 13, 16. 


THE NAZARENES. 


587 


era, and the name Iesu was a common one. Compare ‘ Bar Iesu ’ 
in Cyprus. When healing*, faith cure, casting out of demons 
(Luke, xi. 14 ) and the reception of the holy spirit became con¬ 
joined to the doctrine of the resurrection of the soul with its 
body, the sect of Healers, Nazorenes and Ebionites began to 
stand on a firm popular basis to preach good tidings to the 
poor. What later happened is partly matter of inference from 
the writings of Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius, but 
mostly positive statements made by them. The Iessaeans 
represented the poorer classes, the sick, the sinners and the 
doctrine of the resurrection from the dead. The priest, the 
Eloite (Levite), the pharisee, the sadukee, upon their heads 
the Iessaian Ebionim in the New Testament pour out eternal 
scorn. It is the Samarian who is the good man, not the rich 
man; still less the Jew. Such was the status of the Nazoria 
after the Temple was gone. It is class hatred, uttered in 
strong language, under the Iessaean, Nazorian and Communist 
flags. The name Christians given to the Iessaeans at Anti¬ 
och (we know not how late) may have been derived at first 
from their practice of anointing with oil.—Matthew, vi. 17 ; 
Luke, vii. 46 ; Mark, vi. 13 ; Codex Nazoria, II. 280 , 281 . But 
more probably from Christos. If Epiphanius (in 370 ) cannot 
positively trace the Iessaeans back beyond the Kerinthians in 
115 - 120 , this is a crucial point requiring our closest attention. 
The word nazar is found in Exodus, xxix. 6, and in Numbers, 
vi. 2 we find nazer (nazir) a Nazarene a self-denying person ; so 
that the Nazoria in the sense of the self-denying can be traced 
back before our era : but it does not follow that the Iessaeans 
of Epiphanius can be. They came after the Iessenes proper and 
no one knows how late ! So that if we have to rank them with 
the Kerinthians as a portion of the larger sect of Nazoria and 
Ebionim, this does not require us (dating Kerinthus about 115 ) 
to place their origin much earlier than Kerinthus himself. No 
Christians are mentioned at Jerusalem just before the siege 
began, and no sect of Iessaeans are specially mentioned by 
Josephus, unless he includes them among the lay Essenes. 
This cannot be ; for the miracle of the wine at Cana of Galilee 
and the ‘eating and drinking’ of the Iessaean Healers are 
pointed to as the very reverse of the habits of the Great Naza¬ 
rene sect to which the Baptist belonged.—Matthew, iii. 4; ix. 
13 ; x. 8-12; xi. 18 , 19 ; Luke x. 4 10 . More than all, Jose- 


588 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


pirns made Cana for a long* time his headquarters, but yet 
never heard of the miracle of turning the water into wine. Now 
if this miracle was not heard of in the first century how came 
it known at least from fifty to eighty years after Josephus 
broke up his camp at Cana ? As the Nazoria were opponents 
of the Pharisees they and the transjordan Ebionim would not 
be expected to keep the 7th day, but like the Mithrabaptists 
on the Euphrates were most likely to keep holy the first day 
of the week, keeping the day of the Sun and not observing the 
4 dies Saturni ’ of Judaism. This is just what the IeSsaeans 
(as Nazarenes) did as Ebionites after they were named Chris¬ 
tians. Kerintlios was living in Asia (Epiphanios, I. 110). 
According to Epiphanios, I. Ill, the doctrine of Kerintlios 
was that ov roi/ *Irjarovv elmt XpurroV, that Iesu was not Christ. 
He here means the Messiah or the Christos as Angel-king, 
King of heaven. Epiphanius (educated by the Egyptian 
monks) gets excited against Kerinthus (Epiphanius, I. Ill, 
112) and calls him a false apostle ; and charges him with hold¬ 
ing that Xpicrroj/ TT€Trov$evaL Kcu ecrravcuJeVat, fxrjmi) Sk cyrjyepScu (I. 113) : 
by which Epiphanius meant that Kerinthus said that 4 Iesu 
suffered and was crucified, but that the Christos was not yet 
risen.’ Kerinthus did not consider Iesu to be the Christos. 
See Irenaeus, I. xxv., where Kerinthus apparently holds that 
Christos did descend on Iesu, working in him (as a mighty 
Power), but that the Christos did not suffer and that Iesu did 
suffer (as son of Ioseph and Maria) and (Irenaeus says) he did 
rise from the dead! This brings the conflict as to the nature of 
Iesu to a very early period, but not back to the origin of the sect 
of Iessaeans. Whether Kerinthus knew that the Iesu was not 
a person but a personification, a putative or imagined founder 
of the sect of the Iesiaeans, or had not yet heard of him we 
can never know. His portrait is drawn by his adversaries and 
he may have lived before Iesu’s name was ever mentioned. He 
lived anterior to Bar Cocheba’s rebellion (?). To be called an 
apostle at all indicates that he was a leader of his party among 
the Ebionites, one of those associated with the Churches of 
the Ebionites and Nazorenes as a contemporary and a Chris¬ 
tian. We are not sure that he admitted that the founder of 
the Iessaeans was the man Iesu. Irenaeus relates things 
which, if true, would show that the crucifixion of Iesu was 
known to him, at least through rumor. But he differed radi- 


THE NAZARENES. 


589 


cally from the Church in the 2nd half of the 2nd century, else 
Irenaeus and Epiplianius would not have disliked him. Now 
that Kerinthus, like the Gnostic Ebionites of his time, did be¬ 
lieve in a primal dunamis subsequent to the One (Primordial 
Existence) and distinct from the One, and held that this duna¬ 
mis, this First Power, did not recognize the God of the Jews, 
the God who is over all things, we have on the authority of 
‘Smith and Wace, Diet. Christian Biography,’ I. 448. This 
view of Kerinthus recognizes Philo’s Logos, the Oldest Angel, 
as the Main Agent or Power acting subordinate to the Su¬ 
preme Unity of Being. This First Power is the King, the 
Christos, but not the Healer Iesu, born of Ioseph and Maria. 
Simon Magus, Menander, Saturninus, Karpokrates, Kerinthus 
and Basileides held to this Primal Dunamis (Yirtus or Power), 
whom Basileides calls Mind and Christos. —Irenaeus, I. xxi.- 
xxvi. It is not surprising that the Chaldean Logos and 
Plato’s Logos set Philo and the whole East thinking. What 
disturbed the Boman Church was that it wanted to retain 
the Old Testament as the basis of religion, while these Pla¬ 
tonic theorists were expected to upset this plan, for except¬ 
ing Ebionites every one displaced the God of the Jews from 
his position as Creator of the world and assigned this part 
in creation to a subordinate Angel. Basileides may perhaps 
give one reason of their so doing. He says that one of the 
subordinate angels who hold heaven together, the chief of 
these, is the God of the Jews. This Angel wished the Jews 
to subjugate the rest of the nations to His people, which the 
rest withstood. Of course, the Jews having been overthrown 
and the Temple destroyed these theorists did not maintain 
that the God of the Jews was the Supreme God any longer. 
The Unborn and Unnamable Father sent his Mind and Chris¬ 
tos into the world on earth as a man in appearance, and to per¬ 
form the miracles. Of course He did not suffer, but some one 
else, who was transfigured, was taken for the Christos, and did 
suffer. Irenaeus here reads lesus instead of Christus. But 
the sense of the narrative requires Christos instead. Irenaeus 
does not make the complete distinction between Christos and 
Iesu that the rest of the narrative shows that Basileides him¬ 
self made. Why should Irenaeus plead his antagonist’s case 
for him ! The plan was to make out a Iesu for a founder of 
the Iessaean order ! Menander and Basileides both held that 


590 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the First Power is the Salvator.—Irenaeus, I. xxi., xxiii. But 
the Salvator was the Sun.— Pausanias, viii. 31-7; Julian, Ora- 
tio Y. p. 173. That in fifty to sixty years after the Temple was 
destroyed new interpreters of Jewish scriptures should be 
found at Antioch (which was full of Jews) is not to be won¬ 
dered at. 

Osiris, in Egyptian Mysteries, was the Good Principle 
which is concealed in the arms of the sun. The Good (says 
Julian) exhibited, showing forth from Himself the Sun, the 
Greatest God, in all things like himself. It was on an almost 
desert island that the author of the Apokalypse, on Sunday, 
fell into the ecstacy in which he saw the heavenly Jerusalem. 
It was in a desert place at Pepuza, on the continent, and in 
Phrygia, that is to say, close to the seven towns named in the 
Apokalypse and to the island of Patmos, that the secret as¬ 
semblies of the Phrygians, those sectaries who were spread 
throughout Phrygia, Galatia, and especially Kappadokia, 
where the worship of Mithra flourished, were held. Pepuza 
had been destroyed in the time of St. Epiphanius (Epiph. adv. 
Haeres,cap. xviii.). These sectaries believed that the heavenly 
Jerusalem had come down from heaven and manifested itself 
on this spot. They therefore went there to celebrate their mys¬ 
teries. Men and women went there to become initiated, and 
awaited the vision of Christ, or a Tlieophany, that is, they ex¬ 
pected to see what the prophet John says he did see and which 
lie promises the initiated that they shall see, for he says : “ the 
Revelation of Iesus Christos which God gave unto him to show 
unto his Saints things that must shortly come to pass. . . . 
Behold, he comes with clouds ; and every eye shall see him, and 
they also which pierced him. 1 There is nothing more true.”— 
Rev. i. 1, 7. Men were taught that life was an unhappy con¬ 
dition (Porphyry, de Antro) and that death is the end of our 
misery, since it restores us to our primitive state of happiness 
if we have lived according to the principles of duty; and the 
world and the astronomical divisions which fix the different 
portions of the road traversed by souls is then traced out. 
Such, according to Porphyry (de Antro) was the mystic object 
of these initiations. “ It is in this way,” he says, “ that the 
Persians mark the descent of souls here below and their return 
at a future period.” This is what they taught in their initia- 

1 Zacliariah, xii. 10. 


THE NAZARENES. 


591 


tions, and what they represented in the mysteries which were 
celebrated in the cave of the universe, which was consecrated 
by Zoroaster (Porphyry, ibid.). The Chaldeans held that the 
Planets were seven in number.—De Iside, 48. In the monu¬ 
ment of Mithra 1 in the midst of the seven altars which repre¬ 
sent the seven planets, the angels of the planets are to be seen 
(Hyde, Yet, Pers. p. 113) and especially one which is apparent¬ 
ly the Angel of the sun placed in the midst of the seven 
planets, with a serpent wound round him. He has wings like 
the angels.—Mankind, p. 519. In Sole tabernaculum suum 
posuit.—psalm, xix. 4. Yulgate and Septuagint Yersions ; also, 
De Iside, 51, 52. In the Mysteries of Mithra the steps of the 
ladder were seven in number, relating to the seven planets.— 
Mankind, 520, 526. In the Mysteries of the Lamb the Sup-god 
draws souls to him, separating the Initiated from the coarse 
matter adhering to them. All that is mortal has disappeared : 
the living and eternal God alone remains on the ruins of a 
destroyed world. The sun attracts the souls of the dead by its 
rays, purifies them, and transmits them to the moon, which dis¬ 
charges them into the sun. At last they remain in the ‘ column 
of glory.’—Mankind, 559, 564. 

The orientals and Greeks were active minds, always argu¬ 
ing. When we remember that the Nazoria were called lessae- 
ans, that is, Healers, laymen or saints of Essene theory and 
morals, before they came to be called Christians at Antioch, 
we shall observe an advance from Nazorene gnosis at the close 
of the first century subsequently followed in the second cen¬ 
tury by the production of the Four Gospels. When Justin 
Martyr was engaged from 147 to 164 in contending against the 
doctrines of Saturninus, Basileides, Karpokrates, Kerinthus, 
and, finally, Markion, he used the Old Testament as a pro¬ 
phetical fund by which he sustains himself against these antag¬ 
onists. Of course, in his new departure in this direction, he 
has placed himself in a position antagonistical to the 2nd 
century Gnostics ; but it follows that he (like the Church at 
Borne in his day) is thereby somewhat separated from the 
Essenism and the Nazorianism that at first prevailed. He 
refers to some “evangel,” he mentions the names of some 
Apostles (?). Justin goes to work upon a course of explana¬ 
tion and application of the Old Testament passages to later 

1 Osiris is the Persian Mithra.—Mankind, 607. 


592 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


purposes and uses. We know what the Gnostics did, what 
Kerinthus did, what Justin did. The question is what did the 
former Nazoria perform. They certainly did not write our 
Four Gospels. Did they ever meet any later Iessaeans f They 
probably listened to many, if not before the year 70, certainly 
afterwards, even in Antioch, where they were regarded as Na- 
zorenes. Antiqua Mater, pp. 42, 43, says that Justin, in his 
effort to explain and defend Christianity in the presence of the 
Jew and the Greek, only succeeds in awakening irrepressible 
doubts as to the very existence of any individual Founder at 
all. The real founders, it may be inferred, were certain rov¬ 
ing teachers (called * Apostles’), reminiscences of whose in¬ 
structions had (it says) been preserved in certain memoranda 
(apojnnemoneumata) accessible to Justin (tracts of the times ?) 
—and these he treats as of no divine authority. The Jewish 
prophetic scriptures furnish the actual materials out of which 
he constructs (what Antiqua Mater calls) the poem of the in¬ 
carnation. In the first century, then, there were no gospels, 
although there were eunuchs (Isaiah, lvi. 3-5 ; Lucian, de Dea 
Syria, 15; Matthew, xix. 12), but the Nazoria listened to the 
preachers of self-denial, abstinence, from food offered to idols, 
and monastic Essenianism wherever the 4 hoi kora bemedbar ’ 
was heard. When, then, the Nazorenes were settled in Antioch 
they, without losing their self-denial, were in the very place 
of all others to learn the Pliilonian philosophy and become 
imbued with gnostic systems. There they learned with Sa- 
turninus, Karpokrates and Kerinthus the kabalist conception 
of the King Christos, and there they acquired the appellation 
Christians. And there their disputes and controversies must 
have commenced. Thence came 4 the tradition which is from 
the apostles,’ as Irenaeus said, 4 continuing in the Church and 
remaining among us.’ Seleucus Nikator (b.c. 277) made the 
Jews citizens in the cities that he built in Asia Minor and 
Lower Syria, and made them citizens in Antioch. The Gospel 
of Mark carries the travels of the Iessaeans as far north as the 
environs of Tyre and Sidon. Matthew tells that the fame of 
the Healer was in all Syria; Uhlhorn carries the Ebionites to 
Apamea, Edessa, Nisibis ; and there is every reason to sup¬ 
pose that besides Beroia and Antioch, the Ebionites may have 
got as far as Samosata, the place where Lucian was born about 
a.d. 120, especially as Markion came from Pontus, and there 


THE NAZARENES. 


593 


were Christians still further north. There were ancient Phoeni¬ 
cian settlements on the Black Sea and in Pontus, where Mar- 
kion was born. 

Clementine Homily, xv. 12, xvi. 1, mentions Simon Magus 
at Antioch. Regarding Simon Magus and Menander, the 
author of 4 Antiqua Mater ’ has some interesting suggestions : 
“ It was Simon who brought salvation to men, appearing as 
a man among men, although not really such ; he was thought 
to have suffered in Judea, but had not really suffered. . . . 
Menander is mainly a double of the ideal Simon in this rep¬ 
resentation. He, too, is said to have been an adept at 
Magic ; to have proclaimed himself as a Saviour, sent forth 
from the invisible for the deliverance of men. . . . There 
is no proof nor probability that these Samaritans represented 
themselves as Saviours : they spoke of a Saviour in the revel¬ 
ation of their mystery—namely of Iesus on whom Christ had 
descended at baptism.” Now whether Simon and Menander 
really referred to the Angel Iesua, a name of Metatron, will 
probably never be known,—although it is not improbable. 
When we remember the three Magi appearing at the birth of 
the infant Mithra and at the birth of the infant Christos we 
should at the same time remember that Samaria, the Jordan 
region and Nabathea were thoroughly permeated with the 
Magi in their Nazorine villages. “ Markion,” says Harnack 
(Hdb. 213 ) “ criticised tradition from a dogmatic standpoint. 
But would his undertaking be well conceivable had trustwor¬ 
thy accounts of the Twelve and their doctrine been extant at 
the time, and had they been influential in wide circles. The 
question may be answered in the negative. Thus Markion 
supplies weighty evidence against the historical trustworth¬ 
iness of the opinion that the Christianity of the multitude 
was actually based upon the tradition of the Twelve Apostles.” 
—Antiqua Mater, 301 . The real ‘Gospel,’ the contents of 
which brought redemption to souls alike fettered in Judaism 
and in Paganism, was in the Gnosis itself.—Antiqua Mater, p. 
221 . 

“ They were called Iessaians before they were called Chris¬ 
tians.”—Epiphanius, ed. Petav. I. 120. Iesous says Justin 
(Apol. I. p. 130), is a name having the signification of man 
and saviour, for he was born a man to cast out demons (devils). 
The son was joined with the Father and begotten when in the 
38 


594 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


beginning He produced and arranged all things through Him. 
He is called Messiah {Christos) indeed in reference to the 
God’s anointing and preparing all things through Him, a name 
too that itself includes the signification agnostos (unknown), 
just as the appellative Theos is not a name, but innate glory 
of something that is difficult to interpret to the nature of men. 
Justin when he wrote this sophistical exposition of the word 
Christos knew that the anointing referred to is “ the spirit of 
the anointing ; ” but he did not choose to reveal that secret of 
the gnostical philosophy to those who did not know it already 
in the Kabalist tradition. From Philo’s time to the time of 
Justin the Logos-philosophy was practically without check or 
hindrance ; in the year 70 the Temple was destroyed, the 
priests gone. “ Power belongs to the Unknown Father (Un- 
namable Father) and not the instruments of human reason.”— 
Justin, Apol. II. p. 133. No one absolutely knows the Son but 
the Father, nor does anyone fully know the Father except the 
Son.—Matthew, xi. 27. We adore and love the Logos from 
the Unborn and Unknown God after the God, since he was 
born a man on our account.—Justin, p. 134, Apol. II. 13. 
That is just why the Christians were accused of being insane ; 
because they gave the second place after the immutable and 
eternal God to a crucified man.—Antiqua Mater, 157; Justin, 
Apol. I. p. 139. The authors of the Mystery of Iesou, at not a 
very early period in the 2nd century, meant to link the narra¬ 
tive of his life and parables to the exciting history of the Ro¬ 
man conquest of the Jews. In dating his appearance in Pi¬ 
late’s time he was put where no one could remember about 
him. 

It is noteworthy that the Son of God (in Hermas) is of lofty 
stature like angels in general, and further comparison leads 
to his identification ‘ with the holy spirit,’ with the angel Mi¬ 
chael, with 4 the glorious ’ or * the august angel,’ with the ‘ an¬ 
gel of the Lord,’ with the ‘ prince of the archangels.’—Antiqua 
Mater, 164, 165. There is no reason why he should not be the 
same as Metatron. A Young Man of high stature, towering 
above the rest. He is the Son of the God.—Liber Esdrae quin- 
tus, ii. 43, 47. Deuteronomy, xviii. 15, foretells a Prophet to 
whom the Jews shall listen, Isaiah, liii. 3-12, some one poor and 
despised, who was cut off from the land of the living. Hastily 
making a brief identification of this unknown, all that remained 


THE NAZARENES. 


595 


to do was to write an account of his life and labors, and refer 
to these very prophecies as proof that the Prophet had already 
come. Of course faith was the first requisite, and faith, like 
any blunder, is apt to mislead. Justin says that the unseen 
and apparently unhonored Messiah (as Isaiah said, and David, 
and all the graphai) is Lord of the Powers. Simon, a Sama- 
rian ; that Magus of whom Luke a disciple and follower of the 
Apostles says : A certain man named Simon who was before 
in the district (or city) practising magic, seducing the people 
of the Samaritans, saying that he was some one great, whom 
they obeyed from small even to great, saying ‘ This is truly 
the Power of the God which is called the Great (Power).’ But 
they looked to him for the reason that in much time by his 
magic (arts) he had demented them. This Simon lived under 
Klaudius Caesar, and taught the Gnosis , when he claimed to be 
all three persons of the Sabian-Babylonian trinity. Moreover 
the descent of the holy spirit upon the Healer is in accordance 
with gnostical views. Simon’s conception in his mind to cre¬ 
ate, through Selene (or Helena), Angels and Archangels is 
very much like the contemporaneous mind-perceived gnosis 
(the doctrine of the Kosmos noetos, the Helios noetos, the phos 
noeton, and the noeta generally). Simon’s doctrine that this 
world was made by Angels and Powers certainly approaches 
that of Saturninus and Kerinthus (see Irenaeus, I. xx. xxii. 
xxv.). Menander followed Simon, was like him a Samaritan 
and agreed with him in many of his propositions, claiming also 
that he himself was let down from the heaven as the result 
from invisible generations a Saviour for the preservation and 
salvation of men ; and he taught that no one could otherwise 
withdraw himself from the domination of the Angels that 
made the Avorld than by first being instructed in the magical 
experience delivered by Menander, and being washed in the 
baptism which Menander used to impart. Kerinthus in c. 115 
or later follows with a similar denial that the world was made 
by the primal God, but instead by a certain Power very apart 
and different from that Sovereignty that is over the universe, 
and ignoring Him who is over all things. 1 Markion reminds 
one a little of this description of the view of Kerinthus ; for 
Markion regarded the God of the Jews as the very opposite 
to the Christos. Then we have Matthew 7 ’s Gospel which partly 

1 Hippolytus, vii. 33 ; x. 21. 


596 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


agrees with Kerinthus, as to the “ Unknown Father,” and the 
descent of the Christns (in the shape of a dove, after baptism 
in the Jordan) upon the Healer. We have Paul preaching the 
Power of the God in Christ (1 Corinth, i. 24) creating all things, 
himself the image of the Unseen God, the Firstborn of all crea¬ 
tion (Colossians, i. 15, 16); Kerdon preaching two Gods, One 
Good and Unknown to all, who is Father of the Iesous, and 
One, the Creator, being bad and known ; and that the Christos 
is not born from Maria nor was seen in flesh, but all was done 
in apparition. And he rejects resurrection of the flesh. Next 
we have Markion who knows Paul. Last 147-164 comes the 
Gnostic Justin who believes in the Logos. Klaudius reigned 
41-54, the time when Simon Magus was a remarkable Gnostic, 
about 28 years after Kurenius (Quirinus) had taken the famous 
census mentioned in Luke, ii. 2, 3, and about 28-30 years after 
Judas of Galilee rebelled against the census. Kerdon in 138 
and Kerinthus (about 115) held views different from those of 
Matthew. So that owing to this we may have to place Mat¬ 
thew a very long time after Kerinthus notwithstanding the fam¬ 
ily resemblance between all these gnostics. Matthew refers to 
the destruction of Jerusalem in a.d. 70.—Matthew, xxiv. 15-24; 
Luke xix. 43, 44 ; xxi. 20, 21. Kerinthus did not believe in the 
birth from a virgin 1 any more than did Karpokrates, who also 
(they say) said that Iesous differed from others 2 because his 
mind was firmer and purer. The Ebionim (said Irenaeus, A. D. 
180-200) indeed admit that the world was made by God, but 

1 ibid. vii. 32, 33 ; Lipsius, 141; Tertullian, in a note to Irenaeus, Lutetiae, ed. 
1675. p. 127. Epiphanius adds that the Kerinthians used the Evangel of Matthew in 
part, not in toto ; but blamed Paul that he did not conform to the circumcision. And 
these are those called by Paul pseudapostles, deceitful workers, who transform them¬ 
selves into apostles of Christ.—Irenaeus ed. Lutetiae, 1675 p. 127 note. What Epi¬ 
phanius said may not be very important as regards date and opinion, in this instance; 
but as he mentions Nabathea, Moab, Basan, Samaritans, Jews, Essenes, Nazarenes, Ke¬ 
rinthians all together, and under the name of Christians, we get something from him.— 
ibid. p. 127. note. We learn certain confirmation of what we said was the district in 
which the earliest Nazarenes began (from Samaria to Nabathea); but we obtain no 
positive evidence from Epiphanius as to the date of Matthew’s Gospel (the Gospel of 
the Hebrews is meant.—Sup. Rel. I. 421), while we do learn that (later than Kerin¬ 
thus) Kerinthians accused St. Paul. No reference in the literature of the first century 
to the Christiani at all, and none in the first years of the 2nd century of a sect of 
Christians distinct from Jews except the historical or quasi-historical passage in Taci¬ 
tus.—Ant. Mater, 17. 18. 

2 Compare Mark, vi. 3, where the Ebionite pronounced opinion is like that of Ke¬ 
rinthus. Like other men : having brothers and sisters. The air however was full of 
Jew-Christian gnosis, a contest of opinion. 


THE NAZARENES. 


597 


about those things that have reference to the Lord they do not 
think like Karpokrates and Kerinthus ; and they use the evan¬ 
gel according to Matthew. If the Ebionites regarded Iesous 
as a man then there is every reason to place no great reliance 
on Irenaeus’s curt reference to them (Iren. I. xxvi.) as applying 1 
to them much before 140. Where Markion differs from Ker- 
don is in the antitheses of the Old and New Testament (An¬ 
titheses of the falsely-named gnosis.—1 Timothy, vi. 20), in the 
ethical contrast between the religion of the Law and the re¬ 
ligion of grace; then also between the Good and the Just 
God. Kerdon, however, distinguished between the Unknown 
and the Known God, the c Unnamed and Unseen,’ and the Vis¬ 
ible God the Creator and Demiourgos, who is visibly con¬ 
nected with matter. Kerdon’s Demiurgus was the God of the 
Jews. Markion opposes the Merciful Redeeming God to the 
Just Lawgiver and Judge. Matthew has the oriental Dualism 
of Christus versus the Diable (Adversary), which is Old Testa¬ 
ment Jewish. 

Like the Chaldaean priests and the Jewish Rabbis, Satur- 
ninus held sacred the number Seven. Residing at Antioch 
supposably about a.d. 105-110 (or later) following Menander 
and possibly preceding Kerinthus (whom Antiqua Mater dates 
circa 115), Saturninus recognized One Unknown Father who 
made Angels, Archangels, Powers and Authorities, that the 
world was made by Seven Angels , that man was in part created 
by the Angels but that he received the spark of soul (or life) 
from a Power above in whose image he was made. Saturni¬ 
nus regarded the God of the Jews as only one of the Angels, 
and considered that, because all the Princes (Chiefs of the 
Angels) wished to destroy the Father (the Superior Father) 
of the Saviour, the Christos Unborn, Incorporeal, without fig¬ 
ure, but looking as if he were a man, came to destroy the God 
of the Jews, but to save those that believe in the Saviour, 
while destroying the bad men and demons. Compare Rev. 
xviii. 14, xix. 13, 14, 19-21. The Christos came to save those 
who have the spark of his life (that is, he is Philo’s Logos). 
The Satornelians (his followers) forbade marriage 2 and gene- 

1 Irenaeus, I. xxvi. applies to only one division of the Ebionites, not to the main 
body of them. The description suits those who separated from the rest and under 
their bishop Markus were permitted (as Christians) to reside in Jerusalem. 

2 Compare Matthew, xxii. 30. No marriages in heaven. They are spiritual there. 
At least the orient thought so. 


598 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


ration as the work of Satan. They abstained from flesh, cer¬ 
tain articles of diet, and from wine. This is Essene. Paulus 
seems to have borne in mind their doctrines, when he says it is 
good not to eat flesh or to drink wine.—Romans, xiv. 21; Tim¬ 
othy, iv. 3 ; Acts, xxiv. 6. So in 4 Esdras, vii. 55 ; in Porpliy- 
rius ; so on the Jordan,—Matthew, iii. 4; so with the Baptist 
Nazoria. The Nazoria have not eaten the food of the Children 
of the world.—Codex Nazoria, II. 252. About 50 years later 
than Saturninus of Antioch comes Markion of Pontus saying 
that the Christos, proceeding from the Father who is above 
the Creator of the world came into Jndea manifested in human 
form, dissolving the Law and the Prophets. Markion held 
that there were Two Gods, the Superior God (mild, placid, 
simply good and excellent who manifested himself in Christ), 
the other judicial, harsh, mighty in war (the Creator who 
made the universe, the God of the Jews). — Tertull. adv. 
Markion, I. ch. vi. xi.). Markion’s gospel opened with the 
statement that in the 15th year of Tiberius the Christos came 
down to Kapernaum a city of Galilee (meaning that the 
Saviour, the Christos of the Philonian gnosis, descended 
from heaven at that time). Saturninus knows nothing of 
a man called Iesu the Nazorene; Markion speaks of the 
Christos as coming down on earth ; Saturninus allows (accord¬ 
ing to Irenaeus) that the Saviour, the Christos, came (among 
other things) to save those who have the spark of his life ; for 
he said that the Angels made two sorts of men, one sort good, 
the other bad. But we have no evidence (in Irenaeus, I. xxii.) 
that Saturninus heard that the Saviour Angel Iesua appeared 
in the aspect of a man. Irenaeus charges Menander with 
claiming to be that First Power who w T as sent by the Invisible 
Immortals as a Saviour for the salvation of men, and that by 
his baptism his disciples would never die. Whether we regard 
this as controversial sarcasm or not, the Philonian gnosis is 
patent here, but the name of Iesu (the healer and teacher) is 
conspicuously absent from the statements of Irenaeus regard¬ 
ing Menander and Saturninus in the first quarter of the 2nd 
century of our era. The two words Messiah and Christos can 
be taken in two different senses. While the people of Antioch 
might admit that the ‘ Primal Power ’ was the Logos, the 
Christos, some of the Jews could hold that the expected Mes¬ 
siah was to be an anointed king, the Lord’s anointed; and a 


THE NAZARENES. 


599 


third party whether in the transjordan district or at Antioch or 
in Asia Minor might combine the two ideas of a man and the 
Christos, and, between 105 and 125, while the air was full of 
messianic excitement, set in motion the ideas of the third party. 
While Markion, as an ascetic Nazorene and Gnostic Christian, 
connects himself very much with Saturninus, we have appar¬ 
ently to seek for the name ‘ Christians ’ first about the time 
of Nikolaitans and Saturninus at Antioch, who (if we believe 
Irenaeus) appears among the first to use the word Christos 
(advenisse Christum ad destructionem Iudaeorum Dei). Iesu 
he does not mention. Outside the Four Gospels we have no 
record of the life of the Prophet Iesu in the reign of Tiberius, 
we have only hearsay (inadmissible) testimony. It remains 
for consideration, says 4 Antiqua Mater,’ whether the Iesu thus 
connected with the Christ was not an ideal of Gnostic origin 
in that time of Klaudius to which the arch-Gnostic Simon is 
referred. But there seems to be no doubt of thd existence of 
the gnosis along the Jordan and in Galilee at the very begin¬ 
ning of our era among the Iessaioi in connection with their 
doctrine of the Angels,— a doctrine preserved in Daniel and 
the Pauline writings, and as gnostical as could possibly be. 
Between the Angels of the Jews, Essenes and Colossians, ii. 
18, there ought to have been gnosis enough to satisfy all de¬ 
mands ; and the Essenes were sworn to silence regarding the 
names of their Angels. Therefore these were their gnosis and 
mysteries. The name Iesu in Greek Iaso, Ieso (Iesomai) means 
£ I will cure ; ’ ‘ Saviour,’ as Justin, Apol. I. p. 148, asserts. In 
Hebrew Iaso means salus and he saved, will save. More likely 
the name Iesu was taken from the Saviour Angel, the Angel 
Iesua, who is Metatron. 

Who was it that talked with Moses hut the spirit of the Creator which is 
Christos.—Tertullian adv. Markion, III. xvi. 

I send an Angel before thee, My name in the midst of him.—Exodus, xxiii. 

20 , 21 . 

The name of the Messia is Iahoh. x —Midrash Echa Rabbah, fol. 59 b. 

He will let his Anointed reveal himself,—whose name is from eternity— 
and he will rule over all lands.—Targum to Zachariah, iv. 7. 

Malka Masiacha dathkara be sema di Kodesli barucli hoa.—The Soliar, I. 
fol. 69. col. 3. 

The King Messia’h is called by the name of the Holy One, blessed be He !— 
Soliar, I. fol. 69. col. 3. / 

1 The Kingly Power is called Kurios.—Philonea, p. 150. Tischendorf. Lipsiae, 186a 


600 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Lukretius mentions the future End of heaven and earth, “ Exi- 
tium Coeli Terraeque futurum.” 1 At the “ End of the days,” 
when the world shall be destroyed by fire the Hindus expected 
Vishnu Kaligi 2 on the White 3 Horse to redeem the good and 
judge the wicked. Compare Saturninus : 

The Saviour came to destroy bad men and demons, but to save the good ! 

I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the Acheron shall rise up over the 
dust, and from my flesh I shall behold Alah. The dead rise up from under the 
waters.—Job, xix. 25, xxvi. 5. 

Thus Hermes descends to Hades as Redeemer of souls! the 
Logos alethinos! 4 Apollo has been found in Rome 5 with the 
nimbus or “ glory ” and corresponds to Horus the son of Isis, 
the Egyptian Redeemer, Freer and Apoluon (Releaser) of the 
soul in Hades. 

For as the Father wakes up the dead and makes them live, so too the Son 
brings to life whom he wills.—John, v. 22. 

Philo Judaeus (on Mutation of Names, 37) mentions “ the 
Saviour’s unconquered power,” meaning God the Saviour (see 
de Abrahamo, 27, where God is called a Saviour ; de Iosepho, 
32, the Saviour God; Isaiah, lx. 16; lxiii. 8, 9 where Iaholi is 
called Saviour, and “Malach phanio ” the Angel of his faces 
saved them). 6 Philo, de Somniis, 37, mentions God’s first-be¬ 
gotten Divine Logos. Now in the gnostical ignorance 7 of the 
first or second century it w T ould not be much of a step further 
(recognising the Image of the God, the Angel, His Logos, as 
Himself.—De Somniis, I. 41) from the Oldest Cause, to w, to a 
Logos-Angel “ the Son of the Oldest Cause,” Saviour, and Son 
of the Father or Son of the Man. In the protevangelium 
Jacobi, xi. the angel says to Mary “ thou hast found favor 
before the Lord and thou shalt conceive from his Logos.”— 


1 Lukretius, v. 100. 

2 caleo, to bum. 

3 Comp. Rev. xix. 11 f. 

4 Nork, Real-Worterb. III. 146 ; Rev. ix. 11. 

5 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 365, see Virgil, 4th Eclogue. 

6 Iverinthians used a part of the Gospel according to Matthew.—Epiphanius, Haer. 
xxviii. 5. The Ebionist Kerinthus was at Antioch. All goes to show, however, that 
the narrative of the Gospel according to the Hebrews was written as early as a.d. 140. 

7 Supernat. Rel. I. 409-411, “ No one has known the Father” is a passage that is 
the crown of the Gnostic system. 


THE NAZARENES. 


601 


Supernat. Eel. I. 305 ; Tischendorf, Evang. Apocr. p. 21 f. 
Therefore the protevangel of James connects more imme¬ 
diately with the gnosis of Philo than Luke, i. 31; and to this 
the Logos in John’s gospel bears witness.—John i. 1-3. The 
Logos is represented as Angel by Justin Martyr also, and fre¬ 
quently. See Supern. Eel. II. 292, 293, f. Whence it follows 
that Philo’s School must be credited with laying the foundation 
for a large amount of second century gnosis. The Father of 
all is Light and is called First Man. The Mind is His forth- 
going Son, Son of Man, Second Man.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. 
These thinkers were, like Basileides, gnostics. In the Kaba- 
lah God’s first-born Son has the spirit of the anointing, is the 
Anointed of the Highest, and is Light of Light. It would 
seem that Justin Martyr, a.d. 147-160 (or later) quotes from 
Christian writings antecedent to our four gospels, apocryphal 
gospels, and records written from memory. Yast numbers of 
spurious writings, beating the names of Apostles and their 
followers and claiming more or less direct apostolic authority, 
were in circulation in the early Church. The words of Justin 
evidently imply simply that the source of his quotations is the 
collective recollections of the Apostles, and those who followed 
them, regarding the life and teaching of Iesous. Numerous 
gospels were then in circulation. 1 The apokalypse of one 
John is referred to by Justin, but he does not know the name 
of one of the four gospels, although he speaks of ‘ the Apostles 
of the Anointed.’ This carries us directly to the tpne a.d. 
110-130, or, probably, to the time just preceding 110-115, when 
the gnosis of the “ spirit of the anointing ” was in vogue. 
Philo being sufficiently near to the source of this Alexandrine- 
Jewish or perhaps Palestinian-Jewish gnosis, and his logos- 
doctrine and theory of a kingly Power affording a foundation 
for the New Testament expressions King and Logos (Word), 
the point then comes up whether, with this spiritual basis of 
a new religion already laid down, there was any need of an 
actual human being on whom to superpose the spirit, the 
kingly power, and the logos. 2 Having the theory, the fact was 
not questioned. We are dealing purely with a spiritual set of 
Powers, with a theology already in mente , not with a human 

1 Supern. Rel. I. 292-5. 41 Which have been called evangels ” is a manifest interpo¬ 

lation.—ib. I. 294. 

2 Matth. iii. 16; xxv. 34, 40 ; John i. 1-3. 


602 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


history, so far. That could be written about some Healer or 
transjordan Essene; or some Galilean that served in the war 
against the Roman forces in Judea. But the theological sys¬ 
tem being already mentally conceived, the problem remained 
how from an idea to make it an actuality! At first sight it 
seems hardly probable that a Wandering Healer should come 
to the front as a claimant for the messiahship of the Jews, 
although the passages in the Prophets might possibly suggest 
the idea of such a thing to other men earlier than Justin of 
Samaria. But the Baptists of the Jordan, the Wandering 
Healers, Pilate and the false messiahs in the Jewish War af¬ 
forded a background for a picture whose foreground was pre¬ 
occupied with Philo's theology , and the gnosis of Powers and 
ranks of Angels surrounding the unseen throne of the Logos as 
Angel-king and Saviour of men. What now would be most in¬ 
teresting to find out would be just how early the specially his¬ 
toric part of the account first appeared in any gospel prior to 
our Four Gospels. It looks as if some of it perhaps was in 
the Gospel of the Hebrews, or Gospel of the Nazarenes as 
early perhaps as a.d. 126-140 ; and it could also be conjectured 
that from the time of Menander to Kerinthus it was not so 
much held that Iesous was born like other men, his father 
being loseph, 1 as that Iesu was the Saviour-Angel mentioned 
in Isaiah. The King was the Sun. This being admitted the 
whole N. T. gospel story is put out of its bearings, because the 
commencement in Matthew, i. 20, iii. 16, was denied in a.d. 115, 
or, rather, not yet received by the gnostics themselves. Still, 
they followed Philo; since Basileides held that the Mind 
(Nous) was born from the Unborn Father, and Logos (Word) 
from the Mind (Nous). 2 While therefore the dogma prevails, 
it does not follow that in the year 115 there was a history at¬ 
taching to the name Iesoua ; although the connecting the name 
of the Iessaian Healer with the New Testament and with 
Roman sway in Judea would agree with the date of the Apo- 
kalypse (circa a.d. 125-138). The Apokalypse knows no cruci¬ 
fixion of Iesu, except the crucifixion of Christians. And there 
is no doubt that Pilate’s name and the trial of Iesous were cal¬ 
culated to enlist interest in the narrative that is everywhere 
permeated by the logos doctrine; and the Jews all expected 

1 Irenaeus, I. xxiv. xxv. 

2 ibid. L xxiii. 


THE NAZARENES. 


603 


Home to fall . 1 The water of the Euphrates was to be dried up 
for the kings of the East to march against Home’s power in 
Syria . 2 

Bel-Saturn was the God of Time, the Ancient of the days, 
the endless, boundless Unknown. Enoch refers to the £ Head of 
the days ’ and to a ‘ Son of Man.’—Drummond, Jewish Messiah, 
pp. 24, 50. Therefore Enoch’s Book (at least the Christian part 
of the Book of Henoch) follows Daniel, vii. 13, 14. It mentions 
“ observing the Law in the last days.”—Drummond, p. 28. It 
is therefore Ebionite. It (xc. 28) rejects the 2nd Temple. 
Enoch puts in the Lord’s mouth the words “ I and my Son.” 
—Drummond, p. 28. This is Judaeo-Messianic, and therefore 
precedes the Gospel of Matthew. Eor gnosis, see Genesis, vi. 
2-4 and Enoch’s 200 Angels seeking to marry women,—a most 
shocking idea to Markion and all oriental Gnostics, who made 
a vast difference between spirit (for the beings in heaven, the 
Angels) and matter (of which mortals were known to be mainly 
made up). Enoch has the very expression £ Son of the Man.’ 
—Drummond, p. 54. This is the 6 uios tou Anthropou that 
Matthew borrowed. Hilgenfeld (Jiid. Apokalyptic, p. 181) 
dates the Revise of the Book of Enoch by a Christian writer 
in the time between Saturninus and Markion.—Drummond, 
pp. 56-59. Drummond’s objection that the writer is so reti¬ 
cent concerning the history of the Christos would equally apply 
to the Jew-Christian who wrote or retouched (perhaps) the 
Apokalypse. Neither knew anything of Matthew’s Gospel 

1 Rev. xii. 10; xvi. 12, 19; xvii. 1, 5; xviii. 2, 9, 10, 16-24; xix. 2,3; xx. 6. The 
Sun was called Saviour and Herakles.—Pausanias, viii. 31. 7. Instead of supposing that 
Saturninus and Basileides got their doctrines from Simon Magus and Menander, the 
author rather sees a close affinity with the Philonian gnosis and the oriental 1 spirit 
and matter ’ dualism. With no desire to extenuate the exhibitions of the gnosis in the 
Hebrew Old Testament, it is perfectly obvious that what we see there is only a small part 
of what was current in Egypt and among the inhabitants of Jordan lands. The He¬ 
brew scribes told only too little of what was expanded in greater volume outside of 
the Sacred Writings. The Hebrew Scripture gives only pars pro toto. A glance at 
the Jewish Angelology in connection with the Codex Nazoria and Norberg’s preface to 
his Codex Nasaraeus,” as also the Great Angels of the Essenes and the Bible, estab¬ 
lishes this.—Codex Nazoria, I. 282, 284. Saviour was a common name for the Sun, and 
when Saturninus mentions the Salvator (Soter) he means the Herakles-Christos; for, 
soon after, the Great Temple «f the Sun was built at Heliopolis not far from Caesarea 
Philippi. For the Her4kles-Logos, see Rev. xix. 11-17; i. 16. 

2 Rev. xvi. 12. Babylon is fallen !—Rev. xviii. 2. The Persian White Horse of 
Mithra cometh !—Rev. xix. 11. The cause of the obstinate resistance of the Jews was 
partly an expectation of aid from the oriental or Babylonian Jews to whom they had 
sent.—Jahn, pp. 414, 415. 


604 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


{history) which was not yet written. The Christian Reviser of 
the Book of Enoch was an Ebionite (adhering- to the Law.— 
Drummond, p. 28). Enoch mentions the Angel who binds and 
confines the Demon Azazel in a dark opening in the Desert. 
—Drummond, p. 21. This resembles the idea in Revelations, 
xx. 1-3. 

And I saw an Angel descending having the key of the Abyss (pit) and a 
great chain in his hand, and he overcame the Dragon, the Ancient Serpent, 
that is, the Devil and the Satan, and bound him. 

Therefore the Christian Revise of the Book of Enoch may have 
preceded, certainly resembles, the Apokalypse, xx. 1-3. The 
plan of both works is apokalyptic. Yolkmar places the publi¬ 
cation of the Book of Enoch in the first year of the revolt of 
Bar-Cocliba 132 a.d. immediately after R. Akiba had given in 
his adhesion to the movement.—Beitrage zur Erklarung des 
Buches Henoch, p. 100. The Elect One in the Book of Enoch, 
xl. 5, precisely corresponds to the Logos of Philo (Confus. 
Ling. 14; On Dreams, 37 ; Fragment in Eusebius), the Logos 
of Rev. xix. 13, Luke, xix. 38, the Angel-King, and the ‘ Only- 
begotten Theos ’ in John, i. 18. The Babylonian doctrine of 
‘ the Father and Son,’ Philo’s doctrine of the Father and the 
‘Word’ (the Logos, the Second God), and psalm ii. all stand 
on the same plane of the Chaldaean gnosis. This theosophy 
extended from Babylon to Phoenicia and Egypt. But the ex¬ 
pression ‘ Son of the W T oman’ (in the Book of Enoch.—Drum¬ 
mond, p. 60) points directly to the gnosis (compare Irenaeus, 
I. vii. p. 67 ; xxxiv. p. 134; Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 24). Abel 
(Abelios, Bel-Mithra) and Horus are in the same situation, 
one, son of Eua, the other, of Ishali (Isis). The Book of Enoch 
was not admitted into the Jewish ark, but was accepted by 
Tertullian,—a sure proof that it was late and Christian or 
christianised (in its present shape). See Drummond, 72, 73. 
Since, then, Drummond, p. 117 rather suspects and concludes 
“ that the 4th Ezra was written during the last quarter of the 
first century after Christ,” and since Drummond, p. 90, says 
that the word “ Iesus ” in 4th Esdras, vii. 28 is to be found only 
in the Latin copies (not in the Syriac, Arabic, Aetliiopic and 
Armenian texts, which employ instead the word for Messiah or 
Anointed ), the inference is natural that here (as elsewhere) the 
Romans perverted the original word (Messiah) into Iesus, in 


THE NAZARENES. 


605 


favor of their doctrine (derived from scripture by their own in¬ 
terpretation, or from the East) that there was a man Iesu 
(which doctrine they wanted to prevail); whereas the previous 
theory of the Babylonians, Philo Judaeus, and Psalm ii. was 
that the Father and Son (Logos, or Oldest Angel) were exclu¬ 
sively spiritual natures sine carne. Therefore, in a.d. 100 
(and in the time of Kerintlius, a.d. 115) it is fair to presume 
that the Christos or Messiah were regarded as exclusively 
spiritual natures, and that earliest Ebionites, Nazorenes, and 
possibly Saturninus, had not heard of ‘ the man Iesu,’—that the 
idea was at that period (100-110) still unknown at Antioch, ex¬ 
cept so far as astrology foretold, by the conjunction of Sol and 
Yirgo, such an event, and always excepting the supposed 
prophecy in 1 Samuel, xvi. 12 ; xxiv. 20. The gnosis of Eua in 
Genesis, ii. iii. is closely connected with similar gnosis in the 
System of Simon, and also with another form of Eua as Mother 
of the living (Mater viventium) in Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. In the 
midst of the Jewish gnosis the Hebrew bib lion was put to¬ 
gether; and the doctrine in Daniel is Messianic, but late. 
There is no dividing line, where, in point of gnosis, angelolo- 
gy, and Messianism, a definite line can be drawn between the 
Old Testament and Ebionite writings (including the oldest 
Kabalah) in regard to date and contents. 

Turning now to the Apokalypse which is later than the 
time of Kerinthus and the only known work in the New Tes¬ 
tament that Justin Martyr mentions by its title, we find the 
Angel-King Iesua, the Christos and Logos (Yerbum Dei), 
standing in the midst of the Seven Lights of the planetary Can¬ 
dlestick, the Yernal Young Ariel (the Lamb of the sign Aries), 
—and not the slightest mention of Ioseph or Mary, but only of 
the Woman with wings (in the sign Yirgo) and her Child (the 
Messiah) hidden in the deserts beyond Jordan. The descrip¬ 
tion exhibits Jordan’s hatred of Borne whose downfall it fore¬ 
tells and points to the reign of the Christos for a thousand years. 
The doctrine of Saturninus reappears according to which the 
“ Saviour ” (Iesua the Solar Logos-Angel) comes to destroy 
the bad and the demons and save the good (—Bev. xxi. 3, 4; 
Irenaeus, I. xxii.). That Son of the Man is girded with the 
golden girdle of the sun, like the eternal Mithra. Fornica¬ 
tion and the offering of food to idols by the followers of Niko- 
laos have got to cease. Before the Throne and the Sun in 


606 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Aries (tlie Young Lamb) all nations and tribes, and peoples 
shall stand. Loose the four Angels that are bound at the 
Kiver Euphrates, let them march west with their 20,000 mill¬ 
ions of Arab and Persian cavalry. Now in this entire Apoka- 
lypse all we have to do to bring it into complete harmony with 
the Salvator in the teaching of Saturninus is to write Iesua (the 
Angel.—Eev. xxii. 16) and we have an Aramean original of the 
Greek Iesous. There are no human kindred of Iesu here ; the 
names of 4 Ioseph and Maria ’ were, apparently, not yet men¬ 
tioned in the deserts around the Jordan, while the name Sal¬ 
vator (Saviour) is (according to Irenaeus) in the mouths of 
Menander, Saturninus, Karpokrates (who agreed with Kerin- 
thus in most respects, except perhaps that the last was more 
given to Ebionite Judaism), Kerinthus (whose Salvator was the 
Christos).—Irenaeus, I. xxv. The Essenes and Karpokrates 
held that the body is a prison—Jos. Wars, II. 8, 11; for Ire¬ 
naeus, I. xxiv. p. 122 says of the Karpokratians corpus enim 
dicunt esse carcerem; this was the Christian and earliest 
gnosis ; consequently their Angel Iesua was pure spirit,—a 
Salvator such as we find in the Apokalypse. Iesua Messiah 
(Christos the Saviour king) begins the Essene Warlike Apo¬ 
kalypse, a being on high. Kerinthus taught in the time of 
Trajan and Hadrian, and his Salvator is the Messiah, pure 
spirit; Basileides, on the contrary, lived in the reign of Ha¬ 
drian, a.d. 117-138, and in Basilidians (since Irenaeus uses the 
word dicunt) we see the Gnostical attempt to explain that 
Christos (the Mind, the Word) was not crucified but Simon the 
Cyrenaian, who (they said) through ignorance was crucified in¬ 
stead of Tesus. Basileides is a singular, not a plural. If the 
word Iesua had continued to stand as in the Syriac Matthew, i. 
1, the question would have been less ditficult; but it is not 
clear how actively in the reign of Hadrian the idea of a man, 
the Son of Dauid (Iesous ; derived from Iesua, Saviour) had 
spread itself, and, as the Gnostics contemned the human body 
Basilidians had to get rid of the matter the best way they 
could. Irenaeus lets Kerinthus admit Christos as Angel, but 
acknowledge a man Iesus on whom the Christos descended, 
subjoining that Iesua was the child of Ioseph and Maria. It 
is not certain that this was said by Kerinthus himself. Church 
partisans in writing about the systems of buried teachers 
jumbled together the distinctive names Christos , Iesua, and 


THE NAZARENES . 


607 


Iesous into the same fusion in which they were petrified to¬ 
gether in their own minds. From 115 to 125 there was time 
enough to extract (through astrology, in and among the Ebion- 
ite lower orders) out of the Angel Iesua a human counterpart, 
or from the word Iessaioi a Iesu, and from the spirit to infer 
the body, the flesh. “ Corpus enim dicunt esse carcerem,”— 
“ pneuma is ho theos! ” One Father Unknown who has made 
Angels, Archangels, Powers, Thrones; but by Seven Angels 
(of 7 planets) the world was made and all things therein.—See 
Genesis, xi. 4; Menander, Saturninus, Matthew, xi. 27; Num¬ 
bers, xxiii. 14, 29 ; 2 Kings, xxiii. 5. There is one reference to 
the Lord’s crucificion at Rome in Rev. xi. 8, but this must refer 
to Roman persecutions of the Christians being a persecution 
of Christ; but while Kerinthus in Irenaeus, I. xxv. is made to 
admit that Iesu was crucified (suffered),—Epiphanius support¬ 
ing Irenaeus out of Hippolytus,—yet Epiphanius, I. 113, 
charges Kerinthus with holding that ‘ Christos suffered and 
was crucified, but is not yet risen from the dead.’ Epiphanius 
undoubtedly changed Iesu into Christos here. 

There is little reason to doubt that not a great many 
centuries after this time, 145-180, the Arabian Nazori of the 
East (those of the Liber Adami), or rather, their predecessors 
(circa 350), drew off amid the vortex of differing opinions from 
their Nazoraian associates, the Iessaians, on account of Iesu 
Mendax, the false Messiah, as the Codex Nazoria calls him. 
At any rate that is the position taken by the authors of the 
Codex Nazoria at Bassora in 1042. And it is very singular if 
Irenaeus writes correctly, that Bishop Ephiphanius at Salamis 
in Cyprus should complain of Kerinthus as holding that “ the 
Iesus is not Christos,” and that “ Christos after being crucified 
w r as not yet risen from the dead.” We are not bound to believe 
from the testimony of Irenaeus, Epiphanius, and what Irenaeus 
preserves about Karpokratians and Kerinthians, that the idea 
of a man, the supposed or pretended founder of the Iessaians was 
known to both Karpokrates and Kerinthus. But even in Ire- 
naeus’s own account of Saturninus no sign appears that Satur¬ 
ninus (the predecessor of Karpokrates and Kerinthus) had ever 
heard of such an idea. Supposing the man, or a man Iesu, had 
been baptised in the Jordan, it would have taken certainly not 
more than two years to transmit to Antioch some notices of his 
Essene-Ebionite sermons, and yet neither Philo, Menander nor 


608 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Saturninus can be charged with ever having heard his name 
mentioned, nor his sermons spoken of, nor his miracles won¬ 
dered at. If Irenaeus had such evidence, it is singular that in 
his great book he forget to mention it. The same could be 
said of Josephus,—minus the interpolations. The testimony 
of Hegesippus as given in Eusebius, H. E. iii. 20; iv. 22, has 
no value, from the medium through which it comes, and in it¬ 
self seems to regard the relations of Iesu as of considerable 
family account, rather more than the New Testament makes 
of them. As to the martyrdom of James, that is to be con¬ 
sidered with the Josephus-interpolations. The account of Pa- 
pias is derived through the same “ Eusebius whom Scaliger so 
unmercifully scourges.” The main point is whether a real 
Iesu (in the sense of our New Testament Matthew) ever ex¬ 
isted, not whether he had relations, or what all the world 
thought about it, nor the Church in particular. But, after all, 
what is a Gnostic’s opinion worth any way, about supernal 
things f What could he know about the reality of what him¬ 
self and others were ready to swear to ? Against “ non ex 
virili semine ” was interposed the law maxim “ pater est quern 
nuptiae demonstrant.” We cannot imagine what his relations 
were put in for except to leave no doubt about his humanity. 
That may have been a point, at one time, to make with the 
thoughtless and ignorant publicum,—to help on the doctrine 
of the two natures against Markion and Apelles who testified 
that their Redeemer was on high , without one touch of human 
inferiority! The knowledge of the God was then considered 
equivalent to Essene crucifixion of the flesh. Gnosis required 
it. Hence a crucifixion was a sine qua non. The narrative 
followed (among a credulous people) as a matter of course. To 
make out the two natures they were compelled to bring evi¬ 
dence of a human body. 

But what an excitable people to preach to about the eter¬ 
nal gnosis on high. Simon Magus puts the masses in com¬ 
motion.—Clem. Horn. ii. 25. Acts xxii. describes them making 
outcries, casting off their clothes and throwing dust in the 
air, because “ Paul ” said something distasteful to them, while 
the impostor Peregrinus took in the Christians until they 
thought him a god consorting with their priests and scribes. 
Whatever impostor and skilled man and able to do business 
comes over (to them) he at once gets very rich (mala plousios) 


TEE NAZARENES. 


609 


shortly, laughing at ignorant men.—Lucian, Peregrin., 12,13. 
Just the sort of people to be taken in. Now Kerinthus is 
dated at about 115, Lucian of Samosata and Antioch, at 160. 
Time does not seem to have sharpened the Christian wits 
in the interval between Kerinthus and Lucian. The Essene 
monks seem far more respectable. Their rule was never to 
intentionally injure others. Do unto others as you would 
wish that they should do to you, was a maxim eminently 
Essene and later lessaean. He is described as having said to 
the crowds, If any one comes to me and shall not hate his 
father and mother and wife and children and brothers and 
sisters and even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple. 
—Luke, xiv. 26. There is the real crucifixion of the flesh. 
There spoke the real Essene coenobite. A simple affirmation 
among them is more valid than an oath, says Josephus. Mat¬ 
thew the lessaean says: Let your yea be yea, and your nay, 
nay. There again speaks the Iessene. The Essene sect is far 
older than the Christian era. They leave all things upon God 
to be sure.—Josephus, Ant. xviii. 1, 5; so John, iii. 2, 3, 27. 
The Essenes were over 140 years before our era in the time of 
Demetrius I.—Josephus, xiii. 5. 9. It is therefore obvious that 
the Iessaeans did not derive their appellation from Iesu, but 
just the reverse. 

The distinction between ‘ dicit ’ and c dicunt ’ is not too 
closely observed always, and what Kerinthus taught and what 
some Kerinthians said may have got mixed together in the 
account that Irenaeus gives. Controversialists in those days 
set a greater value on success, than on the truth of history. 
Views were often attributed to men that they never held. This 
is supposed to have happened in the case of Kerinthus. It 
was reported that he was a chiliast, believing in pleasures, 
feasts, marriages, sacrifices, etc. This all rests on mere re¬ 
port. Kerinthus had fundamentally Ebionite sympathies, 
that is, he sympathised with the gnostic Nazoraioi (the Nazo- 
ria) and believed in a prima virtus, the first dunamis or Power 
of the One Supreme I Am . 1 The Gnostics were not very likely to 
believe much in stories of marriages such as those in Genesis, 

1 The very first words in De Vita Contemplativa are "EaaaCuv Tre'pi, about Iessaians, 
Physicians. Therapeutae and Iessaioi are the names of such a sect.—De Vita Cont. 
1. Ieso — to heal, to cure. The followers of Menander and Lucian’s Christians be¬ 
lieved they would never die. See 1 Thessalon. iv. 17. 

39 


610 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


vi. 2. If the Mighty Powers were by some held to work in 
men (Mark, vi. 14) it was in the appearance of some man, not in 
his corrupted body, but in his image. It would have been a 
great gain for Irenaeus’s own party in the Church in a.d. 179 
if Kerinthus could be proved to have taught in the words of 
Irenaeus ! The Gospel of Matthew would then have had the 
valuable aid of Kerinthus in confirmation of Matthew’s doc¬ 
trine (iii. 16, 17) and his belief in miracles performed by Iesu 
(figura columbae, et tunc annunciasse incognitum Patrem et 
virtutes perfecisse). Irenaeus thus gets out of Kerinthus (an 
Old Ebionite) all the testimony his party needed. The Soph¬ 
ists were capital logicians. Epiphanius, I. 116, tells us that 
Kerinthus and others with him often opposed the Apostles at 
Jerusalem, but also in Asia. 1 Irenaeus, III. p. 257, mentions 
“John the disciple of the Lord, announcing this belief, wishing 
through the announcement of the evangel to do away with 
that error which had been sown in men by Kerinthus and long 
before by those that are called Nikolaitans who are a branch 
of that which is falsely named Gnosis (Scientia), that he might 
confound and persuade them that there is One God who has 
made all things through his Logos, and not, as they say, one 
Creator but another the Father of the Lord; and one indeed 
the Son of the Creator but another one of those on high the 
Christos who continued impassible, descending into that Son 
of the Creator, and flew back again into his own pleroma : and 
that the beginning indeed is the Onlybegotten, but that the 
Logos is the true Son of the Onlybegotten. And that that 
Creation which we acknowledge (secundum nos) was made 
not by the Pirst God, but by some Power very much beneath 
and cut off from communication with those that are invisible 
and unnamable.”—Irenaeus, III. p. 257. The first thing to 
notice is that the above quotation from Irenaeus puts the Ni- 
kolaitans long before Kerinthus (ante 115). Next that the Ni- 
kolaitans knew Philo’s Logos-doctrine. Third that Kerinthus 
follows their gnosis, error and all. Fourth that the author of 
the Apokalypse does not follow the error of the Nikolaitans, but 

Compare Galatians, i. 12; ii. 11,12. Some consider Galatians and Acts late 
works. If Kerinthus had spoken of the Angel Iesoua it would have been said in the 
year 190 that he had heard of the man Iesoua. It was so easy to pervert words. See 
Isaiah, xi. 1; 1 Sam. xvi. 1. Antioch was full of Jews, and, after a.d. 70, the Ebion- 
ites, if they could read, must have had access in some way to Messianic views, and 
passages of scripture cited in support of such views. 


THE NAZARENES. 


611 


abominates it: /nereis ra epya to)v N LKoXaLTwv a Kayoj /xicreo. What is 
this early error of the Jewish gnosis ? It is the old gnostic 
theory that the Jewish God was not the Supreme God but one 
of a lower order of Angels, while the Christos is not the Son 
of the Jewish God, but the Son of the ‘ Unknown Father ’ (a 
higher, a Supreme God). The Nikolaitans further make the 
following order of succession in rank (so to speak), 1st the 
Unknown Father, 2nd the Onlybegotten, 3d the Logos. We 
can compare with this the first Man, the second Man, 3d the 
Christos; which brings the expression Son of the Man back to 
a very early period of Christian Gnosis. According to Irenaeus 
himself Saturninus and his predecessor Menander did not 
mention Iesu. These gnostics evidently all started from the 
Philonian views. Neither Philo, nor the Nikolaitans, nor Simon, 
nor Menander, nor Saturninus mention Iesu ; Acts being very 
poor authority on such subjects as whether Simon Magus ever 
heard of Iesus. Basilidians (not Basileides) were aware that 
there was a story afloat that Iesu had been crucified. But the 
quotations or descriptions borrowed from Josephus who died 
about a.d. 103 compel us to place the date of any Gospel 
mentioning the crucifixion of Iesu posterior to the publication 
of the work of Josephus on the Jewish War. The Nikolaitans 
and their successor Kerinthus must have been busy from the be- 
ginning of the 2nd century in their own work of Christianism ; 
and the sources of this Christian Gnosis must be looked for 
in the preceding Semite and Indian gnosis. It remains for 
consideration w T hether the Iesu thus connected with Christ was 
not an ideal of Gnostic origin in that time of Claudius to which 
the arch-Gnostic Simon is referred. 1 Take away from the Niko- 
laitan gnosis their third person (the Christos), there remains 
the Father and the Son of the Man. Add the Virginal birth, 
and the result is Matthew’s doctrine regarding the Son of the 
Man. 2 

And the Healer went about all the cities and the villages . . . curing every 
disease and every debility among the people.—Matthew, ix. 35. 

Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.—Mat¬ 
thew, x. 8. 

1 See Antiqua Mater, pp. xiii. 216, 233, 235. 

3 So that a slight modification of Nikolaitanism brings the Gospel doctrine.— 
Matth. i. 18; John, i. 1-4; Luke, i. 31. Kerinthus avoids accepting the doctrine of 
the two natures, which doctrine was not acceptable to the Nikolaitans or Karpokrates. 


612 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


We find the Iesoua-Iessaians sent out on tlieir travels like the 
Vishnu-Baktas of Ceylon. These are the directions : 

I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry not a bag, not a 
pouch for victuals, not sandals. Greet no one on the road. Into whatever 
abode ye shall enter, say first “ Salom ” to this family. Stay in the same house 
eating and drinking what they have. . . . Eat what is set before you, and heal 
the sick in that city, and say to them (the tidings) : The Kingdom of the God 
has come near among you.—Luke, x. ff. 

And of the other Indi there is this other sort: they neither kill anything 
which has life nor do they sow anything nor are they accustomed to get cabins ; 
but they eat grass and they have a something about the size of millet, in husk, 
that spontaneously is born from the earth; this they pick, boil in the husk itself, 
and eat. And whoever of them falls sick goes into the desert and lies down ; 
and none thinks of him either dying or suffering.—Herodotus, III. 100. b.c. 
450. 

Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, nor reap, nor gather into 
barns—and your Father who is in heaven feeds them ; are you not much better 
than they ?—Matthew, vi. 26. 

Mases descended from the mountain to the people and sanctified the people 
and they washed their clothes. And he said to the people be ready for the third 
day ; keep away from a woman.—Exodus, xix. 14, 15. 

Those who are called Enkratites preached against marriage. Some of those 
reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food.— 
Irenaeus, I. cap. xxviii. Luke, xx. 35, 36. 

Pulse to eat and water to drink.—Daniel, i. 12. 

There is also among the Hindus a Haeresy of those who phi¬ 
losophise among the Bra’hmans, who profess an independent 
life, but abstain from eating living creatures and all the food 
cooked by fire, content with fruits and not even picking them, 
but carrying off what have fallen to the ground they live, and 
they drink the water of the river Tagabena. They pass their 
life naked, saying that the body was given by God as clothing 
for the soul. These say that the God is Light, not such as one 
sees, nor the sun and fire, but they have the God Logos, not 
the articulate word but the Word of the Gnosis, through whom 
the hidden mysteries of nature are seen by the Wise . 1 And 
they say that this Light which they call the God Logos 2 the 
Bra’hmans alone know, because they alone throw off the vain 
conceit which is the last clothing of the soul. These despise 
death 3 and always in their peculiar speech name God as we 

1 Bra’hman, chacham, rabbi all mean “ Avise man.” Krishna = the Light. 

2 Compare Gospel of John. i. 1, 4, 5. Vishnu incarnate in Krishna. 

3 Compare the Essene contempt for death as a punishment. Surviving gvmno- 


THE NAZARENES. 


613 


said before and lift up hymns. Nor are there women with 
them, nor do they get children. 

From the “traveller” sect in India to the “travels” of the 
Essenes and the “ travels ” mentioned in the tenth chapter of 
Luke there is no break. 

And he went through cities and villages teaching and making a “Walk ” to 
Ierusalem.—Luke, xiii. 22. 

I cast out demons and perform healings to-day and to-morrow, and on the 
third day I shall have finished. But I must “ travel” to-day and to-morrow and 
on the following day ; for it is inadmissible that a Prophet perish out of Ierusa¬ 
lem.—Luke, xiii. 32, 33. 

From the Baptists of the Ganges to the Mithrabaptists of the 
Euphrates, Jordan and Tiber it was an unbroken chain; John 
was immediately followed by Iesous. In the term nazarene the 
gymnosophists, semnoi, samana, casti, chasidi, eunuchs, Es¬ 
senes, hagioi, nazers, circumcised, Buddhists, Baptists and 
Ebionites are included. The word zar is the root of nazar and 
means abstinence! The Ebionim were a branch of the Es¬ 
senes 1 or Iessenes, the Essaioi or Iessaioi, 2 who were travel¬ 
lers, healers, nazarenes, holy men, saints, finally, monks of 
Serapis and Christians. 

The poor are blessed, in the spirit 3 (not in the flesh), for theirs is the king¬ 
dom of the heavens.—Matthew, v. 3, text Sinaitic. 

The beggar took the evils (in his lifetime); but now he is called hither (to 
heaven), and thou art suffering.—Luke, xvi. 25. 

The sect of Healers continued to heal, as we learn from 
Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles. The Talmud mentions 
one of the followers of Iesus who proposed to heal in his 
Master’s name. 

“ iarpiKT]v iirayyeWovTai .’’—Philo, de Vita Contemplativa, 1. 

They announce a healing ! 

sophists in India regarded the dead as blessed and lamented that they had not the 
privilege to die.—Lassen, III. 359-367 first edition. So, too, the address to his troops 
by the descendant of Judas the Galilean at Masada, in which death is preferred to life, 
in accord with the Nazorene creed. 

1 Von Bohlen, Introd. to Genesis, I. 21. 

2 from asia “physician.” See Matthew, i. 21. The Ebionites were a sect of the 
Essenes and Therapeutae Mithra-worshippers and Serapis-worshippers apparently. 

3 Cause, manner, means, and instrument in the dative case; without a preposition. 


014 


THE GHEBEUS OF HEBRON. 


The victory over himself is the first and best of all victories; 
but the defeat of one by himself (by his passions) is the basest 
and also the most wicked thing*, for these are a sign that there 
is a conflict in each of us against ourselves.—Plato, Laws, I. p. 
626 E. There was God and Matter, Light and Darkness, good 
and evil, utterly at variance with one another from the begin¬ 
ning.—Mani, On the Mysteries. Christianity did not spring 
up in a day. It took its rise not from any one of the sect of 
Healers; but was indebted to the remains of the Old Semitic 
worship of the Virgin Mother of the Adonis. This was joined 
to an oriental asceticism born from the doctrine of spirit and 
matter—a theory whose popularity Paul attested when he 
wrote: 

By the spirit ye slay the doings of the body. 

“ A notable feature of the Egyptian Church was its asceticism ; 
and this Mr. Poole showed to be of Egyptian origin. The 
convents attached to the worship of Serapis, which the Ptole¬ 
mies introduced as a compromise between Greek and Egyptian 
beliefs, were the direct ancestors of the European monastic 
system ; and the ascetic ideal of life thus came, not from the 
Essenes, but from the ancient Egyptians. 1 2 These are the fel¬ 
lows that the people reverenced, according to Juvenal: 

Semivir, obscoeno facies reverenda minori! 

Let not the eunuch say, lo I am dry wood ; for thus says Ia’hhoh to the 
eunuchs who keep my sabbaths and choose that in which I delight and keep 
my covenant: and I will give to them in m 3 ’ temple and within my walls a place 
and a name better than sons and daughters, a name of everlasting I will give to 
him which shall not be cut off.—Isaiah, lvi. 3, 4, 5. 

When the unclean 5 spirit would go out of the man it goes about through 
places devoid of water , 3 seeking rest, and finds it not.—Matthew, xii. 43. 

When the man is asleep the spirits come to him in the dream and render him 
unclean. This is the doctrine of all the Wise Men. 4 —Bodenschatz, K. Verf. d. 
Juden, II. part 2nd, page 40. 

The Sohar says 5 that the soul goes out from every man who 
sleeps in his bed and then the unclean spirit is ready to stop 

1 The Academy, May 27, 1882, p. 385. 

2 akatharton. 

3 See Leviticus, xvi. 21. The Desert Demon Azazel. 

4 chachamim. 

5 In the Sulzbach edition, parasha Vaishlach, col. 387. 


THE NAZARENES. 


615 


upon the body that the holy soul has left, and the body is 
thereby rendered impure. A man must not in the morning let 
his hands wander over his eyes, because the unclean spirit 
stops on them . 1 The worshippers of Sarapis 2 were ascetics, 
the same as the Nazarene Christians. 


In the city Heliopolis too we saw Great Houses 3 in which, the priests lived ; 
for they say that this abode of priests was most especially the abode of philoso¬ 
phers and astronomers in ancient times : but both this system 4 * and the askesis 6 
have died out. Consequently no one indeed was there pointed out to us being 
at the head of this sort of askesis, 6 but only the officiating priests and the ex¬ 
plainers to the strangers of what relates to the offerings.—Strabo, 806. 

Sabians were on the peninsula of Mt. Sinai practising absti¬ 
nence. They had their sun-temples in Egypt also . 7 Serapis 
was regarded as the Sun, and the Holy Men consecrated to 
Serapis must not go out of their cells. 

Never indeed during less than 7 days, from every living creature they ab¬ 
stained, and from every vegetable and beans. But before all, from the Apliro- 
disia of intercourse with women, . . . and thrice per diem they washed off in 
cold water, on rising, before lunch and near bedtime, . . . and they practised 
(ijoKovv) thirst and hunger and moderation in eating all their life long. And 
a testimony of their continence is that using neither walks not swings, they 
lived without sickness; and compared with the ordinary strength, they were 
vigorous. At least in their sacred ministrations they took upon themselves 
many burdens and services requiring more than the common strength. They 
divided up the night in watching of the heavenly bodies and sometimes too in 
holy rites ; and the day in service of the Gods in which, either thrice or four 
times in the morning and in the evening while the Sun is in the heaven and de¬ 
scending to setting, they sing hymns to them !—Chaeremon ; Porphyry, iv. 8. 

1 Bodenschatz, II. part 2d, p. 40. 

2 Lucius, p. 137, mentions ‘ ‘ der heidnischen Askese, die ein Product der Philo¬ 
sophic war.” It is gnosis. Did not the Christian monachism and askesis have its ori¬ 
gin in the contrast between “ spirit and flesh,” the dualist philosophy ? The 11 End of 
the world” was universal doctrine.—Gen. xlix. 1. 

3 Josephus and Strabo both use the word oocos. Were not these houses the Egyp¬ 
tian wiharas ? Compare the JSi ov oUrjfxa of the Essenes into which none of the heterodox 
were allowed to enter, also their great dining hall which they enter with solemnity.— 
Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 

4 perhaps convent. 

8 Askesis = discipline. 

6 In Strabo’s time the Greeks were still indebted to Babylonian and Egyptian 
priests for rules in reference to computing the solar year exactly, since these priests 
were prodigious in their knowledge of the phenomena of the heavens.—Strabo, 806. 

7 Zeitschrift d. D. M. G. xiv. p. 389. 


616 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


God is in us. He sets us in motion, and warms us with sacred 
force. 

God is spirit.— John, iv. 24. 

What is born of the flesh is flesh ; and what is born of the spirit is spirit.— 
John iii. 6. 

Your body is the temple of the holy spirit in you, and you belong not to 
yourselves.—1 Cor. vi. 19. 

Never shall I forget that scene when those fellows (the Nakish- 
bendi dervishes) with their wild enthusiasm and their high 
conical caps, fluttering hair and long staves, danced round 
like men possessed, bellowing out at the same time a hymn, 
each strophe of which was first sung for them by their grey- 
bearded chief . 1 There was the great and unapproachable One 
—supreme above comprehension and sublime beyond con¬ 
ception, for whose majesty every name was too mean, the 
fount and crown of Good and Beauty, in whom all that exists 
ever has been and ever shall be.—He it was who, like a brim¬ 
ful vessel, overflowed with the quintessence of what we call 
divine and from this effluence emanated the divine Mind, the 
pure intelligence 2 which is to the One what light is to the sun. 
This Mind 3 with its vitality—a life not of time but of eternity 
—could stir or remain passive as it listed ; it included a plu¬ 
rality, while the One was Unity and forever indivisible. 

The concept of each living creature proceeded from the 
second : the eternal Mind ; and this vivifying and energizing 
intelligence comprehended the prototypes of every living 
being, hence also of the immortal Gods—not themselves, but 
their idea or image. And just as the eternal Mind proceeded 
from the One, so, in the third place, did the Soul of the uni¬ 
verse proceed from the second; that Soul whose twofold nature 
on one side touched the supreme Mind, and, on the other, the. 
baser world of matter. This was the immortal Aphrodite, 


1 Vambery, 210. 

2 Substantia enim, quae nec colorem nec figuram admittit nec tangibilis est, animae 
haud dubia gubernatrix, solamente conspicitur.—Origen, c. Celsum, vi. p. 494. The 
Hebrew philosophy held a Second Ousia and Divine Power, the Beginning of all gener¬ 
ated beings, the first Hypostasis and Begotten of the first Cause.—Eusebius, Praep. 
Ev. Book VII. cap. xii. This Second Ousia is located after the without beginning and 
unbegotten ousia of the God of all things.—an ousia unmixed and beyond all compre¬ 
hension.—ibid. xii. The Second God is the Logos, the Oldest Angel.—Philo Judaeus, 
and Proverbs, viii. 

3 The Logos, Mind, Wisdom, and Power of the God !—Gen. ii. 2. 


THE NAZARENES. 


617 


cradled in bliss in the pure radiance of the ideal world and 
yet unable to free herself from the gross clay of matter fouled 
by sensuality and the vehicle of sin. 

The head of Serapis was the eternal Mind; in his broad 
breast slept the Soul of the Universe and the prototypes of all 
created things. The world of matter was the footstool under 
his feet. All the subordinate forces obeyed him the mighty 
first Cause whose head towered up to the realm of the incom¬ 
prehensible and inconceivable One. 1 

There are four Archai (Beginnings) and Powers from which 
the Kosmos has been composed, earth, water, air, and fire. 
But the heavenly and intelligent race of the soul will depart to 
Aither the most pure, as to a father. For the Fifth is a certain 
ousia (nature) borne round in a circle, from which the Stars 
and the entire heaven seem to have been generated, and from 
which the human soul is an offshoot. 2 It is not surprising that 
the ancient souls of men, bothered with a philosophy they 
could not grasp, yet supposing that there might be something 
in it, rigorously followed the practical precepts (the only thing 
that was intelligible to them) and proceeded to starve and 
mortify their infernal bodies for the sake of their immortal 
souls. But this to many minds is preferable to admitting 
themselves to be a natural product. 

Lo the days are coming (the word of Ia’hoh), and I will hurt all circum¬ 
cision in preputio : Egypt and Ieudah and Edom and Beni Amon and Moab and 
all that are shaven on top who dwell in the desert; for all the Goiim 3 are un¬ 
circumcised, and the entire House of Israel are uncircumcised in heart.— 
Jeremiah, ix. 24, 25. 

All through the Jordan country and the desert there were 
wandering pastors, itinerant prophets or Koraim. 4 The Sabian 
Arabs, 5 familiar with the Dionysus Iacchos-worship, offered 
quite a field for the gnosis in preparing the way of Iachoh, 
Adonis, Dionysus, or the “ Angel Iesua,” and especially for 
straightening out the “way of Alah” in Arabia. There were 

1 George Ebers, Serapis, pp. 194, 195. According to Eusebius, Theophaneia, I. 23, 
27, transl. Sam. Lee, 1843, the Only Son of the Father is the Word of God, the 
King of all, and the Saviour. 

2 Philo, Quis Heres, 57. 

3 Gentiles. Adversaries of the Jews, who considered themselves the Elect. 

* Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. xxxii. xxxiii.; Isaiah, xl. 3. 

3 Mark, iv. 11, 12; ix. 10, 18 fif. 


61S 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Nazoria in abundance before Christ. 1 Nazarenes and Ebionites 
dwelt in Idumea and Nabathea, 2 and Isaiah mentions the Poor 
(Ebioni) of Edom. 

One subsistence for all, like brothers.—Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 

To practise holiness (<rejtmfT 7 ?Ta a <TKeiv) . . . self-restraint (iyicpareiav) . . . 
the communist life (rb koivovtitikov). 

And to the disciples they praise up patience always and temperance, and 
they despise wealth and pleasure. 3 

In the Bacchic thiasoi (associations) ten days’ chastity and 
baptism were requisite for initiation. 4 Chastity is, in the Old 
Testament, twice called for under circumstances equivalent to 
initiation. 5 The Essenes lived in thiasoi, etairiai, or sus- 
sitia; 6 which implies monasteries, as Josephus, Philo, and 
the Serapis-worship distinctly indicate. Strabo, 806, mentions 
the Great Houses where the priests lived in the practise of 
askesis (ascetic discipline). The semneia and monasteria, men¬ 
tioned in Philo Judaeus, were cells; and the existence of 
monks of Serapis in Philo’s time is now established. 

Ananias and his wife kept back something; they did not 
obey the rule Qui non abrenunciaverit, inquit, 7 omnibus quae 
possidet non potest meus esse discipulus. . . . Negat Christus 
suum esse discipulum quern viderit aliquid possidentem, et eum 
qui non renunciat omnibus quae possidet . . . sacerdotes do- 
mini, quibus in terra pars non est, quibus portio dominus est, 
Talis enim erat ille qui dicebat: Tanquam egentes, multos 
autem locupletantes: Ut nihil habentes, et omnia possidentes. 8 
Paulus hie est qui in talibus gloriatur. Yis audire quid etiam 
Petrus de se ipso pronuntiet ? Audite eum cum Ioanne pariter 
profitentem; et dicentem: Aurum et argentum non habeo, sed 
quod habeo hbc tibi do.—Origen, Horn, xvi. 9 

1 Epiphanius, 1.121; Exodus, xix. 11, 14, 15 ; Movers, Phonizier, p. 204 ; Dunlap, 
Sod, I. 43. 

2 Dunlap, Sod. II. pp. xiv. 34. 

3 Lucian, Icaro-Menipp. 30. 

4 decern dierum castimonia opus esse, deinde pure lautum in sacrarium deducturam. 
—Titus Livius, xxxix. 9. Dionysus will not at all compel women to take heed as to 
the Kupris; . . . the chaste woman at Bacchic Festivals will not be corrupted.— 
Euripides, Bacchae, 314-318. 

5 Exodus, xix. 15. 

6 Eusebius, lib. 8. cap. 8. 

7 Luke, xiv. 33. 

8 2 Cor. vi. 10. 

9 Origen in Geneseos, cap. lxvii. 


THE NAZARENES. 


619 


Those who belong to the Lord Christos Iesous have crucified the flesh to¬ 
gether with the passions and the yearnings (thereof).—Paul, Galatians, v. 24. 

* 

The disciples of the talapoins of India must keep the rule not 
to touch gold or silver . 1 

Silver and gold I have not.—Acts, iii. 6. 

Every one angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.—Matthew, 
v. 22. 

The Essenes restrained their anger, being just, controllers of 
passion, of the best good faith, promoting peace. 2 

Entering into the oikia, salute it, saying : Peace to this oikos!—Matthew, 
x. 1G. Sinait. 

The Essenes’ every word is stronger than an oath. They avoid 
taking an oath, thinking it something worse than perjury . 3 

I tell you not to swear at all. . . . 

But let your word be Yes, Yes, No, No.—Matthew, v. 

This is the very centre of Eastern self-denial, Eastern Mona- 
chism! And yet it is preached as something different. In the 
N. T. and the English version our attention is diverted from 
the salient points which positively indicate the oriental theories 
(good and bad) introduced into the Christian Tidings. 

Some of these Bra’hmans lived in huts, and as far as possible alone. — 
Lassen, III. I. p. 362. 

The huts of the congregated are very cheap; in each hut is a holy place 
called semneion and monaeterion, in which place, solitary, they perform the 
mysteries of the semnos life (the life of saint).—Philo, Vita Contemplativa, 3. 
The Essenes entered together into their own abode, into which none of the 
heterodox could enter.—Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 

On that day the Healer, issuing from the hut , 4 sat down by the sea. — Mat¬ 
thew, xiii. 1. 

Let him utterly deny himself, take up his digger and follow me. What 
shall a man give in exchange for his soul ?—Matthew, xvi. 24, 26. 

For the soul is more than the food, and the body than the clothing. Mark 
the ravens that they neither sow nor harvest, nor is there for them storehouse 
nor barn,—and the God feeds them! —Luke, xii. 23, 24. 

Those entering the sect (of Essenes) made over to the order their private 
property.—Josephus, Wars, II. 7. 

Neither said any one that what he possessed was his own ; but all things 
were common property among them.—Acts, iv. 32. 

1 Jacolliot, Voyage au Pais des Elephants, pp. 254, 276. 

3 Josephus, Wars, ii. 7. 

3 ibid. 

4 Oikia. 


620 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


But the Baptist, like other Oriental Ascetics, plainly inti¬ 
mated that something more than water baptism was needed to 
cleanse ‘the soul from the flesh. 

He sliall baptise you with holy spirit and with. fire. he will burn up the chaff 
with inextinguishable fire.—Matthew, iii. 11, 12. 

Fear not those slaying the body but unable to destroy the life ; but rather 
fear Him that can destroy both life and body in Gehenna.—Matthew, x. 28. 

The Ascetic Iacob, then, “ Mind ,” when it sees passion humble remains, 
thinking to destroy it by force ; but when high and haughty and arrogant, the 
Ascetic Mind runs away first, and afterwards all the parts of his Askesis, studies, 
exercises, services, memories of the virtues, self-denial, performances of duties, 
—and crosses over the river of the outward senses that swamps and baptises the 
soul in the rush of the passions.—Philo, Leg. Alleg. III. 6. 

For it is not possible for one who lives in the body and the mortal race to 
be united to God, except God frees him from his prison (the body). —Philo, 
Leg. Alleg. III. 14. 

Homer and Sopliokles mention Ascetic Selloi sleeping on 
the ground. Already from Porphyry 1 2 we knew of ascetics in 
Egyptian temples, who, apart from the public, slept on palm- 
leaves, drank no wine, ate no fish, never laughed, held their 
hand always hidden under their gown? A completely organised 
monasticism and convent life was connected with the worship of 
Sarapis the most esteemed deity (as is well known) in Egypt in 
the Alexandrine time. The monachism of Serapis can be traced 
for centuries, from about 165 b.c. to 211 after Christ at which 
time we find the inscription of a Sarapis-recluse. Dr. Wein- 
garten supposes that the Tlierapeutae were an isolated sect 
having no connection with the Egyptian popular life, at least 
with that of Upper Egypt, and after the middle of the first 
century of our era disappears absolutely without leaving a 
trace behind. 3 This is a mistake. 4 We know from Julian’s 
fourth oration that Sarapis is the Sun. We also know from 
Philo, on the Therapeutae, that these adored the Sun and were 
monks. The Sun was the source of Spirit. What hinders our 
regarding them, then, as not remote from the Sarapis-ascetics ? 
Philo’s Therapeutae kept the hands inside of their garment; 5 
the right hand between the breast and chin, but the left con- 

1 Porphurios, de Abst. iv. 6. 

2 Dr. Hermann Weingarten, Ursprung des Monchtums, 30. 

2 ibid. 31. 

4 Connected with the Osirian Serapis-worship.—See De Iside, 2, 5, 10. 

6 Philo, vita contemplativa, 3: elo-w tA? exovres. 


THE NAZARENES. 


621 


cealed, by the flank or side . 1 The Essenes lived in thiasous 
(colleges, convents), etairias (brotherhoods) and snssitia (mes¬ 
ses) ; 2 and adored the Sun, Sarapis, as did the Jews and Chris¬ 
tians. What then becomes of Christianity ? Its origin is lost 
in the mazes of Hindu and Semitic-Egyptian asceticism. 

At the sound of the gong three thousand (budhist) priests assemble together 
to take their meal. Whilst entering the dining hall they observe the greatest 
decorum and propriety of conduct; one after another they take their seats. 
Silence is observed amongst them all: they make no noise with their rice-bowls, 
and when they require more food there is no chattering one with the other, but 
they simply make a sign with their fingers.—Beal's Fah-Hian, p. 9. 

The Essenes, pure, come to the dining-hall, just as into a holy temple, and, 
while they sit in silence, the bread-maker furnishes bread in due order. . . . 
Neither noise nor tumult ever disturbs the abode . . . and the silence of those 
inside appears to those outside like some frightful mystery.—Josephus, Wars, 
II. 7. 

When then the Therapeutae come together, clad in white robes, beaming 
with the loftiest sanctity, at a signal from one of the temporary-stewards, for so 
it is the custom to name those in such services, before they sit at table, standing 
up in ranks in an orderly arrangement, and lifting their faces and hands to heav¬ 
en .. . they 3 pray to the God that the feast may be satisfactory and accept¬ 
able. . . . And the table is pure (free) from animal food. 4 —Philo, Vita Contem- 
plativa, 8, 9. 

After the associates have reclined at table . . . and the deacons (the 
stewards) stand ready for service, ... no one dares to speak in an undertone or 
to respire too strongly.—Philo, Vita Cont. 10. 

All listening in perfect silence except when they must sing the choruses and 
chants. . . . and after the Supper they keep the holy all-night Vigil. . . . And 
the Vigil is kept as follows. They rise all together and, in the centre of the 
sumposion, first two choruses are formed, one of men, the other of women. 
And for each a leader and chief is chosen, most honorable and best fitted for it. 
Then they sing hymns made to the God in many metres and tunes, re-echoing 
in semichoruses and in responsive concord, moving their hands about in cadence 
and dancing in time, pealing forth at one time prosodia, at another the chorus- 
songs, and making the necessary strophes and antistrophes. 

Then when each chorus has been entertained apart, the men by themselves 
and the women by themselves, just as in the Bakchic ceremonies quaffing the 
unmixed dea?' to God they are mingled together, and the two choruses become one, 

1 Philo, 3. Sarapis is Adonis in Hades; for, says Julian, Zeus, Hades and Helios are 
Sarapis. It is the old story of the descent of Osiris, Herakles, Bacchus and Adonis to 
Acheron and Hades. 

2 Philo, Fragment, in Eusebius, viii. 8. 

3 Among the Essenes and Budhists a priest prays before and after the meal.—Jose¬ 
phus, Wars, II. 7. 

4 The Budhists and Essenes ate no animal food. Both bathed ; both had stewards 
and overseers. 


622 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


an imitation of that which once met by the Red Sea on account of the miracles 
worked there. For the sea by God’s command, becomes the cause of salvation 1 
to some and of total destruction to others: . . . Seeing and experiencing this 
(miracle) which was a work greater than reason, imagination and hope, inspired 
men and women together becoming one chorus sang hymns of thanks to * God 
the Saviour.’ . . . 

The shrill chorus of women answering to the heavy swell of the men pro¬ 
duces a very harmonious and really musical symphony with songs of the chorus 
and the antichorus. Very beautiful the ideas, and exquisite the diction, holy 
(semnoi) the ehoreutae ; but the object of the conceptions, expressions and clior- 
eutae is the piety. Intoxicated until dawn with this noble enthusiasm, not with 
heavy heads, nor closing the eye, but more thoroughly aroused than when they 
entered in to the symposium (the sacred supper), so far as regards their coun¬ 
tenances and their whole body, facing the SuN-rise, when they see the Helios 2 
going up from the horizon, lifting the hands to heaven, they pray for a Good- 
day 3 and truth and acuteness of reasoning power. And after the prayers they 
retreat 4 each into his particular cell. 5 ... So much for the Therapeutae that 
cling to the contemplation of nature and the things in it, and that live for the 
soul alone.—Philo, Vita Contemplativa, 11. 

Who marries his girl does well; and who marries not will do better.—1 Co¬ 
rinthians, vii. 38. 

They left their friends at the call of the spirit to crucify the 
flesh. They left all. 

If any one comes to me and does not hate 6 his father and mother, wife, 
children, brothers and sisters and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. 
—Luke, xiv. 26. 

Let him deny himself.—Mark, viii. 34. 

They will pass this night without closing the eye 7 and 
they will employ it in singing to the sound of musical instru¬ 
ments. . . . 

Let one take care on this holy day not to speak to those 
who are not devots to Christna. . . . 

The virtuous man makes it a pleasure to come to hear 
symphonies and prayers which celebrate the praises of the 
Master of the world and efface sins. He then himself mingles 
with the holy flock, and all together are eager to testify their 
devotion and their zeal by dances , songs of lively joy and 

1 The sea washes away all the evils of men ! To the sea, ye Mystae ! 

2 Eli! Eli! 

3 “ Good Day.” This must be the source of the modern greeting. 

4 <b'axwpou<ri. Anchorites. 

5 semneion. 

6 Mark, x. 29. 

7 Compare the Vigils of the Therapeutae. The Vigils were to Amon, or Amanuel. 


TIIE NAZARENES. 


623 


hymns in honor of the Saviour of the world. 1 —Extract from 
the Vishnu-Purana. 

The flock, the holy flock, of Jerusalem in her solemn feasts.—Ezekiel, 
xxxvi. 38. every head was shaven, every shoulder freed from hair.—Ezekiel, 
xxix. 18. 

And thy chasidi (casti, chaste eunuchs) shall bless Thee.—Psalm cxlv. 10. 

And first it was necessary that the body as well as the soul should be pure 
so that it should be reached by no passion, but keep pure from all that is part 
of the perishable nature, eatings and drinks and commerce with women. But 
this last he had despised since many times, and almost ever since he first com¬ 
menced to prophesy and to carry God within him,' 2 thinking it proper to give 
himself up ready always to the oracles : and viands and drinks for forty days 3 
successively he slighted, clearly because having better nourishment, that which 
comes from Contemplation ! 

For ascending into the loftiest andr most sacred of the mountains of the 
region ... he is said to have stayed out the time without having carried any¬ 
thing for the necessary enjoyment of food.—Philo, Vita Mosis, III. 2. 

Contemplating with his soul the bodiless types (ideas) of the bodies about to 
be completed.—Philo, Vita Mosis, III. 3. 

The very sacred association of wisdom and temperance and constancy and 
justice runs after ascetics and those who admire the austere and severe life, and 
self-denial and endurance, together with frugality and few wants, by means of 
which the most dominant of what is in us, the reasoning faculty, advances to 
perfect health and vigor, overthrowing the heavy entrenchment of the body which 
wine-drinkings and good eatings and venereal pleasures and other insatiable de¬ 
sires welded together, producing obesity, the opposite of perspicacity.—Philo, 
III. 22. For our soul is often moved of itself, throwing off the corporeal burden 
and escaping from the multitude of outward perceptions, and often too when 
it is still clothed in them. By its naked movement, then, it comprehended what 
only the intellect perceives.—Philo, On Dreams, I. 8. 

Philo, born 15-25 years before Christ, mentions some of 
the virtues : piety, holiness, truth, right, purity, regard for 
an oath, justice, equality, good faith, community of goods, 4 
temperance, self-denial, 5 abstemiousness. He also speaks of 
Tlierapeia tov wros, the Therapeutae, and the Essaeans. Euse¬ 
bius says that the Therapeutae were the ancestors of the 
Christians. Matthew’s Gospel follows the Essaeans. 

The transfiguration of the Iessaeans into the Christians oc¬ 
curred in the 2nd century, probably between 125 and 150. Ire- 

1 Jacolliot, Christna et le Christ, p. 85. 

2 “toiou/ttj /cal r) AiyunrCtov (ro(f>t a. Si to Oeiov Sotjo.^ovTes yivbHTKeiv vofx gouffiv,” 

3 Luke, iii. 2, 3, 5. 

4 Koinonia : in common. 

6 Enkrateia : continence, self-denial. 


624 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


naeus altered the order of the succession of names in Justin’s 
Syntagma.—Adolf Harnack, Zur Quellenkritik d. Gesch. d. 
Gnosticismus, pp. 33, 49, 55, 56. The most likely hypothesis 
is that Irenaeus first transferred the name of Kerinthus from 
Asia Minor to the West.—ibid. p. 46. Irenaeus does not fol¬ 
low a chronological order, but puts Saturninus and Basileides 
next in succession after Simon and Menander, while in book 
III. cap. 2, he mentions Valentinus, Markion, Kerinthus, and 
then (deinde, jaereVaTa) Basileides. Consequently Harnack, pp. 
50, 52, 53, 56, holds that Irenaeus considered Basileides young¬ 
er than the three first named and that only an interest sach- 
lich (i. e. in regard to the material, the substance) decided him 
to place Basileides earlier than the others in his account.—ib. 
52, 55. The list which is testified to by Hegesippus is in the 
following order: Simon, Menander, Markion, Karpokras, Val¬ 
entin, Basileides, Satornil.—Harnack, p. 48. The idea of 
Irenaeus, according to Harnack, p. 56, was in confuting Valen- 
tinians to conquer other Haeretics. In this demonstration Ire¬ 
naeus so delivers it that he brings it only for those Haeretics 
that, in Harnack’s opinion, stood mentioned in Justin’s Sun- 
tagma, that is, for Markion, Simon, Menander, Satornil, Basil¬ 
eides, Karpokras. He handles Valentinus in starting. He 
puts Simon, Menander, and Markion forward, and then lets 
the rest follow, just so as we know from Justin down.—Har¬ 
nack, 56. Nevertheless Irenaeus brings in Kerinthus in the 
vicinity of the Ebionites, probably with as well-considered a 
purpose as he had in putting Basileides in an early place ; al¬ 
though in Justin’s Dialogue and in the list confirmed by 
Hegesippus the Basilidians come sixth instead of fourth from 
Simon. Now the first three, Simon, Menander, and Saturninus 
do not mention the man Jesus, and there is no positive evi¬ 
dence that Basileides did. Harnack, p. 78, holds that the sys¬ 
tems of Valentinus, Basileides, Saturninus did not make as 
much impression on Justin as Markion and the antinomist 
Gnosis, because when Justin wrote his Suntagma, his first 
Apology, they did not have the importance that subsequently 
lifted them up far above other tendencies. Indeed it is now 
an almost heretical undertaking to speak of a time when Mark¬ 
ion shall have flourished, Valentin and Basilides first budded 
forth: but if our (Harnack’s) previous results are correct then 
there should be sufficient reason for once again revising the 


THE NAZARENES. 


625 


chronological dates to which men think themselves obliged to 
pull down the time of Markion. In our thinking, out of the lit¬ 
erature of the next centuries weighty arguments can be brought, 
which rightly confirm Justin’s Haeretic-list as chronological 
and go to show that certainly the antinomist Syrian Gnosis 
is the oldest form of the haeresy, but that the known systems 
of a Satornil and Basilides have sprung up later than, for 
instance, that of Markion. Justin places together Simon, 
Menander, Markion, because in his view they (as to subject) 
belonged together. The fact that Markion is placed by Jus¬ 
tin in association with Simon and Menander is in itself a very 
singular evidence of the time in which Justin must have lived, 
—about a.d. 150. Harnack’s Satornil is Saturninus in Irenaeus, 
I. xxii. He holds, p. 46, that Marcellina was not mentioned 
in Justin’s Syntagma, nor Kerinthus (although Irenaeus has 
both names) the former because of anachronism; Kerinthus, 
because in all the West the name appears first in Irenaeus. 
Neither Hegesippus nor Tertullian knows anything of him. 
Harnack considers him of importance only in a limited circle ; 
but Antioch and the Ebionites were not a limited circle. Ire¬ 
naeus, I. xxvi. mentions him with the Ebionites that differed 
from him. But it looks as if these last mentioned Ebionites 
w r ere not so numerous circa 150 as those that may have thought 
wfith Kerinthus. Compare Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. with Iren¬ 
aeus I. xxiv. xxv. 

It is plain enough that Matthew 1 never wrote his Gospel 
expressly for the Transjordan Nazoria, else it would have been 
written in Aramean, not in Greek; Josephus wrote in Aramean 
and in Greek. But the Greek was for Antioch and Alexandria 
and Borne, the Aramean for Jews. If Matthew had written for 
the Transjordan people his work would have had more of the 
gnostic aeons 2 of the Chaldaean-Nazorian and Essene school. 
He would have given us some of the names of the Essene 
Angels; whereas he took the Essene moral 3 for his text, not 
its mythology! He describes the King, the Great Archangel, 
only as he appeared on earth,—the man Iesua, not the Salvator 


1 The dialects of Asia Minor were closely akin to the Greek.—Sayce, Science of 
Language, I. 8. Hence the close connection of the Paulinist Jew and the Greek of 
Asia. 

2 rrjs yvGHTTiKYjs ypa<t>r\<;, tovtcVti row viov. — Clemens Al. Strom, vi. 5. 

3 Matth. xx. 26, 27. 

40 


626 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of Saturninus. He gathered his conception from the Nazo- 
renes, lays the groundwork of his story among the Sabians be¬ 
yond the Jordan, takes a leaf out of their book, and proclaims 
it in Greek to the Syrians. He follows Philo and the Ebionites, 
he has a vision of ruins, a destroyed Temple of the Jews. He 
sees the people fleeing to the mountains from their Roman 
oppressors. 1 The mere fact that Matthew and Luke let Philo’s 
Logos the Creator and Great Archangel of many names, the 
Chief of the Angels 2 and the Son of God, 3 be born of a virgin 
shows not only that Matthew wrote after the Gnosis mentioned 
in Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. but that he had in mind the Kingly 
Power of Philo, the Son of the Gnostic “ Man,” the Anointed 
Massiacha of the Kabalah, the Messiah of Daniel, and the 
Great Archangel of the Essenes, Sabians, Jews, Baptists, Na- 
zoria, and Ebionites. In the Book of Daniel vii. 13, 14, the 
Vision of the likeness of a man refers to a superhuman being 
the Governor of all the world, not the Messiah of the Jews 
alone (see Dan. ix. 25, 26). The Virginal birth in Matthew (in 
an age when miracles had a great effect upon the ignorant 
classes in Asia Minor, Syria, and the East) looks late, and 
Irenaeus in what little he gives of the Gnostics proves that the 
Gospel of Matthew is still later. It is not our plan to repre¬ 
sent the Jews of Jerusalem as altogether Essenes or Baptists, 
although the Gospel of Matthew, iii. 5, expressly states that 
Jerusalem, all Judea, and the people of the entire region round 
about the Jordan were baptised by John the Baptist. 

Between the Hebrew Bible and the Pour Gospels comes 
the Septuagint Greek Version. Philo, de Vita Mosis, II. 7, 
calls the Seventy “ Hierophants and Prophets to whom it was 
granted by tested considerations to agree with the most genu¬ 
ine spirit of Moses.” What made them Prophets ? Ernest de 
Bunsen, p. 96, charges that the translators were (according to 
Jerome) divinely moved to add to the original and thus to 
perform the office of prophets, giving a new revelation by every 
addition as well as by all their deviations from the Hebrew 
text. Now the writers of the New Testament cite the Septua¬ 
gint. Philo, the Essenes, the Targumists, and probably the 
early Christians explained the doctrinal development in the 


1 Matth. xxiv. 

2 Matth. iv. 11. 

3 See Hermes Trismegistus, ed. Parthey. 


THE NAZARENES. 


627 


Scriptures by the gradual proclamation of mysteries which the 
Initiated handed down since the time of Moses.—Bunsen, p. 97. 

The original Hebrew Evangel was badly protected. Each 
Judaising sect of Syria added to it or suppressed parts, so that 
the orthodox present it sometimes as interpolated and longer 
than Matthew, sometimes as mutilated. In the hands of the 
Ebionites of the 2nd century it arrived at the last degree of 
alteration.—Renan, 112. 

Renan (Evang. 174) holds that Mark’s Gospel was the origin 
of our Matthew’s text, the base on which it was written. 
Mark’s order, general plan and characteristic expressions are 
followed in a fashion which leaves no doubt that the author of 
the Gospel according to Matthew had the work of his prede¬ 
cessor before his eyes or in his memory. The coincidences in 
the slightest details for whole pages are so literal that one is 
at times tempted to affirm that the author possessed a manu¬ 
script of Mark. On the other hand certain omissions the 
motive of which it is impossible to explain would rather sug¬ 
gest a work made from memory. The main thing is that the 
text called of Matthew supposes that of Mark to have preceded 
and does little more than complete it. It does this in two 
ways, first by inserting in it these long discourses which made 
the worth of the Hebrew Evangels, then in adding to these 
some traditions of more modern formation, fruits of the suc¬ 
cessive developments of the legend, and to which the Christian 
conscience already attached infinite value. The final redaction 
has, however, much unity of style; one same hand has extended 
itself over the very different pieces that enter into its composi¬ 
tion. This unity leads to the thought that, for the parts not 
taken from Mark, the compiler worked on the Hebrew; if he 
had availed himself of a translation, we should feel the differ¬ 
ences of style between the main foundation of the work and 
the intercalated parts. But the citations from the Bible 
Matthew takes from the Greek Septuagint. They presuppose 
the use of the Hebrew text or an Aramean targum and of the 
Septuagint Version. Thus ‘Nazoraios klethesetai ’ (ii. 23) is 
drawn from nezer (a shoot or branch) in Isaiah, xi. 1; lx. 21. 
Even at that, it is a forced construction to infer a Nazori from 
a Hebrew word meaning a young shoot. In ‘ Evangiles,’ pp. 
177,178, Renan exhibits the mode in which the pseudo-Matthew 
makes his additions to the old Mark. It is manifest that 


628 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Renan, like Lucian, had not a high opinion of the intelligence 
of the lower classes in the Orient, whether Jews or Communists, 
who evidently held the view, “ Let hope support thee in the 
angels’ land.” 1 

“ Metatron, liis name is as the name of his Lord, having been created in his 
likeness.”—Sohar, III. fol. 91. 

Let us make Adam 2 in our likeness.—Genesis, i. 26. 


Who has made all things by the Word (Logos) of His power, of 
the gnostic scripture, that is, of the Son.—St. Peter in Clemens 
Alex. YI. v. Then Peter adds: Worship this God not as the 
Greeks do. Good men among the Hellenes worship the same 
God as we, but without having learned the tradition through 
the Son in complete science (Epignosis). 3 Do not worship as 
the Greeks changing the mode of worship of the God but not 
announcing another ; because carried away by Agnoia (Spirit¬ 
ual Ignorance) and not knowing the God as we, according to 
the perfect gnosis (absolute Scientia) . . . Nor worship as 
the Jews do. For they think they alone know the God, but 
they do not know him, serving angels and archangels, month 
and moon, and if the moon fails to appear they do not keep 
the sabbath called the First, nor the Newmoon, nor azuma, nor 
feast, nor great day. But holily and justly learning what we 
deliver to you, take care to worship the God through the 
Christos. For we find in the Scriptures (Graphais) just as the 
Lord said : Behold I set forth to you a New Testament. 4 He 
h as ^ given us a N. T., those of the Jews and Greeks are ancient, 
but you newly worshipping him in the third generation (ycW). 
—Clemens Alex. Strom. YI. v. In connection with the preach¬ 
ing of Peter the Apostle Paul will also declare, saying : Take 
also the Hellenic Books. Know thoroughly the Sibyl how she 
declares One God and the things about to happen. And tak¬ 
ing Hystaspes, read and you will find far more clearly written 
the Son of the God. . . . Therefore Peter says that the Lord 
spoke to his apostles: If then any one of Israel should wish to 
repent, through my name to believe on the God, his sins shall 


1 Olympiodor.. in Phaedon. 

2 Adam is Adamas, the Unconquered Herakles-Mithra Adamatos. 

3 Perfecta Cognitione. 

4 Jer. xxxi. 31, 32. The Essenes, Ebionites, and Jews had worshipped Archangels. 
—So Dan. viii. 16, 17, 18; Colossians, ii. 18. 


THE NAZARENES. 


629 


be forgiven him after twelve years.—Clemens Al. Strom. VI. v. 
It is certain that Peter had read or had not read (it matters not 
which) the Canonical Epistle to the Galatians. He is placed 
in a dilemma any way. If he had not read Galatians he be¬ 
longed to those Eastern Ebionites that Tertullian and the 
Homan Church hated; if he had read Galatians he was so very 
posterior in time as to have been only a quasi apostle. Worse 
than all, in his fall he drags down with him Matthew, xvi. 18, 
19,—the rock of the Homan Church. 

Seir Anpin is the soul of the Messiah joined with the eternal Logos.—Kab- 
baia Denudata, III. 241. 

Metatron his name is as the name of his Lord, having been created in his 
likeness.—Sohar, III. fol. 91. 

The Hades says to the gone to Destruction: 1 his appearance, 
indeed, we have not seen.—Clemens Al. Strom. V. vi. Seir 
Anpin is the Sun ; and the sun is the emblem of the Logos.— 
Philo, Dreams I. 15, 16. 

But the Saviour is, I think, in action, 2 since salvation 3 is his work.—Clem¬ 
ens, Strom. V. vi. 

Dwelling in the land of the shadow of deatli light has shined upon them.— 
Isaiah, ix. 2. 

But pray, before all things, that the gates of light be opened for thee.— 
Justin Martyr. 

The human brain and nerve system are the sole organs 
through which religious ideas - , aspirations, hopes and teach¬ 
ings have been created. Herakles, too, and Adon were names 
of the Lord in the sun, who was the Logos and Mithra in the 
centre of the 7 planets.—Hev. i. 10-17. When, therefore, Hev. 
xii. 1 mentions the sign (Virgo) in the heavens who has come 
into possession of the sun, with the Moon under her feet and 

1 Tjj ’AjrwAeta. 

2 Evepyei. 

3 to aui^eiv. Mark’s Gospel was first written at Rome, Matthew’s Gospel was writ¬ 
ten later, in Syria.—Renan, Evang. 215. Luke’s Renan, p. 253, 254 dates not much 
posterior to the year 70, and he supposes it written at Rome. Luke follows the Greek 
Version of the Septuagint. Consequently it is the Greek Church as we see it in Ire- 
naeus, all Greek names of the Bishops of Rome. The Gospel according to the Hebrews 
is numbered according to some, with the spurious books.—Eusebius, H. E. III. xxv. 
Clemens Al. and Origen are too late to be sufficient vouchers for the date or origin of 
the said Gospel of the Hebrews. Matthew and Mark locate the Gospel among the Ga¬ 
lileans, as Messianist preaching. But this is not decisive as to the date or origin. 
M. Renan has not disposed of this point. See Renan, Evang., p. 102. 


630 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


crowned with 12 stars, we know it is the Great feminine prin¬ 
ciple identified with the Celestial Aphrodite the Mother of the 
Sun, as in Babylon. This is the Messiah.—Rev. xii. 5. Con¬ 
sequently Seir Anpin is the Messiah or Spirit in the sun, St. 
John’s Logos, called Metatron and Iesua in the Jewish Hid¬ 
den Wisdom and Kabalali. Philo, On Dreams, I. 15, 16, says 
Moses calls the Sun the Divine Logos, the Model of the sun 
that goes round in heaven, and again says the Helios is the 
God and Ruler of all things. This was the general view in 
Philo’s time among the Sabians, and the Jews were Sabians 
too, like their transjordan neighbors. But in Messianism was 
there not some Gnosticism ? Else how came the Nikolaitans 
to be Gnostics ? And how did their gnosis happen to be Mar- 
kionite, as given in Irenaeus, III. xi. ? The author of Rev. ii. 
27, v. 5, is a Jew. His Messiah is essentially the Jewish Mes¬ 
siah. Is his book not a work of the Jewish Diaspora, rewritten 
or adapted to Christian uses ? As a Jew he would not be likely 
to favor Markion or the Gnostics. There was spiritualism in 
Palestine, man alone develops it. Living, they went down 
into the water, and living they come up ; but they, who were 
already dead, went down corpses (veKpoT) but came up living.— 
Clemens Al. VI. vi. Destined for the conversion of the Jews 
and having its source in Messianic expectations the evangel¬ 
ical recital had all its individuality before it was written. 1 
Irenaeus, III. cap. xi. 7 describes the Nikolaitans as saying 
that the Father of the Lord is different from the Maker ; and 
that the Christos is another of those above other than the Son 
of the Maker, and that the Christos did not suffer, but descend- 

1 Renan, ib. 95. No reference would be made to “the New Jerusalem ” while the 
Old one lasted.—Rev. iii. 12. John preaches the Logos Messiah.—Rev. iii. 11, 21, xix. 
11-13, xxii. 1, 20. The Short Face is the soul of the Messiah joined with the eternal 
Logos. But the very way Rev. i. 12-20, ii. 1 exhibits the Logos as active in the centre 
of the Chaldaean, Sabian, Moabite, Aramean (Numb, xxiii. 1, 7, 29), and Jewish 7 
Planets stamps the author of the Apokalypse as an Ebionite Jew from east of the 
Jordan, or a sympathiser with the Nazarenes of that region.—Rev. xiv. 4, 5. 

Osiris was put to death and rose again; but was regarded as the benefactor of 
mankind. The tomb of Osiris at Abydos was to the Egyptians what the holy sepul¬ 
chre is to the Christians.—Mariette Bey, Mon. of Upper Egypt, 122, 132, 138. The 
Sun was the source of fire and water and spirit. The Egyptians made the dead 
mummies. Of course, as they, as well as the first Christians, had been long taught the 
transmigration of souls (—Gelinek, Die Kabbalah, 178, Origen, peri Archon, I. 7, Con¬ 
tra Celsum, I. 3; Hieronymus epist. ad Demetriadem), they expected the resurrection 
of the dead in Osiris. Osiris is the Solar Water, ‘ this Water which you worship 
every year.’—Jul. Firmicus, 2. Osiris Saviour ! 


THE NAZARENES. 


631 


mg* into Iesus the Son of the Maker, flew back again into his 
own Pleroma : and is the beginning indeed to the Onlybegotten 
(the Monogenes) but that the Logos is the true son of the 
Onlybegotten (the Unigenite). Renan, on the other hand, re¬ 
gards the Nikolaitans as the followers of St. Paul, in Rev. ii. 6, 
15. The Nikolaitans were Gnostics. If Paul was such a 
Gnostic as the Nikolaitans, some later Paul wrote his Epis¬ 
tles. Irenaeus, III. xi., describes them as prior to Kerintlius. 
It is plain that Rev. ii. 26, vii. 3-9 was written by a Jew of the 
Essene or Ebionite order.—Rev. xiv. 4, xxi. 8. Then we have 
in the Apokalypse a very early form of Christianism prior to 
the Gospels. 

The different families of Ebionim differed considerably in 
their ideas about Iesus, and this would not be expected, if, as 
Renan supposed, the relations of Iesus had gone from Jeru¬ 
salem to Pella beyond the Jordan not long before the siege of 
Jerusalem. The tradition among them in that case would 
probably have been more uniform. Kerintlius represents a 
full-grown Ebionism of the Jordan or transjordan tint, per¬ 
haps, more resembling that of the Apokalypse before it had 
been possibly touched up. 1 The Ebionites, instead of being 
confined to Iturea, Bashan, the Hauran, Moab, Nabathea and 
Galilee, preached in Asia and Antioch, among the Greeks of 
Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna, Philadelphia, Laodikea, also in 
Rome and Cyprus.—Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 1, 2, 18; Juvenal, 
III. 61, 62, 63. They would seem to have been intimate with 
the Samaritans, Sabians and Clialdaeans (—Dunlap, Sod, II. 
xiv, 10, 14, 21), also with the Elchasites. Being in Asia, they 
were mixed in with the Jewish Diaspora and with those in the 
seven cities mentioned in Rev. i. 4, 11, ii. 9, 14, iii. 9, 12. At 
that time were the Nikolaitan Gnostics and a set of separatists 

1 The Son of God (Rev. ii. 18) and the Lamb (v. 6, 12, 13 ; vi. 17; xxi. 22, 23) are 
purely spiritual personae without flesh ; whereas, v. 5, xii. 17, xiv. 12, xvii. 6, xix. 10, xx. 
4, xxii. 16, 20, describe the human nature of the Iesna. Thus less than ten verses point 
to his human aspect. The Jewish Great Archangel, Logos, or Son of the God was in 
Philo Judaeus and among the Ebionites considered as the Spirit, not as man.—Matthew, 
iii. 16, 17, xxv. 31, 34, 40 ; Irenaeus, I. xxv. (xxvi.). In a brochure or Ms. of some Jew 
of the Diaspora, written about the Messiah, ten or more verses interpolating the name 
Iesua as man could easily have been inserted. And it seems the more probable because 
the entire remainder of the book is devoted to a panorama in which only spiritual 
beings are made prominent. Why was the flesh mingled in the Messiah with the spirit ? 
To, by an illustration, inculcate the contrast between spirit and matter in the Essene 
philosophy. 


632 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


from the Jews, who said they were Jews, but wanted to marry 
among- the heathen.—Rev. ii. 14, 20-23, 26, 27, iii. 4, 9, 12. The 
first known of the Elchasites w T as in the reign of Trajan about 
the year 95 ; but they may have been earlier. Now Elxai said 
that the Christos was born like other men, and was not born 
for the first time, but had previously been born and would 
be born. 1 He would thus appear and exist, undergoing 
alterations of birth and having his soul transferred from 
body to body. In another passage Hippolytus writes that 
the Elkesites do not however confess that there is but 
one Christ, but that there is one that is superior (to the 
rest), and that he is transformed into many bodies fre¬ 
quently, and was now in Iesus.—Ernest de Bunsen, the Angel- 
Messiah, p. 116. Now, then, suppose this doctrine spread in 
Antioch and among the Seven Churches of Western Asia 
Minor among the Jewish Diaspora, the Ebionites, and the 
Greeks. Was not this calculated to stir the blood of such a 
Jew as John of Ephesus a hater of Homan Supremacy ?— 
“Not Jews! ” No Jew who read the Hebrew Bible would hold 
such doctrine! Yet a Messiah is mentioned in Daniel. The 
author of the Apokalypse, iii. 9 says that they are not Jews. 
He is one, evidently ! How is it that he speaks of the Lamb ? 
That is Jewish enough.—Ezekiel, viii. 14. The Roman Church 
too was Ebionite, more Jewish than Christian.—Renan, St. 
Paul, 115, 116. Then come Kerinthus and Theodotos of By¬ 
zantium, with similar views regarding the Christos. How is it 
that the Messianist author of Revelations is so much of a Jew, 
so little of a Christian except in some particulars that maj- be 
the result of a later alteration ? He knows the early Ebionite 
or Essene doctrine, but he never mentions the Gospels. His 
desire is to destroy Rome, not to love anybody !! The Gnostic 
theories must have entered Asia Minor early, and the Ebion¬ 
ites have gone there at an early period,—perhaps before the 
year 70. It looks as if the original Messianist Christianism 
started about the time of Elxai or later, and, without any Gos¬ 
pels, spread as <£ the Messiah’s Coming” from Jews to Greeks, 
—a Messianist heritage from Asia. How could such a Jew have 
had anything to do with the Seven Churches unless the Jewish 
Diaspora held a sort of Messianism! The Ebionites may 
have held another sort, and the Nikolaitans another self- 

1 as the Spiritns. 


THE NAZARENES. 


G33 


denial. 1 Regarding* the origin of Christianism, hooks, at first, 
counted for nothing. The oral tradition wa§ the chief thing. 
But tradition is unreliable evidence when it contradicts sound 
experience of mankind, and the books at an early period could 
be altered, rewritten, or destroyed to suit particular interests. 
Consequently the Apokalypse (interpolated perhaps) comes 
nearer to Jewish Messianism than any other book of the New 
Testament. 2 It is not surprising that Eastern Monacliism in 
the form of Essenism, Iessaeanism, or early Ebionism seized 
upon minds.—Rev. xiv. 4 ; Matth. xvi. 24; Mark, viii. 34; Luke, 

1 Rev. ii. 14, 15; 1 Cor. i. 10-14 ; xii. 6 ; xv. 12. Renan, Evang. 448, says that the 
churches of the Ebionim in Syria engaged in every sort of aberration. 

2 Colossians, i. 13-16 gives some idea of Jewish gnosis and messianism. So i. 17, 
18. For Jews too had gnosis of Angels. Rqnan, p. 450, thinks that there was a Gali¬ 
lean sect of Iudah the Gaulonite ; while the Israelites differed concerning the Messiah. 
—Eusebius, H. E. iv. 22. Elkasai’s Christology agreed with that of the Ebionites.— 
Renan, Ev. 457. Speaking of the Gospel of John, Renan (l’Eglise Chret., p. 47) says : 
One could have recourse to one of these pious frauds at which at that time no one hesi¬ 
tated ! But why not also attribute the story (which Renan accepts) regarding the de¬ 
parture of the family of Jesus to Pella, to clerical zeal and pious fraud ! 

Renan, p. 26, thinks it probable that Hadrian began the work of rebuilding Jeru¬ 
salem in 122 instead of 136-140. He regards John’s Gospel and 1st Epistle as not genu¬ 
ine, but first heard of in the time of Hadrian.—ib. 45, 49, 52. If we are right in con¬ 
sidering the Apokalypse or parts of it the oldest portion of the N. T., the name John 
appears in all three, borrowed perhaps from one to the other, or applied purposely to 
each of the three. If John’s epistle I. i. 6-8 contains some Elkasite singularities, as 
Renan fancies, it only helps us to trace the origin of Christian Messianism not only to 
Judaism but into the neighborhood of Essaian, Elkasaite, Tessaian and Ebionite varia¬ 
tions of it. Bengeli, Gnomon, ed. 3rd. Tubingen, 1855. p. 1043, for Nao reads Lao, thus 
making better sense, and expunging the word Temple (as a recent error). Rev. xi. 1, 
says that the Court of the Temple is given to the Gentiles who shall tread the Holy 
City 3)^ years. This looks as if Jerusalem had been captured before the author wrote ; 
for xi. 19 says that the Temple of the God was opened in the heaven above and the ark of 
the covenant was seen.—Rev. xv. 5, 6, xvi. 1,17. Rev. xvi. 15 says : I come as a thief. I 
come quickly.—Rev. iii. 11 ; xxii. 7, 20. All this refers to the Jewish idea of the Coming 
of the Messiah, not to the Christian idea of the Second Coming of Christ. By a few al¬ 
terations the Jewish idea of the speedy Coming of the Jewish Messiah has been made to 
do service in accordance with the later Christian idea of the Coming of Tesua ; and the 
date of the Jewish Apokalypse would seem to have been posterior to a.d. 70. Again, 
Rev. xi. 8, speaking of the Crucifixion of the Messiah in Rome (the Great City called 
Sodom) may have suggested to the writers of three gospels a Crucifixion at the Holy City 
Jerusalem. According to Renan’s identification of Nero in Rev. xiii., and the number 
666 read Neron Kaisar, there is nothing to show that the Apokalypse was written at 
any particular time between a.d. 70 and 125. The date is notin Nero’s name. 

To him that conquers and keeps his eye to the end upon my works I will give con¬ 
trol of the Gentiles and he shall rule them with an iron rod. ... I will give to him the 
Star of the Morning.—Rev. ii. 26, 27. This Jew wanted to subdue the nations unto the 
God of Israel,—as once in Antioch. The star of the morning is the New Jerusalem 
under the expected Messiah. The King shall come to judge the Nations! The Jews 
could still look for a New Jerusalem after the Messiah’s Coming. 


634 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


ix. 23. The Nazarenes and Ebionites were self-denying, poor, 
and communists. 

The Ramgod Amon in Egypt becomes in the Apokalypse 
the Logos-LAMB. Amon in Egypt is the creative Mind. I was 
with Him, Amon.—Prov. viii. 30 ; Justin, p. 58. Josephus in 
a.d. 94 describes the riches of the Jewish synagogue at Antioch 
and the numerous conversions of the resident Greeks to Juda¬ 
ism. This thing did not stop there. Greek converts and Jews 
were to be found in all the great cities between Antioch and 
Ephesus, as far even as Corinth. What has often been called 
the oldest book of the New Testament mentions the Ecclesias in 
seven cities in Western Asia Minor, north, south and east of 
Ephesus. These seven churches show (in the Apokalypse of a 
certain John) a great expansion of Judaism and Ebionism in 
that quarter. Yet John’s Revelation mentions neither Peter, 
nor James, nor John, nor Paul, 1 nor the word Evangel, nor any 
but Jewish saints, apostles, and prophets, and the New Jeru¬ 
salem, the Holy City coming down from heaven, something far 
beyond the earthly Jerusalem in riches, magnificence and 
splendor. Jerusalem always before a.d. 70 had her angels, 
messengers, or apostoloi commissioned by the Sanhedrin as 
emissaries to other cities. The Temple of the God was opened 
in the heavens and the reign of the Messiah announced.—Rev. 
xi. 15, xii. 5, 10. This is the song of Moses and the Ebionites 
of the transjordan region.—Rev. vii. 4 f.; xv. 3. The Roman 
Church was Ebionite and millenarist.—Renan, St. Paul, 115; 
Rev. xx. 4-6. Anew heaven, anew earth, a new Jerusalem ; 
for the first heaven and the first earth are gone!—xxi. 1. All 
the Churches 2 shall know! This work is evidently post-Ne- 
ronic and after Jerusalem was destroyed. The crucifixion of 
the Kurios in Rome 3 is figuratively spoken of the persecutions 

1 Prior to 125 these names would not be mentioned ; after 169 it would have been a 
necessity, for they are mentioned in the Gospels and Epistles. Before 135 the Chris¬ 
tians were in a struggle with all the different opinions, Judaism, Nikolaitans, Simon 
Magus, Menander, Saturninus, Kerinthians, etc. An author writing under Nerva 
might have written an Apokalypse. 

2 The Ebionites were circumcised, kept the Sabbath and all the Jewish rites and 
festivals. 

3 xi. 8. Whether the beast of Rev. xiii. 1,18 is Nero or Domitian or means some¬ 
thing else, it does not follow that when an author got an idea of the sort he wrote it at 
any particular time. It might take a long time to find the occasion to issue it, and 
therefore furnishes no certain date for a Judaeo-Messianic Apokalypse. After Bar 
Cocheba’s destruction in 135, the Apokalypse of John and the Destruction of Rome 


THE NAZARENES. 


635 


of the Jews in Rome, as a war upon the Coming 1 Messiah. It 
is inferred that Josephus, like the rest of his countrymen, in¬ 
cluding even Philo, expected a Messianic era in accordance 
with the prophecies of Daniel, although posterior to the de¬ 
struction of Jerusalem.—Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. p. 458. Con¬ 
sequently, the author of the Apokalypse might be supposed 
to entertain such expectations after a.d. 70. Rabbi Aqiba and 
the followers of Bar Coziba (or Cocheba) held similar views in 
130-133. How then could the Apokalypse, looking for a Jew¬ 
ish Messiah to come quickly and destroy the Great City on her 
seven hills drunk with the blood of the Messiah’s saints, how 
could such a book be a Christian work? Come out of her 
“ My People : ” this is the expression of the Jews. “ Babylon 
is fallen.” “ In one day will come the blows,—death and grief 
and famine, and she shall be utterly consumed in fire, for the 
Mighty God the Lord has judged her.” Do you see any Chris¬ 
tians here, or is it the Jew alone ! 

The Holy Jerusalem descends from the heaven, from the 
God, having a great and lofty wall, having 12 pylons, and on 
the pylons 12 angels and their names written, which are those 
of the 12 tribes of sons of Israel.—Rev. xxi. 10,12. The Ebion- 
ites held that the Christ has gotten the possession of the world 
to come (has obtained it as an inheritance).—Epiphanius, Haer. 
xxx. 16. So Rev. xxi. 9-27. The Book of Revelation was an 
Ebionite work antecedent to Greek Gospels and Roman Chris- 
tianism. 1 


would not suit the time.—Rev. xvii. 18, xviii. 2. Galba would be the ?th king from 
Julius Caesar, in a.d. 68. But it is not yet entirely certain what was meant by Rev. 
xvii. 11. Counting from Augustus, Nero would be 5th, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian 
8 th. This last was really going to destruction.—Rev. xvii. 11. The writer’s calcula¬ 
tion was peculiarly his own. He shows his animus against Rome. Domitian was a 
sort of 2nd Nero. 

1 The Essene and Ebionite constitution was democratic, with a subordination to 
the elders. Speaking of the Ebionites, Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 13, says : The account 
going forth because of the ‘ Evangel according to Matthew ’ constrained to bring for¬ 
ward the history of the knowledge coming to us. In the among them at least named 
1 Evangel according to Matthew ’ but not in toto the most complete, but adulterated 
(spurious) and defective (and they call this Hebraicon) is contained, that there was 
some man named Iesous and he as of 30 years (old) who elected us.—xxx. 13. It would 
follow from this that the Gospel according to the Hebrews was the Greek Gospel of 
Matthew in a mutilated and altered shape among the Ebionites. The Nazarenes used 
the Gospel according to the Hebrews, secundum apostolos. or as some affirm, according 
to Matthew.—Supern. Rel. I. 427; Hieron. adv. Pelag., iii. 2. Kerinthus and Karpo- 
krates used this same evangel.—Epiphan. Haer. xxx. 14, 26. Does not all this seem to 


636 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


With a civilisation of unnumbered centuries, with a Clial- 
daean, Persian and Hindu preaching-, morals and literature 
back of them, with an Essaian and Budhist polity not beyond 
their reach, with social order of some sort, with Sabian relig¬ 
ion, priests, apostles, teachers, apophtliems, proverbs, wander¬ 
ing preachers, memorised moral sayings, parables and the un¬ 
ceasing mind that accompanies all the manifestations of human 
life the Sabian Baptists beyond the Jordan and the Ebionites 
in Gaulonitis, Batanea, the Basantis or the Hauran 1 had mem¬ 
orised and accumulated a vast amount of rules of life and 
moral sayings. Mind carries within itself a substitute for a 
written literature; and just as in India the night is given to 
rehearsal of tales, legends and poems, so in the Hauran, Moab, 
the Basantis or Galilee mental Experiences were renewed in 
daylight or at night . 2 The descriptions of Galilean life and 
preaching were drawn from the people and taken into the 
Gospels of Mark, Matthew, or Luke. They were drawn from 
life,—a life that has passed away. Justin Martyr begins his 
Dialogue with a reference to conversations held with others, 
Plato repeats the disputations of Socrates, Hermas the talks 
on the Campagna, and Paul the arguments between Judaisn 
and Christianism. The Ebionites -were spread from Moab and 
the Hauran to Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus and Rome. Wliat 
wonder, then, that the Gospels picture Galilee? "When Paul, 
too, reasoned of temperance, righteousness, and Judgment to 

show that Messianism passed from the Jews and Ebionites to the Greeks and Romans ; 
that the last subsequently gave it back to the Ebionites in the 2nd half of the 2nd 
century in a mutilated form of the Gospel according to Matthew which later Ebionites 
had altered to suit themselves, and translated into Aramean (Hebrew), after , the 
Church had got the Evangel ? The doctrines of self-denial, poverty, and communism, 
baptism, resurrection, Mithraworsliip, Messianism all must have preceded the gospels. 
These introduce the King, the parables, Iesua and Ebionism among the Nazarenes. 
The process by which those parables were gathered in aid of Messianism remains the 
Eastern mystery. 

1 See those mentioned in Acts, ii. 8-12, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Pontus and 
Kappadokia. 

2 What Renan attributes to the Messiah we consider the work of the people, the 
peculiar civilisation of the land and clime and monastic selfdenial. This charm of 
the Christian idyl is seen in the idyl of Krishna and the religious romance of Budha. 
Seek and ye shall find. What Renan regards as ths spirit of Iesu we think the result 
of the antithesis of spirit and matter working in the Budhist and Essene monasteries, 
in the Egyptian recluses, in all the Encratites, unto the elevation of the spirit by the 
subjugation of the flesh. There was God and matter, Light and darkness, Good and 
evil, the absolute antitheses one to the other. Give light to them that sit in darkness 
and in the shadow of death ! 


THE NAZARENES. 


637 


come, Felix trembled! Compare the Apokalypse (—Rev. xiv. 
3-5, xvi. 19, xviii. 9, 10) proclaiming the Judgment with all its 
horrors attending the Destruction and Burning of Borne. 

The Ebionites were connected with Elxai who was among 
the Sampseni and Essenes and those called Elkesaites ; and 
some of them say that Adam is the Christ, the first inspired 
with life from the inspiration of the God. 1 In the former idea 
of the Jews and Ebionites the Salvator, Saviour, was an Angel. 
—Isa., lxiii. 8, 9. ^So said Saturninus, that the Salvator is un¬ 
born, incorporeal, without a figure, and appearing as if a man. 
—Iren., I. xxii. Christ came for the Salvation of believers.— 
Saturninus, in Iren., I. xxii. So in I. xxv. (26) Christ exists 
in spirit, not in flesh, not in flesh! Therefore Kerintlius (so 
far as he was an Ebionite) was against the argument of Iren- 
aeus. But in the Gospels the Christos becomes man and real 
flesh. Therefore the change from the view of Isaiah to that of 
the Church most probably occurred after the time of Kerin- 
thus. 2 

Like the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Bevelation, John, 
iii. 27, gives us the oriental dictum that the God governs all 
human events, that man cannot originate anything of himself 
that does not come from heaven. This idea contravenes the 
modern view, from the Neanderthal man down to the present 
time, that man is the motor of his own energies and that man 
has his own destinies on this globe in his own hands, subject 
to the influences of the present and the future and immediate, 
proximate, influences in the past. 


1 Epiphanius, Haerseis, xxx. 3, 17, 18. 

2 It was easy for pious fraud to put upon Kerinthus the aspect of objecting to Iesu 
as not being the Christos when, perhaps, in the day of Kerinthus Iesu had not yet been 
named by any Christian as a man. Even John preached the Messiah, according to 
Isaiah.—Mark, i. 2, 4, 7. Kerinthus spoke of the Unknown Father and the Christ.— 
Iren., I. (xxvi.) xxv. 


CHAPTER NINE. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 

The logos of the God is His Son, and, too, is called Angel 1 and Apostolos. 
Justin, Apol. I. p. 160. 

Les verbes inferieurs etant des anges, le Verbe Superieur sera le prince des 
anges on l’archange. Havet. 

The Arabians regarded Dionysus and the Ourania as the Only 
God. The original form of the Arabian, Phoenician, Egyptian 
and Grecian worship was that of the Sun, Karanos, Kronos, 
Sada or Saturn, El (Sol-Saturn), Azar (Fire), Asar, Asarel (Sat¬ 
urn), Osiris (Sol-Saturn), the Hebrew El (theos), the Greek 
Zeus (Sun, Theos), the Hebrew Dionysus, Bal, Iach, Iachoh 
(Greek Iacchos), Iao, Habol, Apollon. The Hebrew Alah, 
Elah, is a Solar Deity ; as the Arabic, Septuagint and Vulgate 
psalm xix. distinctly states. The one general name is Theos 
for Zeus or Saturn; -and our English Scripture translates it 
God: so that it makes a complete admission that the Sun is 
God. Further, the Messiah was regarded (somewhat later in 
the Syrian land) as likewise in the sun. So the Sibyl said; 
and so this treatise has already shown. Mithra, the Sun, was 
the God of the Nazorians, somewhat disguised under the 
names Abel, Ziua (Zeus), Bel the Younger, and Iao: the Fa¬ 
ther, Bel-Saturn, having been withdrawn from human com¬ 
prehension by such terms as Athik iomim, Ancient of days, 
to on, “ I am,” it, that, Ain Soph, Ayin, etc. But the essential 
point is that the Deity was in the priestly mind and in the 
public comprehension (as well as in psalm xix. in three 
Biblical languages) located in the sun, in sole, en to helio. 
Now the Nazoria, Baptists, Iessaians, Therapeutae, Sarapians, 
and Egyptians took this as their starting-point: “ Thou art 

1 The Angel Gabriel (Abel Ziua) takes the place of the Logos.—Irenaeus, I. xii. p. 
86 ; Codex Nazoria, L 24. The Angel came in the memra (Word) from the Lord’s face. 
—Jerusalem Targum to Gen. xxxi. 24. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 639 


the quickly from the sun coming* God ; ” Su ei ho tachu eeleos- 
then ekoos Theos ! This is the Sun born from the month Epi- 
phi (July, in the sign Leo when the Nile overflows), the Prin- 
cipium of regeneration, the Creator. 1 The religion was wrapped 
in mystery by the priests to confuse the ideas of the faithful. 
After the priests had passed away the mystery was too rich a 
fund to be neglected as a source of profit and influence ; and 
we find the word still in the Epistles ascribed to Paul. A 
gospel was preached that the Messiah had already appeared, 
and that the kingdom of the heavens would soon come ! 

Micah (in Hebrew), v. 1, declares the preceding existence of 
the Messiah from antiquity, from the days of eternity. The 
Septuagint Micah says : from the beginning, from the days of 
eternity. Eev. xiii. 8 says that the Lamb (the Solar Messiah 
in the Zodiac sign Aries) was slain from the foundation of 
the world. The Septuagint Amos, iv. 13 says “ Creating pneu- 
ma, and announcing unto men his Christos.” The Greek Dan¬ 
iel, ix. 25 mentions the Christos, and, 26, his destruction to¬ 
gether with the city and Temple. Daniel (Kara tov s 6), ix. 26, 
says that the Anointing shall be withdrawn and shall cease, 
and a Gentile kingdom shall destroy the City and the Holy 
Place and the Christos. Daniel (in Hebrew) agrees substan¬ 
tially with this Septuagint. We see therefore that Messianism 
began as early as the time when the Hebrew and Greek Dan¬ 
iel was written, possibly as late as the first century before 
Christ; for it was possible to interpolate the Scriptures at any 
time, as Onkelos and the targum of Jon. ben. Usiel did. The 
priests and scribes had the control of the sacred books, and 
wrote what could be understood in two ways, with a hidden 
meaning. Therefore Messianism got into Scripture with the 
knowledge of the Jewish government. Tacitus says as much 
of Messianism in the Sacred Books. As Messianism grew, a 
considerable number of brochures, memoirs, apokalypses, and 
an evangelion, perhaps, appeared and gave way in time to 
others like the Gospel according to Matthew. Agnoia op¬ 
pressed the human soul. 2 It is a combination of ignorance 

1 Isaiah, liii. 7. The Mystery of the King it is good to conceal.—Origen, Cels. v. 
p. 483. 

2 O you Blessed, don’t you know how the Agnoia and deception has made them eo 
that their ears could not be opened even with an auger !—Lucian, I. 286. In the Proph¬ 
ets a profounder sense is hidden.—Origen, Celsus, vii. p. 509. Arroganti Gnostico- 
rum nomine polliceantur novam quandam scientiam.—ib. v. p. 489. 


f> 40 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


find mistake. Lucien advises to live always keeping* death 
before tlieir eyes. What you desire so earnestly you cannot 
take away with you. Of necessity you depart naked. House, 
land and gold are eternally for others. But the Ebionite said: 
Blessed are the poor. A rich man will find it hard to enter 
the kingdom of the heavens. Sell all, and give it to the poor. 
The poor man dies and angels lift him to heaven ; but as to 
the rich, Luke, xvi. 25, he is tormented in hell because he had 
been comfortably off while he lived. 

Saccus my slave and Eutucliia and Hiene my women servants, let them all 
be free on this condition that they take turns in lighting for my monument a 
lamp every month and perform the usual rites belonging to death.—Modestinus, 
leg., 44. 

I will make ready a lamp for my anointed.—Psalm, cxxxii. 17. 

Ia’hoh kills and makes to live, he makes descend to Hades and makes as¬ 
cend. 1 —1 Samuel, ii. 6. 

The Jews kept festival for eight days, commencing Kisleu 25th 
(about Dec. 1st) and called the Lights. 2 In the month Audu- 
naios the Hebrews mourned Adonis (Audonai), but Job 3 men¬ 
tions a resurrection from Acheron the End. 4 
The Moon finds herself in hells as hideous and dark as does 
the sun. 5 

Kerberus whom indeed Echidna bore to evermoving 6 Typhon 

Under an awful cave near black Night, 

Around the destructive gates of much-wept Aides 

Shutting up a dead multitude in a dark abyss. —Quintus Smyrnaeus, vi. 2G1. 

Some of the Byblians said that the Mournings were all made 
to the Osiris and not to the Adonis, Osiris having died among 
them . 7 

1 from Hades. 

2 Josephus, Ant. xii. 7. 7. 

3 Job, xix. 25, 26. 

4 Acherin = end.—Daniel, iv. 5 (8); akerana = endless. Acherunuti = 
the divine Under world.—Dr. F. J. Lauth. 

5 Guigniaut, I. 171, 512, Lydus de Mens., p. 13. 

6 Job, i. 7. 

7 Lucian, de Dea Syria, 7. The name Osarsiph, assigned by Manetho to Moses, is 
the unaltered name Osiris-Sapi, applied to the deceased Osiris as God of the Under¬ 
world. Sopi is one of the forms of the Osiris-mummy.—H. G. Tomkins in the u Acad- 
emy ” September 8th, 1883, p. 163 ; Ebers, Gosen zum Sinai, 561. Dr. Ebers has sug¬ 
gested Osar-suph of the Egyptian pantheon as the origin of Manetho’s Osarsiph. 
Compare the name of the occupant of the Great Pyramid, the Saturnian name Suphis. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 641 


That therefore, to be sure, Osiris is the same as Dionysus who ought to 
know better than you, O Klea, who art the first of the maenads at Delphi, con¬ 
secrated to the Osiriau Mysteries from father and mother ? But if for the sake 
of the others it is necessary to adduce proofs the Mysteries at least we should 
leave in their place, but what things the priests do openly when they bury Apis, 
when they carry the body upon a skid, are not different from the fete of Bac¬ 
chus. For they put on fawn-skins and carry the thyrsus and make use of cries 
and movements like those inspired in the Mysteries of Dionysus.—De Iside, 35. 

Reverence God under earth.—Euripides, Phcenissae, 1320 ; so also Rev. i. 
18. Ezekiel, xxxi. 15 ; Joel, ii. 17. 

The Sabian Sun, Mithra, Herakles, was held to descend to 
the place of departed spirits, Hades. The Apokalypse, xii. 7, 
11 connects him with the sign Aries. The Little Mysteries 
were celebrated to the departing Sun, whose shortest day is 
December 22nd. He rises from Darkness and death Dec. 25th, 
Light having vanquished Darkness. Rev. xx. 3, 10 refers to 
this Conflict. The Lamb of Aries is slain. Rev. v. 6; i. 16. 
Herakles rises from the dead Dec. 25th.—Movers, I. 349. 

El, Bel, Kronos, Elohim and other designations are names 
of Saturn. Bel in the reasoning of the Sacred Mysteries was 
both Saturn and Sol.—Movers, I. 185. Bel is the Syrian Kro¬ 
nos (p. 186), the name being derived from karan, to shine. In 
the Elood-myth Kronos takes the place of Iahoh.—Movers, I. 
187, 261. El and Bel are Babylonian. El and Elohim are 
Semite-Jewish. The Chaldaean Iao is the Phos Noeton (Light 
perceived only in the mind).—Gen. i. 3 ; Movers, I. 553. Iao 
is, first, the Sungod in the different seasons of the year with 
the predominant idea of Adonis as autumnal God, in general a 
complex of Nature-deities whose essence (Wesen) he unites in 
the significance of his mysterious name, which, according to 
Sanchoniathon, in the priestly Mysteries was already taught 
through the oldest Phoenician hierophants. Second, as Ado- 
nis-Eljon he is the primordial Being (Exodus, iii. 14) with the 
feminine Nature-goddess (Gen. ii. 21-25) out of whom Ouranos- 
Ge is born as two-genders, later dividing himself into heaven 
and earth. Third, his name, too, under different forms had 
come to Greece in the Dionysia. Fourth, in Chaldaism it sig- 


Mosia is the Hebrew name for Redeemer. Suphis is Creek ; and Suph is euhemerised 
into a dead king of the 4th dynasty; being another name of Keb or Khufu, Cheopa. 
The Exodus from Egypt may have been an allegory,—describing the soul’s return to 
the Promised Land out of the sins and flesh pots of Egypt. The Essenes had some 
such analogous idea. 

41 


642 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


nified the pneumatic principle of Light and Life, where at 
one time he seems to be the Highest Life-principium (Bel- 
Saturn) at another his Offspring (Ausfluss) and image (Bel 
Mithra). His mysterious Name (Iahoh, Iao) points to him as 
the Principle (the Beginning) of Life.—Movers, I. 554, 555, 
270, 269, 265. In the Chaldaean theosophy this Mind-per¬ 
ceived Intelligible Light is the Liglit-principle, the Light- 
aether, from which the souls emanate, and to which they re¬ 
turn again purified from the dross of sensualness ; they are 
borne up aloft (see, 1 Tliessalonians, iv. 17) through the Media¬ 
tor (and Saviour) Bel-Mithra who is called the Mind-perceived 
Intelligible Sun, logos, and Onlybegotten.—Movers, I. 391, 
553. Here, then, at last we touch the Mysteries of the Niko- 
laitans, of whom Irenaeus, III. xi. says that they hold that 
their Christos is the beginning of the Onlybegotten, but the 
Logos the true son of the Onebegotten. The Chaldaeans 
hymn the * Kronos ’ (Chronos) as Eternal, New, and Old. The 
Younger Kronos has the same name as the Father.—Movers, 
I. 256, 265. See Daniel, vii. 14; Matthew, xvii. 2. The trans¬ 
figuration is significant of the Intelligible and Mindperceived, 
and the Magi that Justin Martyr says came from Arrhabia, 
probably came from Yaman (Yemen) the native country of 
myrrh and frankincense (Wright’s Christianity in Arabia, 2) 
since Matthew, ii. 1, describes them as ‘from the anatolai or 
sunrisings.’ The Adon died on the 23d of September, was 
mourned seven days, and rose on the eighth.—Movers, I. 211. 
The autumn celebration was also renewed in June. When Sol 
is in the lower signs the Goddess Binah-Venah mourns! For 
he is killed by a boar (Winter) as soon as the days are short¬ 
ened. Kronos had an Onlybegotten Son, of the same name as 
the Father.—Movers, I. 252, 265; Orelli, Sanclioniathon, p. 36. 

Make to thee Mourning for the Onlybegotten.—Jeremiah, vi. 26. Vide 
Preller, Gr. Myth., I. 427. 

Elxai taught that there was the Son of God ; but he knows 
nothing of Jesus in A.D. 95-100. There were successive periods 
of Judaeo-Ebionite Messianic Conception. The Father (to' 
dyaSov, das Urgute) produced the Sun that is mind-perceived, 
which in the Chaldean doctrine is Iao, the mind-perceived Light 
and Spiritual Principle of Life.—Movers, Phoenizier, I. 265, 
266; Julian, Orat. iv. 132. The Roman Mysteries call Me 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 643 

Liber (Dionysus) the Arabian race Adon (Lord).—Ausonius, 
Ep. 30. Why should they not adore thee (Krishna) O Great 
One, thee the first Creator, more important even than Brahma 
himself. O infinite King of the Gods!—Thomson, Bhagavad 
Gita, p. 194. The Christos was the King of the Gods in Mat¬ 
thew, xxv. 34, 40; iv. 11. Krishna is crowned with a diadem, 
and in height touches the skies.—Thomson, 191, 192. The 
Angel who procured from Parthia the book for Elchasai was 
96 miles high. Like Mithra, the Christos was born December 
25th; this is the Sun. To the Sun the Sabians brought as 
tribute gold and incense. The Arabian Magi brought gifts to 
the Christos, gold, frankincense and myrrh.—Matth. ii. 11. 
Eastern monachism (owing to the dualist conception, spirit 
and matter) was on the Jordan, in the Essaian convents, among 
the Sabians, Nabathaeans, Ebionim, Nazoria. Eusebius, H. E. 
ii. 17, seems not to have known why Philo’s Therapeutae were 
so called, as he says that the name Christians was not yet 
spread to every place. But we have seen that the Hindus be¬ 
fore the period of which we are speaking had a sect of Iatrikoi, 
which probably supplied the name for the lessaians of Arabia 
and the Therapeutae of Philo, and the N. T. Healers. At any 
rate, those in Egypt renounced the possession of private prop¬ 
erty, like those in Syria and Palestine, laid down asceticism as 
a fundamental principle of virtue, and levied war upon all the 
propensities and desires of the body. Just so, we find, in Mat¬ 
thew, xix. 20-25. Eusebius declared that Philo (in De Yita 
Contemplativa) is describing only the religion of the Chris¬ 
tians,—“ the same customs that are observed by us alone at the 
present day.” If Eusebius had given sufficient credit to East¬ 
ern Monachism in India, Babylonia, and among the Sabians of 
Arabia, Syria and Palestine, he might have truly said that these 
votaries of “ spirit and matter ” philosophy further east might 
have been the instructors of the Essene monachists and Ies- 
saean Ebionites in the Great Baptism of the Orient. A bap¬ 
tism of the Ebionites and Nazoria from beyond Jordan. 1 — 
Matthew, iv. 25. The Outsiders (Iessaeans) seem to have 
merged in the Arabian race, and in time (as the sect extended) 
to have sent out missionary saints, apostoloi, and appointed 
episcopoi, in imitation of the Ebionite Overseers. There are 

1 And from all Syria and Palestine.—So Acts, viii. 88; x. 37, 38, 47, 48. East of 
the Jordan all was Arabia.—Wright, 64, 65. 


644 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


three evangels in Greek; Justin, Matthew, and the Pauline. 
Matthew’s Gospel is an original Greek Gospel founded in part 
upon the doctrines of the Ebionite Hebrews. Daniel, vii. 21 
and the Apokalypse, xi. 18, xv. 3 both mention the saints. 
There were several sorts of Ebionites. The larger half appear 
to have in the 2nd half of the 2nd century regarded Iesu merely 
as a man, Joseph’s son. Paulus (the Hellenist) takes the ground 
that Iesu was the Christos. Thus there was a difference be¬ 
tween the Canonical Paulus and some part of the Ebionites 
on that point. All three synoptic evangels, being written in 
Greek, presuppose a prior Aramean status of whose perhaps 
altered condition 1 in St. Jerome’s time we know no more than 
the saint chose to tell. 

1 Dunlap, S5d, II. 46, 47 ; Hieronymus, V. 445 ; Olshausen, 37. Since Jew-Chris- 
tians, Markionites, Gnostics, etc. unsettled the unity of the Church, something had to 
he done to produce a United Church; and out of this effort proceeded the so-called 
Katholic Church.—Olshausen, 18,19 ; Dunlap, Sod, II. 42. The Son of Man is coming 
in the Clouds.—Dan vii. 13. The Messiah is to he cut off.—Eusebius, Theophaneia, 
p. cxii.; Dan. ix. 26 ; Rev. i. 7. Daniel had not yet seen Herod’s walls and forts. The 
old idea of the Jewish Sibyl comes up again in Jude, 14, who quotes Enoch as saying 
that the Lord will come to execute Judgment. But Enoch does not say that Iesu will 
come. As the Apokalypse, xxii. 21, knows Daniel and Henoch, it promises the “ Com¬ 
ing quickly ” ; but this last Saint must (it seems to us) have interpolated or added the 
name Iesu to the Christos idea in Henoch. According to Eusebius, Theophaneia, I. 3, 
6, the Word of God is the Maker and Creator of the universe (and according to the 
Philonian-Ebionite idea of the Logos). The Divine Logos was in the world the Creator 
and Saviour of all.—ibid. 35, 36, 68. Eusebius then (being bishop of Caesarea, where 
the Ebionites were) naturally falls into dualism (the two natures, spirit and matter, 
like the Hindus, Iatrikoi, Iessaioi, Ebionim and Christiani), saying that this all par¬ 
takes of two natures, the Ousia (the Life in the Logos.—John, i. 2) and Matter.—ibid. 
36. But this oriental philosophy as we have seen is in error. There is no such thing 
known as Spirit, and as to proteus-like matter, we know only the form it assumes, but 
not its substance. Saturninus held that the God of the Jews was the Chief of the 
Angels, for whose imperfect laws the purifying principles of asceticism were to be sub¬ 
stituted, by which the Children of Light were to be reunited to the Source of Light. 
The Christos himself was the Supreme Power of God, immaterial, incorporeal, formless, 
but assuming the semblance of man.—Milman, Hist. Chr. New York, Harper, 1844, p. 
210. This is the counterpart of the description of Simon Magus (the Samaritan) in 
Duncker’s ed. of Hippolytus, vi. 19, pp. 254, 256. The doctrine of the Great Archangel 
(Philo’s Logos) being born of a virgin must have been considerably later than the Chal¬ 
dean idea of the Logos (or Great Archangel) in Revelation, i. 16, the Unspoken Mys¬ 
tery about which the Chaldean raved concerning the God with Seven Rays, bringing 
up the souls through Him.—Julian, Oratio V. 172. The Chaldaeans call the God Iao, 
and Sabaoth he is often called, being over the Seven Orbits, that is, the Creator.— 
Movers, I. 550; Lydus, de Mens. iv. 38, 74. Before and after the origin of Christian- 
ism the Jews pursued astronomy ; it was already early regarded as a part of the percep¬ 
tion of God (Gotteserkenntniss).—Fuerst, pp. 44, 45. Justin Martyr reads Exodus, 
xxiii. 20, 21, in such a way as to identify the Angel of the Lord with Iesous, formerly 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 645 


Philo says that the Lord standing on the top of the ladder 
(Gen. xxviii. 13) is the Archangel Lord. The Great Power of 
the God (see Acts, viii. 10) was the Chaldaean Chief Angel 
called Gabariel by the Jews and Sabians, Gabar meaning 
Powerful, Mighty. Therefore Iaqab as prince of the angels 
has power with Aloliim.—Gen. xxxii. 28. According to Origen 
(in Joann, tom. II. c. 25,—Opp. ed. de la Rue, iv. 84 ; Lommatz, 
I. 147) t( Iakob at least then says : for he speaking to us (says) 
I am Iakob and Israel Angel of God and we-vpa. ap^ixoV (the 
primal spiritus vitae): and Abraam and Isaak were created 
prior to every work ; but I . . . the first-begotten of every 
creature endowed with life by God. . . . And I Israel am 
Archangel 1 of (the) Lord’s Power among the Sons of God ; am 
I not Israel, first Workman ; and I invoked My God in an in¬ 
extinguishable Name !—Schiirer, II. p. 672. Iaqab is, here, the 
Saturn-Angel, who stands in the presence of God.—Luke, i. 

called Ausgs ; and says that the name of Him that said to Moses “For my Name is in 
him ” is Iesous.—Justin, p. 84. It makes no difference that Justin’s argument is un¬ 
sound. It is a sign of the time in which he lived, that men could draw any inferences 
they pleased from the Jewish Scriptures, and find followers. But that Daniel’s proph¬ 
ecy lay at the root of the Messianic theory is shown by Justin when he says that the 
words “like a son of man ” mean appearing and being born man, and that he plainly is 
not born from human seed. This is a tolerably sensible inference on the part of Jus¬ 
tin, p. 85. He could not well escape it. Justin, contra Trypho, p. 97, speaks of “hon¬ 
oring that Angel (God being willing) who is loved by the Lord Himself and God.” We 
are compelled in this Angel to recognise the Archangel of the Ebionites mentioned by 
Epiphanius, the Great Archangel. And that we still have to do with Iessaean Ebion¬ 
ites, followers of the Nazorine Essenes, Justin, contra Trypho, p. 89, shows, saying: 
They shall not marry nor be given in marriage, but will be as angels, being children of 
the God of the Resurrection.—Matthew, xxii. 30; so xix. 12. Justin seems to regard 
all parts of the Old Testament as prophecies and as to be interpreted to suit his pur¬ 
pose. But he connects Herod with Ptolemy Philadelphus (or Philometor) in regard to 
the Septuagint ; which is inaccurate.—Justin, p. 146. 

1 Here we have Philo’s Great Archangel with many names.—Philo, Confus. Ling. 
14, 27, 28. The Logos according to Philo, is the Great Archangel, the Oldest Angel, 
and he who sees Israel.—ibid. 28. For that which is above the Powers is understood 
to be superior, not in existence only, but the ‘ Power ’ of This (Tourov hvvap. is Se, >) edr/ice) 
which made and arranged all things has been truly called God and contains all things 
and pervades through the parts of the whole. But that which is divine and unseen and 
everywhere incomprehensible is seen and comprehended nowhere according to truth. 
'O Se <rr<is eyw np'o tov ere (Exodus, xvii. 0), but when he says “I am he who stands before 
thee ” he appears (Sokmv) to be shown and grasped, before all shewing and appearance 
surpassing all things that have come into being.—Philo, ib. 27. Philo is a Docetic 
Gnostic, one of the Doketae. As to the passage in Exodus, xvii. 6, “ Lo, I stand be¬ 
fore thee,” Simon Magus is said to have claimed, as the “Great Power,” to be the 
“ Standing One.” Thus Philo, Simon Magus, the passage from Origen and that from 
Epiphanius all testify to One Great Archangel, Gabriel of the Nazoria and Ebionites or 
lessaians. Philo is dated from b. c. 16 to a.d. 60. 


646 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


19. But, as Logos - angel or Angel - Logos, he, like Osiris, 
(Asar-El, the Angel of Fire, and Gabarel), enters the moon; at 
least, Gabarael is Lunar Angel. Now of no one but the Great 
Clialdaean Angel (who in the gnosis took the place of the 
Logos) could it have been asserted that he produced the 
spotted and ring-streaked cattle mentioned in Genesis, xxx. 
37-39. Moreover Genesis, vii. 2, 4, has the Sabian Sacred 
Number Seven, thus indicating that Babylon, Jerusalem and 
the transjordan region were all Sabians together, like the rest 
of the Arabs. Compare Bev. i. 4; v. 6; Numbers, xxiii. 1; 2 
Kings, xxiii. 5. Reuben, Gad, and all the Azarielites (Numb, 
viii. 2; xxvi. 31) recognized the Sabian Sacred Numbers 
Seven and Twelve. In the end of the first century of our era 
the Book of Elxai (Elchasi) was known, in connection with the 
names Sobiai, Parthia and the Ebionites. These last used his 
Book; so that in the reign of Trajan 1 (if not earlier) the Ies- 
saians and perhaps the Ebionites may be regarded as Elcha- 
sites. Across the Jordan this Book had a great run among the 
sects there ; and the word Sobiai itself is only another way of 
spelling Sabian, the a being pronounced o. 

Rabbi Idit recognized Metatron as the Great Archangel in 
whom is the ‘ Name ’ of God and who can pardon transgressions, 
(therefore, the Angel whom Paul calls Christ); but says that 
Metatron is not to be confounded with God, and we may not 
even accept him as a mediator.—Ernest de Bunsen, Angel- 
Messiah, 303. This reminds us of the Ebionite opinion. 

The Lord said unto my Lord (Adonai).—Psalm, cx. 1. 

Philo, too, mentions the Archangelic and most Ancient Lo¬ 
gos (Quis Heres, 42), the Archangel Lord (On Dreams, I. 25, 
41), the Angel the Logos of God (On Fugitives, 1, 18), the 
‘ Kingly Power * of God (ibid. 18), the invincible power of the 
Saviour (On Change of Scripture Names, 37), God our Saviour 
(On Joseph, 32 ; see Isaiah’s “ Saviour Angel.”—Isa. lxiii. 8, 9). 
From all that we have mentioned it appears that Kabar was a 
predicate of Kronos (Saturn) who was called Keb ; that accord¬ 
ing to euhemerism Keb had been a man, laqab; but, accord¬ 
ing to angelology, Akibeel and Archangel Logos, Gabariel or 
Abel Ziua beyond the Jordan, the Magna Yirtus Dei in the 

1 The Jews of Philo’s time (and therefore the Ebionites) adhered to the Law of 
Moses.—Philo, SS. Abelis and Cain, 38. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 647 

estimation of Simon Magus, “ the Son of the Man ” Angel 
Iesua, and the (Great) King in the Gospel of Matthew. “ For 
it was necessary that the (man) sanctified to the Father of the 
universe should use (the) Son 1 as an Advocate the most perfect 
in rank, both for amnesty (forgiveness) of sins and an abun¬ 
dance of unlimited blessings.”—Philo, Yita Mosis, III. 14. 
Philo here comes quite up to the Ebionite standard of the 
Great Archangel as the Son of the God and the Saviour Angel 
who stands in the sight of God (Isaiah, lxiii. 8, 9 ; Luke, 
i. 19), and Simon Magus’s “ Power of God,” which is called 
“ the Great Power.”—Acts, viii. 10. The Hebrew Life-God 
placed his tabernacle in the sun.—Yulgate Psalm, xix. 4. 
Wherever the Semite planted himself, the Sun-god was wor¬ 
shipped under some form or name. 2 —Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 
p. 170. The Shekinah is the Holy Ghost and God. It is also 
called Adonai. The Angel Redeemer is the Shekinah, and 
Metatron 3 is the Angel of the Shekinah. The Shekinah is the 
Word, the Messias. 4 Metatron is most absolutely the very 
Shekinah, and the Shekinah is called “ Metatron Iahouae” 5 for 
he is the Crown of the ten Sephiroth. 6 Mithra is the Chief 
Watcher over all souls 7 ordained by Ahura Masda. This 
makes Mithra the Angel Iesua, the Saviour.—Isaiah, lxiii. 9. 
In the Rik Yeda the stars are the lights of the pious who go 
to heaven. The Angel-King Mithra is the Angel-King Metat¬ 
ron.—Movers, I. 390. Metatron is the Angel Iesua.—Boden- 
schatz, Kirchliclie Yerfassung d. Iuden, II. 190. When one 
dies, we are as stars in the air.—Aristophanes, Eirene, 772. 
Philo says that when Moses speaks of the Sun he means the 
Divine Word, the model of the visible sun. 8 The God who 
stands for the Word is superior to every rational nature.— 
Philo, to Genesis, i. 27. 

1 Compare Luke, i. 35, 47. 

2 Compare the solar names Gebal, Kephalos, Keb, Akibeel, Achbal. 

3 Mettron, Mitra. 

4 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, xxii. xxxi. xxxii. ; Sohar to Exodus, fol. 48, 122, 123, 
124; Surenhusius, hamashveh, 710; Meuschen, Nov. Test. Graec., 736; Dunlap, Sod, 
II. 72; Bodenschatz, III. 38, 39, 40. 

5 Jehovah’s Throne-angel. In the conflict between Good (Abel) and Evil, Kin 
(see Qina/i, a town in Edom.—Joshua, xv. 22) represents the Qain (Cain) of Edom 
and Sau§ (or Esau). 

6 Gfrorer, I. 306, 321; Tikune Sohar, 73 b. 

7 Jesht Mithra, 26. 

0 Philo, On Dreams, 15, 16. 


64S 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Hermes, Logos that is sent from God.—Justin Martyr, Apol. I. 68. Also 
Plutarch, Iside, 54. 

This is Metatron, prepared a condiment for the body in houses of the 
buried—Sohar, I. 77. col. 2. Sulzbach. 

Skin for skin, all that a man has he will give for his soul.—Job, ii. 4. 

The Angel Iesua is placed over the Death-angel, to whom he 
daily gives the order whom to kill.—Bodenschatz, Kirchliche 
Verfassung d. Juden, II. 192; Pesichta echa rabbati, fol. 289, 
col. 4; Jalkut rubeni num. 13. under the title Metatron; Sohar 
chadasch, fol. 44, col. 1. He is Chief of the Angels, a King of 
all Angels.—Bodenschatz, II. 192; Sohar to Deuteron., fol. 
137, col. 4. Satan, Qin, Esau (Asu), Sammael (Shemal, Ish- 
mael) are the Evil names of the Evil Principle (the Evil Power 
of the Sun in the two solstices), which in Winter is the Power of 
Darkness and Death. But the Scripture of Moses appears to 
look for Evil chiefly at the hands of the Ishmaelites and the 
Idumeans of the two localities, Qinah (Joshua, xv. 21, 22) in 
Edom and Saue (Gen. xiv. 17) which is in Esau. The names of 
the districts and towns suggested the Patriarchal names to the 
Jerusalem scribe. Letters were used to mystify and deceive 
the unlearned, as to truth and faith. Such are political meth¬ 
ods now, through the papers. 

Metatron the Throneangel, called King and Angel Iesua, 
Saviour of souls, holds in his hand the Seven Planets repre¬ 
sented in Jewish symbolism by the seven-lamps of the Sacred 
Candlestick in the Holy of holies, which Titus carried from 
the burning Temple. The Angel Mettron (Metatron) plays a 
very great part in the Kabbalist system. It is he that has the 
dominion over the visible world; he rules over all spheres 
hanging in space, over all planets and heavenly bodies, as well 
as over the angels who lead them ; for over him are only the 
Intelligible forms of the Divine Being, and are so far purely 
spiritual, that they cannot immediately exert an influence upon 
material things. Among some Tanaim (the oldest theologians 
of Judaism) a certain religious philosophy, religious meta- 
pliysic, was secretly taught. The 42 letters contain the names 
of the ten sephiroth. Since this way of conceiving God was 
separated from the commofl belief by a deep cleft we will 
naturally find all measures of foresight taken not to allow it to 
be spread outside the circle of the initiated. The prohibition 
to communicate incautiously the mysteries of the Creation 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 649 


and of tlie Mercaba is therefore older than the book which 
contains them. We know not the author of those words; only 
this is still more evidence of their high antiquity. Maimo- 
nides uses the expression: “ They whose memory be blessed, 
have said.” The doctrine must have preceded the law which 
prohibits its publication. It must have been previously known, 
it must have won a certain consideration before they observed 
how dangerous would be the spread thereof among the learned 
and teachers of Israel, not to mention the people. Therefore 
we can carry it back, without much risk, at least as far as the 
end of the first century of the Christian era. This is just 
exactly the time in which R. Akiba and R. Simon ben Iochai 
lived, who passed generally for the authors of the weightiest 
and most famous works of the Kabbala. In this period also 
falls R. lose from Zipporis, whom the Idra Rabba, one of the 
oldest and most remarkable pieces of the Sohar counts among 
the most trusted friends, the most zealous students of R. Simon 
ben Iochai.—Ad. Gellinek’s translation of A. Franck, Die Kab¬ 
bala, pp. 43-48. The oriental wise men concealed many things 
in mystery in such a way as to imply something different from 
what is said.—Josephus, Ant. Preface; Origen contra Cels, i.; 
Sohar, III. 152; Franck (Gelinek, German transl.) 119, 121; 
Dunlap, Sod, I. 175, 176. Iesua was the Throne-Angel Meta- 
tron, the Saviour Angel.—Bodenschatz, Kirchl. Yerf. d. Juden, 
II. 191. Rev. i. 13, gives the figure, seven golden lamp-stands 
each holding one light, and in the centre of the seven lights 
(candelabra) as if a son of man clothed with a long garment 
reaching to the feet and girt with a golden girdle under the 
breasts. His face was as the Sun in his power, and he held in 
his right hand Seven Stars! This is the Chaldaean Seven- 
rayed God, the Hidden, Concealed, Mysterious Iao, the Sabaoth 
of Chaldaeans and Jews, he raises up the souls to the mind- 
perceived world on high. The Candlestick with its 7 lamps 
was his symbol in the Jerusalem Temple; but the First Cause, 
the Father, is unrevealed, regarded as the NO Thing.—See 
Matthew, xi. 27. The mysterious God of the seven rays was 
always regarded as kept Concealed, until he comes as the final 
Judge of the world.—Dan. vii. 13, 14; Henoch, 48. 6; 69, 27, 
29. Daniel describes him so that the Jewish writers have, in 
the first century of our era, regarded him as their Messiah. 
He is the first and the last, and the rabbis recognised his pre- 


650 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


ceding existence. He holds the keys of death, and of hell.-^ 
Bev. i. 18; iii. 7; Bodenschatz, K. Y. II. 191, 192. He is so 
credited (as Logos) in Bev. xix. 13-17, xx. 11-15; Matthew, 
xxv. 31-33, 41. He is here called the King; but in Matth. iv. 
11 the angels treat him as their King: as the Sohar says, 
Metatron Malach Malka malachim; Metatron Angel King of 
angels. Here we find the Kabbalah-tradition of the Jews the 
foundation of Gospel theology. Metatron is the Oldest Angel, 
he stands before the Throne of God to which he leads the 
souls of the just from the houses of burial. The Sohar, I. 77. 
col. 1, declares Abrahm’s servant, the Ancient of his house, to 
be the divine Angel Metatron, who will do wonders for the 
body in Jewish houses of burial, when he comes as Angel-king 
or Messiah. 1 Metatron is the Shekinah. 2 Metatron is Adam 
Kadmon. 3 

Metatron is tlie identical Sliecliinah, and the Sliechinah is called Ia’holi’s 
Metatron, because it is the Crown of the ten sephiroth.—Tikkune Sohar, 
73 b. 4 

The tree of life, out of which the staff of Mse, Moses, was made 
belonged in common to Metatron (the Messias) and Samael 
whom the Babbins called the Old Serpent. Consequently, 
Adam Kadmon (Hermes, Kadmus) w*as identical with the 
Serpent-Spirit, Hermione, and on the staff of Hermes, Kadmus 
and Hermione as serpent-spirits became united. Adam Kad¬ 
mon was two-sexed; and the Sohar, I. fol. 4. col. 2, gives 
Adam primus two faces. 5 The serpent was regarded as a 
“ great mystery.” But the serpent around the tree of life sym¬ 
bolised the logos, which under the influence of apples, or 
pomegranates, seems to have been supposed to separate into 
the Sun-serpent (Chadam, Adam-Kadmon, Kadmus) and the 
female serpent (Eua, Evia, Hermione). Now the Sun had 
his sacti, who is the female Sun (Sonne, Asana) Minerva or 
Luna, into whom the Logos was said to have entered. She 

1 Compare the Resurrection mentioned in Matthew, xxvii. 52, where the bodies of 
the hagioi arose and returned to the holy city. 

2 The Tikkune Sohar, 73 b. 

3 Nork, Biblical Mythology, II. p. 281 ; quotes Ialkut Chadash, fol. 10. col. 1. 

4 Gfrorer, 1.121. ' 

5 Compare the hermaphrodite character of Venus. See Inman, vol. I. plate III. 
figures 3, 4; p. 119, figure 21; ibid. vol. II. plates ii. iv.; Greene, Blazing Star, 79; 
plate. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 651 


certainly is called Mene, and, in her, Osiris (the logos) was 
represented at the Egyptian festival of the Pamylia. Kadmon 
means the Old, the Ancestor, the principinm creaturarum; 
compare the Soliar, when it calls Metatron Senior. 1 2 Gabriel is 
Hermes, and Hermes is Metatron, Michael and the Logos, for 
Philo calls the Logos the Oldest of the angels of God. 
Hermes leads the souls as psuchopompos, Metatron is con¬ 
joined (as Messiah) to the body in the houses of burial (Sohar, 
I. fol. 77. col. 1, 2), both are Angels of the Resurrection, 
Michael is Merkury, and is called Kadmiel, 8 Merkury raises 
the souls of those that sleep, Hermes in the Samothrakians 
Mysteries was called Kadmiel, and the Angel Metatron was 
called Iesua by the Rabbins.—Bodenschatz, II. 191. 

The ten sephiroth are 10 spheres ; by adding a unit and a 
duad to the number seven, ten would result. Philonian gnosis 
mentions the Seven Circles. 

There are some who assert that the centre among the Seven Circles of heaven 
is the Tree of life. 3 But others say that the Tree of life is the Sun, since he is 
nearly the centre among the planets and Cause of the times, and through him 
all things are brought to life.—Philo Judaeus, Quaest. et Solut. I. 10. 


1 Nork, Biblical Mythology, II. 280 ff. 

2 Nork, Biblical Myth. II. 279. Comp. 1 Thessalon. iv. 16, 17. This is the Arch¬ 
angel Metatron-Iesua, the Angel-Saviour. In Philo Judaeus, Quis Heres, p. 346, we 
find the Logos (the Word) standing as Mediator between God and man; this is the 
Great Archangel, the Oldest of the Angels, Metatron or Mithra. He raises the souls 
up to the Intelligible World, and is their Saviour. Here we come upon the Chaldaean 
Source of the Soter, the Salvator, of both Philo and Saturninus. Irenaeus, I. xxii. 
does not tell us where Saturninus and Kerinthus got their Christos-Salvator. It came 
from where John derived his Mithrabaptism, from be 3 ^ond Jordan, near the Euphrates, 
where the God of the 7 rays was adored as the Second God (as Philo calls him). But 
this too is gnosis; and the first Christians were gnostics. Philo, Quis Heres, p. 346, 
calls the Logos “ a suppliant for the mortal, anxious always for the immortal.'” Philo, 
Quis Her. p. 342 (ed. Paris, 1552), says that the sun is a copy (symbol) of eternity. 
Hence it is the symbol of the Logos.—John, i. 1; Proverbs, viii. 22-30. The timeless 
and nameless One at the head of the Babylonian Theogony is known as the Ancient of 
days, Belitan, the Allfather, now a being of Light, then time without beginning, and 
here the Older Unrevealed Bel who after three cosmogonial periods is followed by the 
Creator Bel that reveals himself in human form, reigns in the Babel he built, and 
leaves behind him to the Chaldeans his written law. The Powers are the mind per¬ 
ceived entities. The Sidonians put first the Chronos as the Babylonians did the Un¬ 
spoken, Concealed and Unknown God. The deities were active with Bel before the 
Demiurg created the 7 Planets. From Apason and the Mother of the Gods (Euah.— 
Gen. iii. 20) an Onlybegotten is born.—Movers, I. 275-277, 544. This is gnosis. The 
Codex Nazoria, n. 304, 305, has the Aeons. 

3 The SUN, or solar source. 


652 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Certain thing's, says Origen, are interpreted on celestial circles 1 
inscribed on the top, as well other (circles) as these two in 
particular, the Greater one and the lesser one, (inscribed as) 
belongingto the Son and the Father. We have indeed found 
in this diagram a greater circle and a smaller one in whose 
diameter was inscribed “ Father and Son.” And between the 
greater (in which the lesser was included) and a double circle 
composed of a yellow exterior and a coerulean interior there 
came in between, as it were, a sceptre 2 in the form of an axe : 
and on the top the little circle joins with the other one of the 
two prior, that is, with the greater circle, with an inscription 
of love ; but, below, with the same circle another joins with 
the inscription, “ to life ” : but in the second circle that con¬ 
tained two other circles there was also another figure in the 
shape of a rhombus, with this inscription: Sapientiae pro¬ 
vidential And between their common section there was a 
circle, and on it was inscribed : Intellectus. 4 Here we have in 
Origen (contra Celsum) vol. II. p. 497, the first of the spheroth 
of the Kabbala; since we find Chachamah in Sapientia and 
Binah in Intellectus. The Crown contains the two sephiroth, 
the Father and the Mother. 

Servator noster ac Dominus Dei verbum.—Origen, contra Celsum, vi. 

Origen, II. p. 503, Contra Cels. vi. says, If Celsus shall have 
asked us how we can think that we know God and through 
him obtain Salvation, we will reply that the Word (Logos) of 
the God is able, wheii he has come, to those that seek himself 
and expect his Advent, to reveal the Father, who cannot be 
perceived except through the preceding Advent of the Son. 
For who other is able to save and bring the human soul to God 
best and greatest than God the Word, who, although he was 
in the Beginning with the God, became flesh, etc.! We see 
here Salvation of the soul was what the Jews and Christians 
were after. Thus the Jews had the Saviour Angel (named 
Iesoua, in Greek Iesous) who every night brought the souls 
of the Babbis into the heaven.—Bodenschatz, II. 191,192. He 

1 Sephiroth. 

2 King.—Matthew, xxv. 31, 34. 

3 the providence of Wisdom. 

4 Intelligence, or Intellect, the feminine sephira. Here we have the gnosis in the 
Tradition. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 653 


was also called Metatron, Throneangel. The Christians then 
had adopted the Jewish Messiah, as Saviour of the souls. 
What then shall we say when we turn back to Contra Celsuni 
v. where it is mentioned: “ It is good to conceal the Mystery 
of the King.” Great is the Mystery of that Divinity.—1 Tim. 
iii. 16. Instead of Metatron, Luke, i. 19, lets Gabriel (the Abel 
Ziua of the Nazoria) appear as the Presence Angel. 

Gabriel is represented as a King, majestic in appearance, 
having a sceptre in his hand. 1 He is the Angel of thunder 
and the ripening of the fruits. 2 Being the Angel of fire, birth 
and life, 3 he could either baptize with fire, infuse the “ vital 
fire ” into them, or burn them up entirely. This view of the 
matter impressed the Baptist, Iessaians and the Nazarenes. 4 * 

In tlie beginning, the will of the King was carving forms in highest purity, 
light of power going out, the centre of the concealed that are concealed.—The 
Soliar, I. 1. 

The King himself is the innermost light of all. 6 —Idra Suta, 9. 

The Messiah dwells in the 5th house of the Garden of Eden.—Beresitli 
Rabba, to Genesis, ii. 9. 

To this Paul refers, when he says: 

Your life is hidden with the Messiah in God : speaking of the mystery of 
the Messiah. 6 

The King Messiah goes out from the Garden of Eden (or Adan).—Sohar, II. 
fol. 11. 

Apollo is the King, 7 the Son of Dios. 8 The Sun had the mystic 
surname Ies. 9 —Mankind, p. 580. The Mikroprosopos (Short 

1 Mrs. Jameson, Sacred Art, I. 119, 122, 126. 

2 Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verfassung d. Juden, III. 160; Talmud, Sanh. fol. 95, 
col. 2. 

3 Kork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. 402; Bodenschatz, III. 160; Eisenmenger, I. 370; 
Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 58. 

4 Matthew, iii. 10; Sod, II. p. xxiv. 

3 The Sohar, II. fol. 3. col. 3. 

6 Acts, xvii. 23; Coloss. iii. 3; iv. 3; Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 70. The Sohar, I. fol. 4. 
col. 2, gives to the first Adam 2 faces ; which connects him with Mithra, Dionysus, 
Anos and Ianus. Genesis has the dual Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah, and the Tal¬ 
mud has him also, according to Ioel, Medrash hasohar, 367. 

7 Homer, Iliad, vii. 37; ix. 559, 560. 

8 ibid. vii. 37. 

8 The three letters Ies make the number 608. The Sun (Dionysus) has the mystic 
surname of Bacchus, Ies, which has been lengthened into Iesoua (Iesous). These cele¬ 
brated letters (says the Baliol College author of ‘Mankind,’ p. 580) are written in Roman 
letters on our pulpit cloths, in Greek letters on the inside of the roof of the Cathedral 


654 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Face) is the Son of the Father, and Seir Anpin is called King. 
—Kabbala Denudata, II. 355, 375, 391; So Matthew, xxv. 34. 
Seir Anpin is the Sun. 

Landauer 1 reminds us that just the ideas of the Sohar which 
now appear to be Christian go to prove the high antiquity of 
its doctrines. For those so called Christian ideas must spring 
from a time in which they had not this Christian meaning but 
belonged, together with others that we now call Jewish, to the 
Jewish Secret Doctrine whence they most probably passed over 
into Christianity, first by the agency of Jesus (?) and the Apos¬ 
tles, as, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity and the Lo¬ 
gos, the theory of the Atonement, the dogma of inherited sin, 
the designation of the Messias as heaven’s bread, the Easter 
Lamb as his symbol, &c. These and similar doctrines cannot 
have been first written down by a Jew of the time of Christian¬ 
ity, but must have belonged to a period when united with other 
doctrines of the Kabbalah they had no particular weight, only 
a speculative importance, and had not yet been taken up and 
employed by oneparty exclusively. The Jew who should have 
written them out for the first time at a late period, in the Mid¬ 
dle Ages, as is often asserted, must have either known or not 
known the New Testament and the Christian theology. In the 
first case, it would be nonsensical to suppose that a Jew in a 
time of mutual hatred and obscure intolerance used the doc¬ 
trines of Christianity for the explanation of the Pentateuch. 
In the second case, however, an accidental agreement in ideas, 
between the Sohar and New Testament, to the extent that really 
exists , would be impossible to explain. The author of the 
Sohar could not have been secretly a Christian and applied 
intentionally the doctrines of Christianity to the Books of 
Moses; for the Sohar says : “ Only the people Israel, which 
carries on itself the holy sign of circumcision, is from God ; 
all other folks, that have not this mark, come from the side of 
impurity. You must not connect yourselves with them, not 
converse with them about the word of God and generally tell 
them nothing of the Law. When one gives to an uncircum¬ 
cised even but a little letter (an iota) of the Law, it is as if he 


at St. Albans, and in every kind of letters on the churches in Italy. This number, 608, 
is one of the cycles. Solera te Latium vocat, quod solus honore.—Capella. The sun, 
says Philo, is the emblem of the Logos. 

1 Wesen und Form des Pentateuch, p. 93. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 655 


destroys tlie world.” Did the author of the Sohar here wish to 
christianize ? But if you put the doctrines contained in the 
Sohar in a period when what is now called Christian was still 
mingled up together with the Jewish Messianism and first in 
the course of time separated into two directions, all this is 
conceivable. 

Where Messianism goes back a hundred years, perhaps, 
prior to the Christian era and faith in the expectation of a 
Messiah’s Coming is intensified by Jewish sufferings at the 
hands of Borne, the feelings that necessity aroused made at 
last a public impression in Syria and beyond the Jordan so 
strong that individuals could bank upon it as something re¬ 
liable, not likely to change. It mattered not much from a.d. 
70 to 137 who or what the form in which the Messiah was 
to come. He was expected! Even Barcoclieba might be the 
destined leader of Messianic insurrection against the Gentiles. 
This positive feeling afforded an opportunity for cooler heads 
to derive some notoriety or other advantage. The words (in 
Bev. xxii.) “ I come quickly,” explain the situation from An¬ 
tioch to Idumaea and Babylon, it was the 4 war cry ’ of the Mes¬ 
siah ! But, as all things on earth change in time, it was nec¬ 
essary to keep up the fire lest the flame die out. Hadrian did 
something in that line between 132 and 138. But he left little 
more to keep up the fire of Jordan indignation. After his 
death, however, there being only Messianism left to keep com¬ 
pany with the ruin of Judaea, it must have occurred to some 
that, if Judaea’s Temple was gone and Jerusalem was no longer 
on earth, the public interest in Messianism must not be per¬ 
mitted to die out entirely among the Gnostics and the Greeks 
settled from Antioch and Samaria to Babylonia. 1 Then, prob¬ 
ably, based on some such motive, came the New Bevival not 
merely of the previous Messianism but with a new feature, the 
foundation Essene-Ebionism and the narrative as given in the 
Evangelium. Whoever started the revival of Messianism, that 
goes back to b.c. 150 perhaps, knew that in a.d. 140 it required 
to have new blood put into it, and he gave it in the shape of 
antiphariseeism, baptism, essenism, ebionism, self-denial, aske- 
sis and the Crucifixion. He gave it in Ghreek ! For the new 
form of the Messianism of the Book of Daniel he returned to 
the great staple doctrine of the East, Spirit and Matter, and a 

1 So in Judaism later ; we find the rabbins sedulously at work on the Talmud. 


656 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


loving Christos born in the flesli, however, but born of a Vir¬ 
gin,—to satisfy the gnostics. But there was no satisfying them. 
They, like Daniel the Prophet, stood honestly for the Spirit 
against the human flesh. Yes, but c the son of Dauid ? ’ Does 
not that mean a man in the flesh ? It means any successful 
• King of the Jews, whether of Daud’s line or not! It was easy 
enough to make a genealogy that would bring Judas Makka- 
beus into Daud’s succession, if the people demanded it. But the 
Sons of Daud were not divine beings, and it was held that the 
Messiah was with the Ancient of days in the heavens on high. 
So he was no man , but the Divine person long held in abscon- 
dito from before time itself, the King the Son, in the divine 
hidden wisdom, according to the Vision of Daniel, vii. 13, 14. 

The King himself is the innermost Light of all.—The Soliar, Aidra Suta, ix. 

The mystery which was kept secret since the world began, but now is made 
manifest for us. 1 —Romans, xvi. 25. 

The Messias was supposed to be concealed or kept in charge 
with God until the End of the world and the Judgment. This 
is (or is not) that Angel Gabriel (Abel Ziua) that takes the 
place of the logos and played so great a part in the Nazarene 
opinion. The Angel Gabriel is the Son of God begotten upon 
light. 2 As Jupiter, Apollo and Herakles were called Boy, so 
the Angel Metatron was called Boy. 3 Nor (Boy) is Metatron’s 
mysterious name. 4 

For Nor is born to us, his name el Gabor.—Isaiah, ix. 5. 

Ialioh is Adoni, Hel the Great, the Gabar and the Nura. —Deuteronomy, 
x. 17. 

His name shall be called Angel of the great purpose.—Septuagint, Isaiah, 
ix. 5. 

God was called Adam haeljon, and Adam is the Angel Meta¬ 
tron. 5 Metatron is the Tree of life. 6 Michael is the Logos; 
and the Messias was the Angel Metatron and Michael. 7 Koros 

1 Compare Colossians, i. 26. 

2 Adams, View of Rel. 118. 

3 Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, I. 528; Luke, i. 9; Nork, Real-Worterb. III. 157. 

4 Sohar, V. fol. 117, col. 465. Nor (Boy), noor “light,” nura “fire.”—Codex 
Nasaraeus, I. 56. Anar, Aner.—Genesis, xiv. 13. Nerio, NoraZA city of Light. Nar 
“ light.”—1 Sam. iii. 3. The angel Narel.—Henoch, lxxxii. 13. 

5 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. lxxv.; Exodus, iii. 2, 4, 6. 

6 Kabbala Denudata, I. 498. 

7 Milman, Hist. Christianity, p. 49. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 657 

means a boy, and Koros (Kurios) tlie Lord Logos. 1 The Wis¬ 
dom took its seat among the angels. 2 The Angel Gabriel takes 
the place of the Logos 3 (Word). 


Gabriel the Messenger, called, delegated and sent; summoned I say and 
delegated to create the world. Abel Ziua was baptized in 360 Jordans . . . the 
Messenger of Life . . . Abel Ziua Prince of all creation! Do thou too exhort 
the angels thy brethren that they strive after the treasure of Life, and when 
thou slialt have begun the journey to the place of Darkness, mayest thou quickly 
and happily conclude it by the power of the Dove.—Codex Nazor. I. 165, 247. 

I, such a one, who am thought the son of Othman, of the village of Nazaria, 
have seen Christ who is Iesus and also is the Word of God and Director and 
Achmed son of Mohammed son of Hanaphia of the sons of Ali; who also is 
Gabriel the Angel.—Assemani, Bibl. Orient. II. 319. 4 
But when Rome shall rule Egypt also, 

Making two into one, then indeed a very great kingdom 
Of an immortal King will appear to mortals : 

And a holy King will come to hold the sceptre of all the earth 
To all aeons of the hastening time. . . . 

Ah ! wretched me ! when that day shall come 
And the Judgment of immortal God’s great King ! 

As Judgment signal, earth shall with sweat be drenched, 

From heaven the King shall come, enduring through ages, 

Only think, present in the flesh to judge the world ! 

And Iachoh shall be King over all the earth ; in that day there shall be One 
Iachoh and his name One.—Zachariah, xiv. 9. 

The Great Day of Ia’hoh is nigh! Near and coming fast! — Zephaniah, i. 14. 
The Son of Dauid does not come until that impious kingdom 5 shall have 
extended itself over the whole earth.—Talmud, Joma, fol. 10. I. 6 
Babel shall not endure and conquered will be Media’s kings, 

The Heroes of Ionia shall not remain, rooted out will be the Romans. 

No more tribute 7 shall they gather from Jerusalem.—Targum of Jonathan 
to Habakuk, iii. 17. 

And then Great God’s nation will again be powerful, 

Who shall be to all mortals patterns of living. 

Then God shall send from heaven a King, 

And he shall judge each man in blood, in a flame of fire. 

There is a certain royal line, whose race 

1 Plato, Cratylas, 79. 

2 Henoch, xlii. 2. 

3 Irenaeus, I. xii. The Logos is called Hermes by the Greeks.—Hippolytus, I. 118. 
“Plato seems to me not unreasonably to consider the Wisdom-God to be Hades.”— 
Julian, On the King Sun, p. 130. Osiris, the Logos, created in Hades ; so did Hermes. 

4 Anno Domini 891. 

5 Rome. 

8 Meuschen, p. 19. 

2 Is it lawful to pay tribute to Caesar?—Matthew, xxii. 17. 

42 


658 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Shall be unceasing ; and this in coming times 

Shall govern. The house of David shall put forth a branch. 1 

As Beginning , the God, before all the works, produced from Himself a cer¬ 
tain Power, rational, which is sometimes called Son, sometimes Wisdom, some¬ 
times Angel, sometimes God, Kurios (Lord) and Logos ( Word).—Justin, 284. 

The Power from the Father is called Angel.—Justin, 858. 

Deservedly, therefore, do we accuse the Jews that they do not think him 
God, to whom the prophets testify in so many passages that he is the Great 
Power of God.—Origen, contra Celsum, p. 431. ed. Paris, 1619. 

God’s image, the Angel, his Logos, they regard as Himself.—Philo, On 
Dreams, I. 41. 

That Power which arranged and established the universe is without hesita¬ 
tion called God.—Philo, Confus. ling. Paris, 1552. p. 230. 

The Sohar declares that Metatron is the Senior of God’s house, 
for he is the first of the creatures of God. 2 

His first-born Word (logos), the Oldest Angel as being an Archangel, having 
many names.—Philo, p. 231. ed. Paris, 1552. 

For the Father of all things has given birth to him, the Oldest Son indeed, 
whom elsewhere he calls the First-born.—Philo, p. 222. 

For he is called Beginning and God’s Name and Logos, and the Man in the 
image (of God) and “seeing Israel.”—Philo, p. 231. 

Metatron is the Angel-king. 3 

The God who stands for the Logos is superior to every rational nature.— 
Philo, Fragment; Eusebius. 

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God and God was 
the Logos.—John, i. 1. 

Irenaeus, I. xii. p. 86 says that the Angel Gabriel takes the 
place of the logos in the system of Marcus. 

Who is more holy and excellent than the Angel of the Lord ? 

For to him it has been entrusted to seek out the erring soul. 4 —Philo, 
Quaest. iii. 27, 34. 

Days thou shalt add to the King’s days, and he shall remain to eternity in 
the presence of the God.—Septuagint Psalm, lxi. 6, 7. 

1 Sibylline Books. Gallaens, I. 337, 388, 389, 638, 651. The third Sibylline Book 
is said to date as early as 140 before Christ. It is doubtful if Messianism, even in the 
Book of Daniel, is quite so old. The targums are not so ancient, and Rabbi Akiba 
dates like Simeon ben Iochai no further back than the end of the first century of 
our era. 

2 Sohar, I. fol. 77, col. 1. 

3 Sohar, V. fol. 137, col. 4. Sulzbach ed. 

4 Homer, Odyssey, xxiv. 1. Rabbi Idit admitted that the Angel in whom the 
1 Name’ of God is and who can pardon transgressions (therefore the Angel whom Paul 
calls Christ) is Metatron.—Ernest de Bunsen, the Angel-Messiah, p. 303. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 659 


There are two angels of death, one a holy angel called 
Gabriel; the other a godless angel named Samael; whose 
name the author of Genesis seems to have bestowed upon the 
tribes of the Arabian Desert, considering all that dwelt in the 
Desert as uncircumcised (ol Shemali), I Shemali. 

God shall say to the Angel Gabriel and Michael: 1 Open the gates of the 
hells' 2 and bring them up ; then shall they go with the keys and open the 8,000 
gates of the hells.—Ialkut Shimoni, fol. 46. col. num. 296. 3 

What in thee hears and sees is the Logos of the God.—Hermes, I. 6. 

The holding seven stars in his hand seems to denote Gabriel, 
as Logos-angel, Sabaoth. Seven Angels serve before God’s 
veil. 4 

My name in the middle of him.—Exodus, xxiii. 21. 

The Ange» of Him.—Genesis xxiv. 7. 

God is named by the Kabbalists Adam haeljon, which means 
the Most High Man . 3 The Voice of Adam was heard.—Dan. 
viii. 16; Adam calls to Gabriel as the Angel of the Mysteries 
of the Anthropus. 5 Consequently, the “ Son of the Man ” is 
the Son of ha-Adam, which is Gabriel.—Daniel vii. 9, 13 ; viii. 
16. Gabriel in the gnosis takes the place of the Logos. 
Gabriel, as Executor of the divine punishments, corresponds 
to the Anointed Judge Adonai, Osiris, Saturn, at the end of 
the world. He is the Power, while Thoth-logos-Hermes-Ga- 
briel is the Wisdom, of God. Since Hermes is the Logos 6 and 
Gabriel takes the place of the Logos, it follows that in the 
Codex of the Nazoria (at Basra) Gabriel is both Logos and the 
Onlybegotten Abel Ziua, the power and the wisdom, 7 Hermes 
and the Word. 

For the Logos (Word) from the Unborn and Hidden God we adore and love 
after the God.—Justin Martyr, Apologia, I. 

The Power of God was His Logos.—Justin, Apol. I. p. 140. ed. 1551. 


1 Michael is Angel of the planet Hermes, Merkury. 

2 This is Hindu doctrine of thousands of hells. 

3 Bodenschatz, III. 152. 

4 Gfrorer, I. 277 ; Pirke Eliezer, IV. 

6 Daniel, viii. 16, Kara tows o. Tischendorf. 

6 Plutarch, de Iside, 54, 68. 

7 1 Cor. i. 24. Paulinism is Essene-Ebionite. 


660 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


Michael is the Angel Metatron, 1 and Metatron is Gabriel. 2 In 
fact, the war of the Angel Xalioh against the Dragon is strik¬ 
ingly similar to the contest of the Agatliodemon in Egypt 
against Typhon, or Homs with the Evil Principle, Darkness,— 
Michael and his angels fighting against the Serpent. 2 

The Serpent shall die ! 4 —Virgil, Eclogue iv. 24 

This idea is recognised in Apollo 5 slaying Python, and in 
Krishna depicted with his foot on the Dragon’s head. 

At the birth of Budlia, then Devas and men, Mara and 
Brahma, Shamans and Brahmans beheld a wonderful Light 
which shone through the entire world and lit up the gloom of 
the external mountain depth where eternal darkness reigns. 6 
This looks very much like the cave where Mithra was born 
Dec. 25th. 

I am the Light of the world.—John, viii. 12. 

The Shechinah is the Messias. 7 Hermes is born of Maia, that 
is, Ma, the moon. The Ram is assigned to Mars; Yenus to 
Taurus. 8 Merkury is the same as Apollo 9 and Sol, who is, like 
Hermes, King of the regions above and the realms below, as 
the Egyptians said. They give Hermes the color of Hades 
when sol is in the winter zodiacal signs. In the Sacred rites 

1 Bodenschatz, Kirchliche Verf. d. Juden, II. 191; Nork, Rabbin Quellen, pp. 
Ixxix., Ixxxi. The Phoenicians, Jews and Sun-priests in Syria were circumcised.— 
Chwolsohn, Ssabier, II. p. 144; Herodotus, II. 104. The initiated in the Egyptian 
Mysteries were circumcised. As to Genesis being a work of the Jewish gnosis less than 
B.c. 160, it paints the life of the Egyptian priests just as it was known to be in later 
times.—Movers, I. 112, 113. Josephus, Ant. xviii. 9. 5 shows that the Mesopotamians 
in A.D. 55 carried with them on a journey the teraphim (objects of worship) just as we 
find Rachel doing in Genesis, xxxi. 19, 32-35. The Essene and Ebionite gnosis precede 
the Christian era. 

2 Luke, i. 19, 31; Nork, Real-Worterbuch, I. 474, 475, Bibl. Mythol. II. 307. 

3 Rev. xii. 7. 

4 Rev. xii. 9. 

5 The Greek sabbaths were called 'Ebdome, the Hebrew were called Sabbata. 
Apollo was called ‘EbDOMAIOS (Sabatarian). ‘E/BSop-arr} S’ rjireLTa KaTr\\v9ev iepov i^pap ; 
u the Seventh then surely came back, a holy day,” says Homer. Ever}'- new moon and 
each Seventh day of the first ten days of the month was sacred to Apollo.—Herodotus, 
vi. 57. *E086prj lep'ov ?/pap, “ the Seventh a holy day ; for on this day Leto bore Apollo 
Chrysaor.”—Hesiod, ’Epya, 715, 716. Apollo and Liber are one and the same God.— 
Macrob. I. xviii. 1. 

6 S. Beal, Romantic History of Buddha, 36, 37. 

7 Nork, Rab. Quellen, lxxv. 

8 Macrobius, I. xii. 10, 11. 

9 ibid, xviii. 7-11. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 661 


of the religious mystery sol is called Apollo when he is in the 
upper hemisphere and Dionysus when in the lower or noctur¬ 
nal hemisphere . 1 

The hell of Plato which is introductory to that of the 
Christian belief is born of the Orphic opinions of its author. 
One cannot doubt that Plato was initiated into the Mysteries 
of Orpheus. His idea of sin is analogous to the Christian 
conception of it for he considers the present life as an expia¬ 
tion of an anterior fault . 2 The Orphic life tended to free us 
from the circle of evil , in which the human destiny ajipeared 
to be shut in, by seeking the solution of man’s emancipation 
in a disguised monotheism. The Orphic religion superposed 
itself upon the Dionysiac religion in Greece, and, not being 
able to overthrow it, fused the two in one. The tendencies of 
these two religions had too much analogy for it to be other¬ 
wise. It was then that Bacchus, the God of the fields, de¬ 
scended to the lower regions and became a subterranean divin¬ 
ity . 3 So the God of love, redeemer of souls, who descends to 
the subterranean realms and who in Egypt is called Osiris, 
becomes here Dionysus and Orpheus, and redeems man from 
original sin; then, among the Christians, they personify the 
Word under the same characters ; the Christ is equally a God 
of love who also descends to earth to ransom us from original 
sin then to hells to deliver the souls, and rises after his death 
ascending to heaven. The difference between the original 
sin of the Orphics and that of the Christians consists in this, 
that, according to the former, man was descended from the 
Titans revolted from Zeus , 4 and, according to the Christians, 
he is sprung from Adam who was likewise risen up against 
God. The Talmudists pretended that Cain was the fruit of 
the union of Eve and one of the rebel angels . 3 

Hermes and Herakles are both termed Sun and “ Saviour .” 6 
Herakles, with his lion skin, is Michael the Archangel with a 

1 ibid, xviii. 7-11. 

2 The Fall of man.—Gen. vi. 5, 12; vii. 1. 

3 Edouard Gerard, Berlin, 1861, Ueber Orpheus und die Orphiker. 

4 This idea is certainly in Genesis, vi. 3, 4, in the Apostate Nephilim; also in 
Ovid, Fast. v. where he speaks of the earth-born Giants. The Titan Stars are men¬ 
tioned in Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 721. Typhoeus (Typhon) is in Homer, one of the Giants ; 
and in Egypt Apophis (the Sun’s Brother) wars against Jupiter. 

6 P. Gener, La Mort et le Diable, p. 399; Gen. vi. 2, 4, 5. 

6 Dunlap, Sod, I. 20, 22, 36, 143; Aeschylus, Choephorae, 1; Movers, Phiinizier, I. 
389; Munk, Palestine, 522; Nork, Rabbin. Worterb. II. 157. 


662 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


lion’s head, 1 and the Iar (Ariel, or Horns) with a lion’s head. 2 
Michael is Metatron ; Metatron is the Angel Iesua. 3 He is the 
Saviour Angel. 4 Justin Martyr says that the Logos is called 
Angel. 5 

The Angel who is the Divine Logos. —Philo, de Profuzis, 1. 

His firstborn logos, the Oldest Angel, as being an Archangel having many 
names.—Philo, Confusion of Tongues, p. 231. Paris, 1552. 

Learned priests of India style the Sun, by many names, 6 and 
Philo informs us that the sun is the symbol of the logos.' 
Metatron (Mettron) is Mithra and Michael. 8 

Where Michael appeared, there was at the same instant the Glory of the 
Shechina, 9 —Scliemoth Rabba, II. fol. 104. col. 3. 

Rabbi Iditli answered the question put him : Why stands (Exodus, xxiv. 1) 
“ Ascend up to the Lord ” instead of 'Home up to Me .” By the Lord (Ia’hoh) 
must be understood Metatron ; for Exodus, xxiii. 1, reads : “ My Name is in 
him.”—Talmud, Sanhedrin, fol. 58. col. 2. 

The Shechina said “ Ascend up to the Lord.”—Sohar, to Exodus, fol. 52. 
col. 5. 

The Word (Memra, Logos) of the Lord, his Shechinah, will go before you. 
—Targum of Jonathan b. Usiel to Deuteron. xxxi. 3. 


The targum of Onkelos to Genesis, xlix. 27, mentions the 
Shechinah. 10 The Shechinah is the Messias, 11 the Messias is 
the Tree of Life, 12 and the Tree of Life is the 10 Sephirotli. 13 
The Messias goes out of the Garden of Aden, 14 from Ken- 
zippor, 15 and is the Sliekinah-Angel. The Redeemer-Angel is 


1 Mankind, London, 1872, p. 447. See Homs and Iar with the lion’s head. 

2 Seal of Iar in Dr. Abbot’s Egyptian Museum, New York Hist. Soc. 

3 Bodenschatz, Kirkliche Verfassung d. Juden, II. pp. 191, 192; Buxtorf, Lex. 
1192, 1193 ; quotes the Book of Zerobabel; Nork, Rabb. Quellen, p. xcix. 

4 Isaiah, lxxiii. 8, 9 ; Sod, I. 20 ; Ezra, viii. 1 ; Numb. xxv. 4. 

5 Sod, II. 76; Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, liv. xcviii. The Logos is called Hermes by 
the Greeks.— Hippolytus , I. 118. 

6 Wilson, Rig Veda, II. 143. 

7 Philo, On Dreams, 15, 16 ; Dunlap, Vestiges, 238, 240. 

8 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, pp. lxxix. lxxx. 

9 ibid. lxxx. 

10 Gfrorer, Jahrhnndert d. Heils, I. 55. Onkelos is near 30 before Christ. 

11 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. xxii. xxxi. lxxv. Surenhusius, hamashveh, 710. 

12 Nork. p. xxxii. 

13 Nork, p. lxxiv. 

14 Sohar, II. 3, col. 3. Sulzbach. 

15 "nest of light." The Glory I had with Thee, Father, before the world was.— 
John, xvii. 5. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 663 

the Shekinah. 1 The light of the Messias ! 2 That light is the 
Shekinah, compared to which human souls are as little lamps 
to the bright glare of the Torch. 3 The Iesidi believe the 
Christ a Great Angel that assumed the human shape. 4 Justin 
Martyr holds that he was the Power of God, His Logos. 5 The 
Poimander of Hermes Trismegistus, I. 6, says : That Light I 
am, Mind , thy God, the luminous Word 6 from Mind , the Son 
of God. The Hermetic Books belonged to the period of the 
Essaians, Therapeutae, and Nazorene-Iessaians (mentioned by 
Epiphanius), as we see by the words gnosis and Koinonia.— 
Menard, Hermes, pref. pp. lvi.-lxi., lxv.-lxvii. The Essaeans, 
the Nazoria and Ebionites practised communism believing 
in aeons or the gnosis of things on high. The Codex Nazoria 
II. 304, 305, has the aeons. Gabriel is Cheper, the Cabir or 
Creator Sun. 7 He presides over the ripening of the fruits, 8 is 
Angel of birth and life, fire-angel, and, like Zeus, presides 
over the thunder, 9 like Malach Ia’hoh the Angel Lord. The 
Pneumatic Fire of the Spirit moved on the waters in the 
thunder-clouds.—Gen. i. 2, 6; ix. 16 ; Exodus, ix. 23. 

The Angel, God’s Logos, they recognize as Himself. 10 —Philo, de Somniis, I. 
41, 33, 34, 39. 

The God is prior to the divine Word. — Philo, De Somn. I. 11. 

Iachoh makes die and live, makes descend to hell and rise !— 1 Samuel, 
ii. 6. 

Torch-immersions and water sprinklings with lustral water 
formed a part of the worship of Hermes. 11 Compare the water 


1 Sohar, II. fol. 48, 123, 123. 

2 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. ix., lxxiv., lxxv., xxii. Meuschen, 736. 

3 Tikkune Sohar, fol. 6, col. 4. 

4 Haxthausen, Reise, I. 228, 230. 

5 Justin, Apologia, I. p. 140. 

6 Logos, in the sun. 

7 Rinck, Relig. d. Hellenen, I. 175; Hesychius, Abclios Sam. vi. 15, 18; Psalm, 
xix. 4. Hebrew and Septuagint; Codex Nazaraeus, I. 165, 267, Norberg; ibid. Ono- 
mastikon. 

8 Bodenschatz, III. 160; Talmud, Sanhedrin, 95.2; Ezekiel, i. 13, 26; viii. 2, 3. 

9 Bodenschatz, III. 160 ; Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. 402; Mrs. Jameson, Sacred 

Art. 

10 John, i. 1; Plutarch, de Iside, 54. “The Archangel Lord.”—Philo, de Somn., 
I. 25. Philo himself was then Ebionite. 

11 Aristophanes, Eirene, 884, 886, 888. The Ascetic does not endure to continue to 
live in the region of the senses, but during few days and a certain short time, on ac¬ 
count of the necessities of the conjoined body.—Philo, de Somniis, I. 8. 


664 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


baptisms in the Euphrates and Tigris, and among the Es- 
saeans and Ebionites. 

Such rites with secret torch the Baptists 1 

Performed, who are wont to harass the Athenian Luna.—Juvenal, II. 91, 92. 

Apollo at Colosse surrounded by 12 Zodiacal Signs. Compare 
the Aries (Lamb of Light) and the 12 Eulers of Signs.—Bev. 
xxi. 14, 23. In the Mysteries of Mithra they taught the Ascen¬ 
sion of the soul by water-baptisms which took place in the 
Euphrates at midnight and at sunrise in the Tigris, also by 
fire-lustrations, etc. Ariel is Judah’s fire-altar, and means 
God’s lion. The Mithra-baptism belonged to the Essene lus¬ 
trations, Ebionite Baths and in the Baptism of the Jordan fire 
appeared as the Saviour entered the Jordan—so it was stated 
in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Metatron stands be¬ 
fore the Throne. The King has been appointed to reign over 
all hosts.—The Sohar, Comment, to Gen. xl. 10. The Lord ap¬ 
pears with the voice of the Archangel.—1 Thessalon. iv. 16. 
This Angel, the Wisdom, is the associate (paredros) of God’s 
throne (—Sophia Sal. ix. 4, 10), and was with Him when He 
created the world.—Henoch, xlviii. 3; lxii. 7 ; Sophia Sal. ix. 9 ; 
Proverbs, viii. 22, 27, Hebrew. Adam Kadmon is the Canal of 
Light, the Word, and the prototype of the first man. 2 God, 
first of all making the Wisdom, called it Adam.—Philo Judaeus, 
Quaestio, i. 53. Just here we meet the Ebionite theory that 
annoyed Tertullian and which Irenaeus handles with reluc¬ 
tance, and- as gingerly as he does the opinions of Kerintlius. 
In fact, Irenaeus could not have said less of the Kerinthians 
and Ebionites if he had tried. They were in continual opposi¬ 
tion to his theory of Messianism. The sublime contempt that 
Juvenal felt for the credulous male and female votaries of 
Oriental Eeligions spared neither Jews nor Egyptians, nor 
Chaldaeans. The Lord (the Logos) was by Philo considered 
as represented by the Sun ; and Apollo’s picture with the nim¬ 
bus (rays) around the head was found in the Baths of Titus. 3 


1 They are mistaken who carry back the origin of baptism no further than the 
preaching of John.—Meuschen, Nov. Test. Graecum ex Talmude illustratum, pp. 262, 
263. 

2 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, pp. xxviii. lxviii.; John, i. 1, 4; Ep to the Hebrews, 

i. 3. 

3 Nork, Bibl. Myth. II. 365, 366. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 665 


In sole tabernaculum suum posuit.—Vulgate Psalm, xix. 

The Great Soul was the Sun. —Spirit-Hist. p. 160. 

Genesis, xlix. 10, is clearly a reference to the Messiah, 
showing that the Pentateuch is, as it stands, as late as Daniel. 1 
There is every reason to think that the Messiah 2 idea (known 
to the Jewish prophetical writings) became more and more 
prominent after the subjugation of the Jewish nation under 
the Eoman power, but that the expectation of the Coming of 
the Messiah rose to fever heat in the times of Yespasian, Titus 
and Hadrian. The idea of the incarnation of Solar and Sal- 
vatory power in human shape appears in the legends of Bud- 
ha and Krishna in India. 3 Souls emanated from spirit, and 
the spirit (like fire) was a characteristic of the sun. Hence the 
circle surrounds the head of the Messiah, and the nimbus, that 
of Apollo-Bel. The sect of Nazoria, like the Essaians, was 
before our era. As to John the Baptist, there are three sources 
which mention him. One in Josephus, which may be an in¬ 
terpolation, another, the Gospel according to Matthew; the 
last is the Codex Nazoria. Josephus mentions a Baptist of the 
Nazorene sort, named Banous. Therefore there were Baptists 
on the Jordan answering to the general description of Eastern 
Monachism and Mithrabaptists, and these were in the style of 
John, kata Iuchanan, ‘ according to John.’ In the first part of 
the 2nd century the haeresies of Simon Magus and his succes¬ 
sors were not founded on Christian Gospels, but on the gen¬ 
eral gnosis at that time prevalent ; and although in reading 
Irenaeus, one might be led to think that these “ individual 
opinions ” had their suggestion from some of the Christian 
teachings (and probably Irenaeus meant his readers to think 
so) yet such would apparently be an erroneous view to take. 
Gnosis was before Christ, and these “ haeresies ” were gnostic 

1 The Ms. could be altered or rewritten, at any time. There were Temple Scribes. 

2 Justin, contra Trypho, p. 53, describes the Christos as Angel; Philo describes 
the Logos as Archangel, the great Archangel, of many names. Justin, pp. 44-50, 54, 
59, 61, 84, is latest Ebionite. On p. 59 he uses the words ‘ the New Testament,’ fi k<uv»} 
AiaOrjicr ); and the expression ‘ born of a virgin : ’ All this is quite late. On pp. 41, 55, 
58, 61, he knows all about the 1st and 2nd parousia (appearance) of the Christos; and, 
like Matthew, iv. 11, he recognises the Lord of the Powers.—ibid. p. 50. 

3 Josephus refers to leaving dead bodies putrefying in the sun, as an offence to the 
Sun ; Herodotus makes a similar remark regarding burying a body in Apollo’s sacred 
isle; and a dead body rendered the Jews unfit to enter the Temple.—Levit. v. 2. xxi. 
11; xxii. 4-6; Numbers, v. 2. 


666 


THE GHEBEUS OF HEBRON. 


productions. Moreover, Irenaeus represents Kerintlius as an 
early Gnostic, talking of the man Iesus. The author of ‘ Anti- 
qua Mater’ dates Kerinthus about a.d. 115. But Justin Mar¬ 
tyr wrote later than the time of Kerinthus because he never 
mentions his name, although he mentions the Basilidians, 
Satornelians, Markionites and Oualentinians (—Justin, p. 54) 
and others of various names. Irenaeus (about a.d. 185-187) on 
the contrary brings Kerinthus forward in nine lines and a half, 
apparently (as we uncharitably suppose) for the purpose of 
making him testify to the name Iesu. It was not Justin’s 
policy to do so. Now we have two mythical men already in 
Eastern Theology (Budha and Krishna), and since Josephus 
was interpolated with a like intent (probably) what was to 
hinder the inserting the name Iesu in an account of the doc¬ 
trine of Kerinthus ? For Karpokrates and Kerinthus with 
Basileides (in Irenaeus) follow Simon, Menander and Satur- 
ninus, no one of which last two does Irenaeus accuse of know¬ 
ing the name Iesu. We date Matthew’s Gospel as late as a.d. 
150; and as Justin quotes the Gospel according to Peter and 
the one according to the Hebrews (without mentioning Mat¬ 
thew) we have to consider the Hebrew Gospel quoted by 
Justin as earlier than the Matthew of the New Testament. 1 
Now Irenaeus is an exponent of Christianism posterior to the 
Gospels and the Hellenist-Pauline status; whereas Justin 
Martyr represents the Gospel status pure and simple, accord¬ 
ing to the “ Gospel kata Hebraious,” without any reference to 
Paul. There was between the * Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews’ (later than 140) and a.d. 97 an earlier Christianist for¬ 
mative period; and, still earlier, a Jewish Messianic belief 
extending back to the period of the third Sibylline Book and 
the date of Daniel, vii. 13, 14, ix. 26. 

When Philo Judaeus describes the Therapeutae and Essai- 
ans we know that he has the Nazoria in mind ; and Eusebius 
plumply adopts these Therapeutae as the earlier Christians 
because they were Nazoria. When Philo describes the two 
powers of the Logos, the ‘ Kingly Power ’ and the 4 Merciful 
Power ’ we see a connection between Philo and Matthew, xxv. 

1 The reasons and the argument for this will be found later in this chapter. But 
the human race is not necessarily bound by the frauds and mistakes of antiquity, even 
if the creeds and theologies are. The orient is the last place to go for truth ; antiquity 
is the fruitful soil of error,—the last place to go for truth. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 667 


34, 40 ; and Jnstin Martyr (6 Trarrjp tov Aoyov.—p. 33) follows both 
Philo and the Apokalyptic John in their Logos doctrine; as 
applied to the Messiah. Here is a positive consensus in re¬ 
gard to the Logos doctrine ; which John (of the Apokalypse) 
originally could not apply to Iesu, but to the Lamb (the Adon) 
in Aries; at the same time that John does not know our Four 
Gospels. Justin has the Son of God born of a virgin. Justin 
knows the Apokalypse and calls its author John; but the 
“ Revelation of Iesou Christos ” by John is so far inferior to 
Matthew’s Gospel that it takes no note of the Nazorian-Ebio- 
riite sources of Christianism but concerns itself with the 
apostles, martyrs, New Jerusalem and the cities of Asia Minor. 
He knows the Nikolaitans (Rev. ii. 7) and martyrs (Rev. vi. 9 ; 
vii. 14), but the only references that can be even inferentially 
construed to refer to the Ebionites and Nazoria of the Four 
Gospels are Rev. vii. 3 to 8, 14, viii. 3, xi. 18, xii. 6,14, xiv. 4, 5, 
xvii. 6, while Rev. ii. 1, 8, xi. 18, xii. 11, xviii. 24, xx. 4, 9, xxi. 
2, 4,10-14, xxii. 20, point clearly to a period after the Jews had 
suffered persecution, but still looked for the coming of the 
Messiah ,—Ipxopaa raxv, I come soon! Not a word about Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel, or Luke’s, or Mark’s, or John’s,—not a hint of 
the Iessene Ebionism of Matthew, v. vi. vii. Justin, p. 38, ap¬ 
pears to know these precepts! 

Think not that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets, I came not to 
destroy but to complete.—Matthew, v. 17 (So xxiv. 26 is Ebionite). 

This is the transjordan Ebionism that after Jerusalem’s fall still 
adhered to the Law and the Prophets. Justin completes a 
little further. John’s Revelation is (if it is the oldest book of 
the New Testament) late enough ; Justin Martyr (circa a.d. 160) 
alone knows the book and its author; he knew the Nazoria 
and Ebionim, because he was born at Nablous (near Sychem) 
in Samaria; but the later Greek Matthew builds a Gospel on 
the Essaian-Iessene-Ebionite status and principles. Now if 
Jewish and Babylonian gnosis had not already supplied the 
oriental minds with the doctrine that there was a Saviour 
Angel whom the Jews called Angel Iesua and Mttron (Meta- 
tron) whom they regarded as their Intercessor and Mediator 
(Bodenschatz, Kir chi. Yerfass. d. Juden, II. 191) as the Persians 
regarded Mithra, men could never have clothed him with flesh 
and blood. Mettron (Metatron) is the Jewish Angel King (— 


66S 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Bodenschatz, II. 192; so Matthew, xxv. 34; iv. 11; Dunlap, 
Sod, II. 3; Julian, v. 172) the Babylonian Logos, and St. 
John’s Logos. He stands in the centre of the Seven (Sabaoth, 
Wanderer) Planets, and, as the Chaldaean Saviour of Souls, 
bolds the Seven Stars in his hand!—Rev. i. 13, 16; Dunlap, 
Sod, II. p. 3; Exodus, xxvii. 23. Bodenschatz identifies the 
Jewish Angel, Metatron Iesua, with the New Testament Lo¬ 
gos and King, when he says : Denn, ist niclit unser Jeshua, der 
Engel des Angesiclits Gottes, der Engel des Bundes (Malachi, 
xiv. 1) der rechte Metatron ? This Chaldaean Seven-rayed 
God (the Seven Lamps of the Jewish Candlestick) was called 
Iao and Sabaoth, was Creator, raised up the souls of the de¬ 
ceased, and this name was an unspoken mystery of the Chal- 
daeans.—Movers, 550, 553; Lydus de Mensibus, iv. 38, 74; 
Julian, Oratio, v. 172; Bodenschatz, II. 192. Great is the 
Mystery of that Divinity (Iahoh, Iao, Sabaoth).—1 Timothy, 
iii. 16. For by him were all things created, being the Image 
of the God.—Coloss. i. 15-17. In ancient Egypt the cross 9 
was the emblem of the resurrection on the cover of the sar¬ 
cophagus of Pepi Merenra of the 5th dynasty. Come, take up 
the cross.—Mark, x. 21. So that Christianism has grown out 
of Jordan Essenism and Ebionism in the East, leaving Saturn’s 
throne of fire, Herakles and Gheber fire-worship, somewhat in 
the background. At the same time the Agreement of Justin 
Martyr and the Pauline Epistles upon the Crucifixion of the 
Christos forces us to admit that the Angel Iesua had been 
clothed with flesh in the estimation of some ecclesia as early, 
perhaps, at a.d. 147-155. This therefore makes the period 
from 115-125 of very great importance in the history of dogma, 
—the period posterior to Saturninus. No wonder that Epi- 
phanius, I. 117, 120, 122, 123 (ed. Petau) was puzzled when he 
got upon the chronology of the Nazoria, Iessaeans, and Kerin- 
thians. If we include the Essenes as Nazoria (which they cer¬ 
tainly were in their self-denial) Epiphanius had to go back 
about 500 years after their origin. Now this Bishop could not 
exactly tell whether the Nazoraioi succeeded the Kerinthians 
or the Kerinthians came after the Nazoraioi ; but he says they 
were contemporaneous. That is very likely! It is credible 
that Epiphanius knew more than he let out. The author of 
Antiqua Mater dates Kerinthus about a.d. 115, perhaps too 
early. Cyril of Jerusalem (about A. D. 350) calls Kerinthus the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 669 


destroyer of the ecclesia. But Cyril is rather late, to be an ac¬ 
curate authority concerning- Kerinthus. According to Philas- 
trius, Kerinthus asserted that the Christus is not risen from the 
dead. It looks as if Kerinthus himself had never admitted the 
existence of Iesus, but only acknowledged that of a Saviour 
Angel (the Angel Iesua, as Presence Angel); and this is the 
more probable, since Saturninus mentions the Saviour (prob¬ 
ably Iesua Metatron) but not Iesu at all. Kerinthus at Antioch 
adhered to the Law of Moses and Jewish customs, and there¬ 
fore was wholly unlikely to have clothed the Jewish Angel 
Iesua with flesh and blood, turning him into the man Iesu. 
Besides, the Jewish Messiah was expected still in a.d, 115-134 
and it is unreasonable to assume that Kerinthus should so very 
early have surrendered this hope, when the time had not ar¬ 
rived to put forth the proposition that the Angel Iesua had 
already come ,—and that too in the flesh, the human flesh of a 
man. It is not so sure that Kerinthus interpreted Isaiah as 
Justin or Tertullian did. 

Considering Justin and our Four Gospels as more doctrinal 
than historical, it seems improbable that, during the forty or 
sixty years succeeding the destruction of the 'Jerusalem 
Temple (while men were earnestly expecting a Messiah to 
save the nation and restore its power,—rebuilding its Temple) 
when most need was felt of a Messiah to overthrow and expel 
the Homans, and to burn the Roman Babylon, the theory 
should be advanced (and gain credit) that the expected had 
come about 100 years previous in the shape of a non-resistant 
Essene or Iessene Healer, Nazoraian, or Ebionite; for this 
would have been a disappointment to the public hopes, and 
none except an Essene or Iessaian Ebionite could be found to 
say ‘ who draws the sword shall perish by the sword.’ The 
Jews had expected a warrior Messiah, somewhat in the style 
of Rev. ix. 15, 16 ; xviii. 2, 8, 21; xix. 11-18. But when time 
had dulled the appetite for the Messianic hope and the people 
had got used to submission to the Kaisar, and Bar Cocheba 
had been destroyed, the hour had come to listen to the Ebion- 
ite-Iessene Evangel of love, teaching that the Messiah was no 
warrior but a Messenger of peace baptised by John in the 
Jordan while fire rolled over the river’s surface. 1 It seems al- 

1 To this fire kindled in Jordan we consider related the passage in Matthew, iii. 11, 
4 He shall baptise you in fire.’ This too is placed in the mouth of John the Baptist, 


670 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


most too soon after Titus and their fallen Temple (Luke, xiii. 
35) for even the Ebionites in 125 to preach a ‘ Crucified Mes¬ 
siah ’ beyond the Jordan, in Bashan, or in the recesses of the 
Arabian Desert. But the style of the Apokalypse, referring to 
the Saints (and Matthew, xxvii. 52 also has the resurrection of 
the Saints), comes nearer. Justin used it and the Gospel of 
the Hebrews (Nazarenes).—See ‘ Supernatural Keligion,’ I. 270- 
273, 332, 420, 421. Justin’s birthplace was in Samaria not far 
from the Jordan, and his advocacy of the Christian Gospels is 
from this very circumstance a moral confirmation of Cyril’s 
statement that Jordan was the beginning (of the doctrine) of 
the evangels. Cyril was bishop of Ierousalem, but Justin came 
from near Sichem, tells us that the “ Magoi apo ton anatolon ” 
came from Arrhabia. But how is it that the Babylonian and 
Jewish doctrine of the Intelligible Sun 1 (Mithra, Logos) is found 
referred to in the Apokalypse, I. 4, 13, 16, 20 ; ii. 1; and the 
Seven Stars are again later referred to, as Spirits of impiety, in 
the Codex Nazoria, if Norberg did not get a good text, or did 
not know how to translate it ? His translation so successfully 
connects with other contemporaneous Nazorian doctrines that 
the inference is that this translator of the text of the ‘ Codex 
Nazoria ’ either knew how to translate correctly or was divinely 
inspired to get the correct meaning. 2 Let us enter here the 


the head of the Nazorenes according to the Codex Nazoria. The Gheber fireworship, in 
reference to Angels, is seen in Judges, vi. 21; xiii. 20-22. Any reference to such evi¬ 
dences in the 2nd century at Antioch may be regarded as literary humbug, or sophistry. 
But the fire-symbol in Seir belongs to Saturn’s castle of flame, and the fire in the waters 
of Jordan belongs in the Gospel of the Nazarenes properly to the Angel Iesua, the 
Saviour Angel, a name of Metatron and Mithra the Mediator born Dec. 25th. Matthew 
puts the Magian horoscope in the 2nd chapter, followed in the 3d by the Baptism of 
the Jordan. This is Essene, Nazarene, and Ebionite enough. The earliest Jordan 
Nazorians were perhaps the sect of Essenes and the Baptists.—Matthew, iii. 4 ; Codex 
Nazoria, passim. The Nazorene Iessaeans were contemporaneous with the Kerinthians, 
believing in a Christos as Messiah, but not in a Iesus.—Compare Irenaeus, I. xxii. xxiv. 
xxv.; psalm, ii. 2, 6, 7, 8, 12; Elxais Epiph. Haer. xix. 1. c. 4. 

1 Julian, Oratio, V. p. 172; Lydus, de Mens., iv. 38, 74; Movers, I. 550; Dunlap, 
Sod, II. p. 3. The Manichaeans were austere ascetics. They did not celebrate the 
birth of the Christos, denying its reality.—Milman, ed. 1844 (Harper), p. 281. 

a Norberg gave the text and Latin translation in 3 quarto volumes, with a Lexidion 
and an Onomastikon besides. Theodor Noldeke produced a “ Mandaische Grammatik ” 
and calls Norberg’s text “ wholly useless ” because Norberg printed it in Syriac letters. 
This was an error ; and this text may have been useless to Noldeke in making a Man- 
daite Grammar; but Norberg succeeded in translating 479 pages (of text, according to 
my copy) intelligibly, in Latin ; and so that the translated passages and texts (so far as 
we have used them in this work) agree remarkably well with the testimony we have 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0NITE8. 671 


following approximate dates: Kerinthus, 120-125 or later ; 
Gospel of the Hebrews, 150 or later ; the Apokalypse, 125-130 ; 
Justin s first Apologia about 155-165 or still later; Dialogue 
with Trypho, 166-175. Noldeke dates the oldest parts of Codex 
Nazoria as high as 650 ; some pieces may have their foundation 
in the time of the Sassanides.—Noldeke, Manda. Gram. p. xxii. 

In a passage of the Talmud the fathers of the Synagogue 
expressly acknowledge that their forefathers introduced out of 
the land of the Exile the names of the Angels, months, and 
letters of the alphabet.—Franck, Kabbala, p. 261. Apollo had 
the epithet Hebdomaios Sevenly, like Sabaoth ; compare the 
Sevenly Logos in Revelation, i. 12,13, 16 ; ii. 1 ; iii*. 1. Apollo 
is the Monad. 1 Apollo does not think that there is anything 
that he does not know, but he even says that he knows how 
to number the grains of sand and to comprehend all the 
measures of the sea. 2 The Eretrians and Magnesians pre¬ 
sented the God 3 with the first fruits of men, 4 as Giver of 
fruits, paternal, the Generative Source, and loving man. 5 Like 
the Egyptian Gods, Apollo is closely connected with the 
Sun. 6 The planets revolve around him. 7 The Sun is the King 
of all things. 8 We are born from Him ; 9 and the initiated in 
the Egyptian Mysteries were circumcised. 

collected from other sources, such as Sohar, II. fol. 3, 5. Whether this is miraculous, 
or a result of Norberg’s being able to make a Lexidion and Onomastikon, or of a cer¬ 
tain facility of translating the languages of Syria, is of no consequence. It is the sub¬ 
ject that is interesting to us. It is sufficient that Norberg was able to translate otie of 
the texts. 

The real trouble is that so-called ‘ orthodox ’ scholars find it desirable to sustain an 
orthodox interpretation and general prevailing views concerning the Semite Scriptures 
whether they know better or not. Hence such scholars as Movers or Norberg are 
greeted with faint praise or talked down (as adverse to the sentiments of a ring). Theo¬ 
dore Parker, on the contrary, a first rate scholar, spoke highly of Dr. Movers. Others 
have spoken highly of Nork. At all events, Norberg in giving us “ Gabriel Salicha,” 
Gabriel Apostolos, has come very close to ‘ 1 Apostolos ” as one of the names of the 
Messiah, according to Justin Martyr. “The Son of the God is called Angel and 
Apostolos.”—Justin, Apol. I. p. 161. ed. Lutitiae, 1551. 

1 De Iside, 10. 

2 Philostrat. Vita Apollonii Tyan., VI. 11. 

3 Apollo ; called in Crete Abelios, elsewhere in the Orient Abel the Good Divinity. 
Bel the Creator. Hebrew, Habol, Bol. 

4 Compare Exodus, xiii. 12. Man is generated by man and the Sun.— Julian, 151 ; 
quotes Aristotle. 

6 Plutarch, Pythiae Orac., 16. 

6 See Julian, Orat., iv. p. 144. 

7 ibid. 146, 149. He is called King! 

8 ibid. 149. Eli, Helios. 

9 Julian, iv. 192 ; see Colossians, i. 16 ; ii. 2, 3. 


672 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


And those things more divine that he gives to the souls, freeing them from 
the body, lifting them up to the kindred natures 1 of the God, a subtile and power¬ 
ful vehicle of the divine ray, given to the souls for generation of the safe Re¬ 
turn, celebrate worthily, and by us let it be believed rather than shown.— 
Julian, iv. p. 152. 

The Sun generates Aeskulapius the Saviour of all things.—Julian, in Sol., 

153. 

Tlie first day of the week was made sacred by the Greeks to 
Apollo, to the ‘ Light of the world ’ by the Christians. Also 
the ‘ glory ’ is a present from heathenism to the * Church.’ At 
an early period the Greeks placed on the head of the statues in 
the open air a little moon to protect them against the weather. 
This is the nimbus. In the Baths of Titus a painting was dis¬ 
covered representing Apollo with the nimbus round his head. 2 
Herakles is termed Saviour. 3 Metatron is called Angel Iesua. 4 
Gabriel was by some Gnostics regarded apparently as Saviour 
and Sun-angel. 5 Julian says that Zeus has appointed the God¬ 
dess of Wisdom as guardian to Herakles (the King of Fire ; Ga¬ 
briel) the Soter tou Kosmou, the Saviour of the world. 6 The 
Sun governs the seven circles of heaven. The Sun draws all. 
things from the earth. How shall he not draw and raise up 
the happy souls ? Since this light appears to belong to the 
Gods and to those that desire to be lifted up to a higher place. 
The light of the rays of the God has been shown to be naturally 
able to raise up through the visible energy and the invisible ; 
by which innumerable souls have been raised on high having 
followed the most brilliant and sunlike of perceptions. 7 

I am Abel whom Life has sent.—Codex Nazoria, I. 267 ; Brandt, p. 44 has 
Hibil Ziwa (Gabriel). 

Going above and lifting up the souls to the World of idea. 8 —Julian, iv. 136. 

The Codex Nazoria in Abel Ziua has retained the Chaldaean 
doctrine of Belus Minor, the Logos, the Saviour Angel, the 
Presence Angel, Gabriel. In Crete the Sun was called Abelios, 

1 essences, ousias. 

2 Nork, Biblical Mythol., II. 365 note. 

3 Movers, 389 ; Munk, Pal., 522. 

4 Bodenschatz, I. 191. 

5 He takes the place of the logos. Irenaeus, L xii. p. 87; Rev. i. 16, 18 ; xix. 13. 

6 Julian, Oratio VII. p. 220. 

7 Julian, Y. 172. 

8 The Intelligible world may be termed the ideal world, only to be perceived by 
the mind. Movers, I. 551-554. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 673 


and a Dorian form of tlie name was Apellon.—Binck, Bel. d. 
Hellenen, I. 175 ; Hesycliius, s. v. Perseus is the Logos.—Hip- 
polytus, I. 122. He was born of a Yirgin.—Justin (Trypho) 

p. 82. 

Aeskulapius, the Son of Apollo, 1 is the late autumnal Sun 
without strength, and his emblem, the cock, signified the 
Sun’s return from Darkness, that is, resurrection ! That is the 
reason Sokrates desired at his death a cock sacrificed to 
iEskulapius. He is Harpokrates, and Serapis (whose emblem 
is one or two cocks). Having offered himself on the eighth 
day he was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. 2 He was 
represented as an Infant, 3 holding in one hand a sceptre, in the 
other a pine-cone. The Sun generates Aeskulapius, the Sa¬ 
viour of all things. 1 He is the divine physician ! Melampous 
(priest and physician) introduced the rites and festivals of 
Dionysus into Greece. He appears to be a sort of Krishna. 5 
It is to be noted that Herakles, Iaqab, Gabriel, the Yernal 
Lamb (Bev. vii. 4, 11; xii. 1; xxi. 14) and the Christos are all 
connected with the number 12 ; Herakles and Apollo with the 
12 zodiacal signs. 

In these oriental religions, Adonis (as Nature-god) is the 
King over all the other Gods. 6 The Jewish priesthood, later, 
tried to strip their God of life 7 of his Groves, besides burning 
and chopping up the Asheras or emblems of the lunar divinite 
generatrice, the sole source of the body. 8 We find Bol with 
Asherali; 9 and he was inquired of, as the Delphian oracle was. 
In the third volume of La Chau and Le Blond’s description 
of the principal engraved stones of the Cabinet of the Due 

1 Mithra, Ha Bolim. “Helios the Phoenician Baal.”—Sayce, in Academy, Jan. 
15. 18S1. p. 45. Helios Apollo generates the Asklepios in the world, and has him also 
before the world with himself.—Julian, Or. IV. in Solem, p. 144. The blood of the 
Lamb is the death of the Adon, slain by Winter, resurrected in Aries (the Lamb).— 
Rev. i. 16, 18. Come up here !—Rev. xi. 12; Julian, Or., V. 172; Dunlap, Sod, II. 3. 
The Messiah was regarded as the God in the sun.—Matth. xvi. 2; Ps. ii. ; Ps. xix. 6, 
Sept. The Logos = the Sun. 

2 The Eleusinian Mysteries are the Mysteries of Mithra. Compare the ladder (of 
the seven planets) with seven steps. 

3 Mithra infans born Dec. 25 in the cave. 

4 Julian in Solem, p. 153. 

s Niger hie est. 

6 Compare psalm xcv. 3. 

7 Adoni, Mithra, mn\ or iThT. 

a Deuteron. xvi. 21. 

9 2 Kings, xxiii. 4. 

43 


G74 


TIIE GHEBEBS OF HEBBON. 


d’Orleans, plate 49, Apollo 1 was exhibited the central figure of 
a zodiac of eleven signs. He has a crown of Rays and a horn 
of plenty, with flowers in it. He thus is the first sign himself, 
taking the place of the missing Lamb of the vernal equinox. 
The Apollo’s crown of rays, then belongs to the vernal Lamb 
that in the sign Aries 2 wakes nature out of her winter’s sleep. 
The Lamb treads on the Serpent of darkness and winter. In 
the autumn equinox the Serpent was the cause of mortality to 
Adam ; but in March the other Adam has conquered death ! 
Apollo has served Admetus 3 (the Unsubdued) in Hades ; 4 in 
Spring he is a risen Redeemer, and Liberator of souls. The 
Turkish graves are sprinkled with flowers and water. The 
Hindus offered a lamp, 5 water, and wreaths of flowers. 

“ Regnabit a ligno Deus ” 

Certainly I once perceived a young shoot of palm coming up by Apollo's 
altar at Delos.—Odyssey, iii. 161, 162. 

Krete where Kudones dwelt, around Iardan’s waters.—Odyssey, iii. 292. 
Before the Sun had put on his CROWN of rays Krishna and Ram mounted. 
—Maurice, Hindostan, II. p. 363. 

The triangular (figure) belongs to Hades, Dionysus and Ares. 6 
In the ancient gymnasium at Megara there was a stone in the 
form of a not large pyramid ; this they named Apollo Karinos. 7 
But the Hindu triangle, with the sun in the centre, seems to 
express them all. The sun was the centre of Essenian symbol¬ 
ism, and the austere life of the Essenes resembled the ascetism 
of the Brahmans, Jains and Budhists, as also that of the 
Magi.—Ernest de Bunsen, 78, 124. 

The truest Sun proportions all things to the time, being truly Time of time. 
—Chaldaean Oracle. 8 


1 at Colossae. See Rev. vi. 13, vii. 9, 10. 

2 Ares, March. Ariel, Iar. “Christus invictus Leo, Surgens dracone obruto. A 
morte functos excitat.”—Rambach, Anthol. I. 224, paschal hymn. 

3 Mithra in Hades. Horns. 

* Rev. i. 18. Rev. v. 9 is the Christian adaptation of a part of the Apollo-Admetus 
legend about Hades. This will be passage for Ia’hoh (through Aries). The pascha is 

the Diabateria. 

6 Lights were borne before the dead Jew at his funeral and the mourners should 
keep one burning day and night after the funeral seven successive days. 

8 de Iside, 30. 

7 Pausanias, I. 44. 3. 

8 Proclus in Tim. 249. Cory, p. 266. For the unseen fleshless, bodiless, is men¬ 
tally perceived.—Damaskius, de princip. cap. 6. pp. 15, 16, Kopp. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 675 


The priest-king of Athens supervised the Mysteries.—Ger¬ 
hard, in Koniglich. Akad. der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1858, 
p. 152. At Bybins, another Highpriest supervened every 
year ; he alone was crowned with a golden tiara and wore pur¬ 
ple.—Lucian, Dea Syria, 42. Gold was the Sun’s color.—Mat¬ 
thew, ii. 11. On the front of the Hebrew Highpriest’s tiara of 
gold were the letters mrp. The priest of Dionysus (the Sun) 
at Athens occupied the most distinguished place in the thea¬ 
tre. He corresponded to the Brahmatma, the Eab Magus, the 
Hebrew or Egyptian Highpriest who held the next rank to 
the sovereign. 

To the Sun (called Adamas, Athamas, Tamas, Tammuz and 
Adam-Christ) the Sabian Jews and Egyptians sacrificed a 
male lamb (annually slain from the beginning of the world) at 
the Diabateria (thou wast slain and didst buy us for the God 
in thy blood.—Rev. v. 9. Rev. vii. 14: The blood of the Lamb) 
in March, the passage or pesach of Sol through Aries. This 
pascha or pesach is Sol’s “ passage,” or passover in the zodiac. 

First fruits to God and the (Aries) Lamb.—Rev. xiv. 4. 

The Angel-king, 1 anointed with light by the Father of lights 2 
above his fellow Powers, is called the King 3 and the Lamb. 4 
Compare Kleuker (Emanations lehre bei den Kabbalisten) pp. 
10, H ; Dunlap, Sod, H. p. 28. The word slain has been 
used, not crucified ! This points to the Jewish Diaspora. 

A Lamb standing-, as though slain, having Seven horns and Seven eyes 
which are the Seven spirits of God, sent forth.—Rev. v. 6. 

Seven Eyes of Ia'hoh.—Zachar. iv., 10. 

Seven Angels serve before God’s veil.—Pirke Eliezer. 5 

The Light of Light is the Anointed of the Most High, and his 
holy Veil. 6 The veil is the shekinah, and Metatron, angel of 
the shekinah, is Lord of the seven rays of the Intelligible Sun 

1 “ Mithra, first of the izeds.” Compare also Matthew, iv. 11. He returns, after 
the Hoi Adon (Dec. 23), as the Vernal Lamb in Aries, the Lord of the Seven Rays.— 
Rev. v. 6. 

2 The unknown first cause, to ov. Numbers, xxiv. 16, is the gnosis. 

3 Matthew, xxv. 34. This is the King “ Sabaoth Adonaios,” as the Sibylline 
Book calls him, and says he shall preside at the Last Judgment. 

4 Dunlap, Sod, II. 28, 72-74, 137, 24; James, i. 17. 

6 Gfrorer, I. 

« Dunlap, Sod, II. 28. 


676 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


that the Gnosis beholds in heaven above the firmament. Me- 
tatron is the Divine Glory itself the very Shekinah ! 

Metatron est ipsissima Sliekina, et Shekina Metatron Ieliovae vocantur, 
quia Corona est decern Sepliirarum.—Tikune Soliar, 78b. 1 

The Kabbala uses the term King of the Mikroprosopus. 2 Me¬ 
tatron is most absolutely the pure Shekinah itself, and Sheki¬ 
nah is called the Metatron of Jehovah (Iahoh); for the Crown 
is of seven spheres. Shekinah is the Holy Ghost and God. 
It is also called Adonai. 3 The Angel Redeemer is the Sheki¬ 
nah, and Metatron is the Shekina-Angel. The Shekinah is 
the Word, the Messias. 4 The Mikroprosopos is the Son of the 
Father. 5 Seir anpin is Mithra; and the seven lamps of the 
Jewish Candlestick signified the seven planets. 

The Adam-Kadmon of the Kabbalah is the foundation of 
Christianity. The Christians adhered to this doctrine, only 
reducing the first three persons of the gnosis to two. In the 
Jewish gnosis, Eua was the Spiritus feminine in luna. Adam 
corresponds to Allah Sin, Lunus (Lunus-luna). So that the 
gnostically perceived by mental power is the arcane, unrevealed 
Father, whom the Law called Most High, Him that formed the 
Adam, 6 who “illumined” Her. 7 Thus the order of gnostic 
essences was, first, the First Man, called the Father; second, 
the Second Adam, and, third, Christus-Gabriel, the Logos 
and Son of the Spiritus Sanctus. 8 The followers of Monoimus 
the Arabian say that the Beginning of the universe is First 
Man and Son of Man, and what come into existence, exactly as 
Moses says, have their origin and being not from the First Man 
but from the Son of the Man, 9 not from the whole of him but 

1 Gfrorer, I. 321, 306. 

8 Kabbala Denud., II. 391. Microprosopos means Short Face (Sun, Logos). 

3 Adonai is the Sun. Adonai is Adonis.—Am. Orient. Soc. Journal; Gladstone. 

4 Nork, Rabbin. Quellen and Parallellen, xxii, xxxi, xxxii; Sohar to Exodus, folios 
48, 122, 123, 124; Surenhusius, hamashveh, 710 ; Meuschen, Nov. Test. Graec., III. 38, 

39, 40. 

6 Kabbala Den. II. 355, 375. 

Nork, Rabbin. Quellen, p. 402; Bodenschatz, III. 160; Talmud, Sanhedrin, foL 
95. col. 2. 

Exodus, iii. 2, 14; Irenaeus, I. xii. p. 86. 

6 Adam is the Egyptian Osiris.—Dunlap, Vestiges, p. 226. 

7 Dunlap, Sod, II. 24. 

8 Irenaeus, I. xxxiv.; Sod, II. 18, 22, 24, 25 and authorities cited there. 

9 VITO TOV vlou TOV avOpUTTOV. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 677 


from a part. And the Son of the Man is i, which is his dekas, 1 
the principal number, in which is the beginning of the entire 
numeration and the generation of the universe, fire, air, water, 
earth. And this i being a unit and one keraia, 2 perfection from 
perfection, a point 3 coming forth from on high, containing all 
things whatever itself and whatever the Man contains, who is 
“ Father of the Son of the Man,”—Moses therefore says that in 
six days the world was born, that is, in six powers, from which 
the world is born from that one point. 4 Isis is the feminine 
spirit, coming from Phoenicia, called Isali or Ishali in Genesis, 
ii. 22-24. 5 Therefore the reference to Father and Mother 0 
must be Kabbalist, because Adam had no parents. The Con¬ 
cealed Child of light was expected to appear from the place of 
his concealment. The Messiah goes forth from the ken zippor 
(the bird-nest) in the Garden of Eden. 7 Here we come upon 
the Adam-Christ. When Alohim spoke, the Word was Light on 
the side of the Father and on the side of the Mother.—Gen. v. 2. 

Adam supremus omnium est Corona 8 summa.—Rosenroth, Kabbala Denu- 
data, Apparatus, 26, 28, 517. 

The doctors concluded that the Messiah would be manifested 
before the Destruction of the City.—Lightfoot, Hor. Heb. I. 
449. The Kabbalists held that the three letters Adm meant 
that Adam should reappear in David and the Messiach. “ The 
Mystery of Adam is the Mystery of the Messia’h.” 9 Metatron 10 

1 His number 10. In the oldest part of the Mishna, in the Pirke Afoth, v. 1, it 
says : Through 10 words the world has been created. Origen says that the God is 
named with ten names by the Hebrews.—Gfrorer, Jahrhund. des Heils, L 299; 11.24. 

3 keraia means a horn of the moon, one projecting point, apex. 

3 keraia. 

4 Monoimus ; Hippolytus, x. 17. 

5 Sod, II. p. 24; Irenaeus, II. xxxiv. 

6 Gen. ii. 24. 

7 “Light of Power proceeding from the Concealed that are concealed,’’—from 
the Beginning of Ain Soph (without end). 

8 Matthew, xxv. 34; Luke, iii. 38. The Supreme Adam is the King! 

9 The reference is forgotten ; it probably is in the Kabbala Denudata; but it is 
proved to be correct in Dunlap, Sod, I. 112 note; II. 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 74, 77, 149; 
Hyde, 168; also 1 Cor. ii. 7; Coloss. iv. 3. Araoun means the Concealed and Conceal¬ 
ment.—Manetho; Plutarch de Iside, 9. Hekataeus, the Abderite, says that the 
Egyptians think the First God the same as the universe, as if being invisible and con¬ 
cealed ; calling on and invoking him to become visible and manifest to them they say 
Amoun !—de Iside, 9. 

Adam (the Man, Gabar) appears in Daniel, viii. 15, 16, and gives an order to 
Gabriel. 

10 Mithra, Seir Anpin, Serapis, Osiris, Horus, Dionysus, Apollo. 


678 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


is Adam Kadmon. 1 “ What you call Adam Kadmon we call 
Christ .” 2 “ He was no sophist, but he was the Power of God, 
his Logos.” 3 Adam supreme of all is the Highest Crown, the 
Logos, the Word of St. John’s Mysticism.—John, i. 1-3. The 
Elect and Concealed One existed in His Presence before the 
world was created and forever.—Enoch, p. 49. From the Be¬ 
ginning the Son of Man existed in secret.—Enoch, p. 68. 

luctus monumenta manebunt 

Semper, Adoni, mei; repetitaque mortis imago. 

The Anointed King has been appointed to rule over all hosts.—The Sohar, 

Comment, to Genesis, xl. 10. 

/ 

Before the creation God had no form. When the Concealed 
of the concealed wished to manifest himself he first made a 
point. 4 So long as this light-point had not come to appear¬ 
ance the endless was still wholly unknown and diffused no 
light at all. 5 The Crown is the first “point.” . . . That light 
which is manifested is called the Garment; for the King him¬ 
self is the innermost light of all lights. 6 

But arcana is tlie subject to which that belongs; to conceal the Mystery of 
the King is good : lest into profane ears should be injected the statement about 
souls migrating into bodies, but not from other bodies ; lest sacred things should 
be sent to dogs or pearls cast before swine. For it would be impious to give to 
the public (vulgus) these arcana of the wisdom of God!—Origen, contra Celsum, 
V. pp. 483, 484. Latin. 

Concealed from you is the Great Wisdom itself of the Maker of all things 
and the All-ruler God.—Justin against Tryplio, p. 56. Lutetiae 1553. 

His garment is white and his appearance that of a Concealed Facd!—The 
Sohar, III. 128 b. 

A great White Throne.—Rev. xx. 11. 

That which neither generates nor is generated remains un¬ 
moved ; for genesis consists in movement, since, too, what is 
generated is not without motion, both to cause production and 
to be produced: and that 7 which alone is neither moving nor 

1 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 281. 

2 Knorr, Adumbratio Kabb. Chr. pp. 6, 7. 

3 Justin, Apologia, I. p. 140. 

4 nekodah rashonah. 

5 Sohar, I. 15 a; Io6l, p. 87. 

8 The Aidra Suta, ix. He shall judge Azazel and all his associates.—Enoch, p. 58. 
Compare Rev. xix. 20, 21; xx. The Book of Enoch and the Apokalypse are near 
together on this last point. 

7 Compare the Hindu “tad.” 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 679 


moved is the more ancient Ruler and Governor whose image 
might properly be said to be the number Seven. 1 2 And Pliilo- 
laus confirms my opinion in these words : For God, he says, is 
the Governor and Ruler of all, being always, staying, 3 unmoved, 
himself like to himself, different from the others. 3 Already in 
the days of the Akkadian monarchy the religious hymns of 
Clialdaea speak of the one God and, before then, the Egyptian 
priests had been engaged in proving that the various Gods 
were but manifestations of one divine essence. 4 The Hindus 
and the Jews were accustomed to similar views, and Philo 
speaks of the “ Powers ” of God. In the identification of Zeus 
Chthonios with the other Chthonian Deities, we find a resem¬ 
blance of the Gods which Orpheus regarded as their unity, 
which the Bible considered to be their unity, and which Philo 
supposes to be a unit (to on), revealed and manifested by 
“ Powers.” 5 

Irenaeus wrote his first three books about a.d. 185-187.— 
Compare ‘Supernatural Religion,’ II. 213. Among certain 
Gnostics of the School of Valentinus we find this: “ est enim 
super te Pater omnium primus Anthropus et Anthropus filius 
Anthropi: ” Over thee is the Father of all, the First Man, and 
the Man the Son of the Man.—Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. p. 135. The 
very title ‘ Son of the Man ’ comes from the gnosis ; probably 
in connection with the “ Man ” mentioned in Ezekiel, i. 26-28; 
x. 21. Some of the gnostics seem to have held that above the 
immediate creator of the kosmos there is another Father, 6 an¬ 
other Onlybegotten, another Logos 7 sent forth in a lesser rank 


1 Sabaoth. Apollo is the monad, Diana the duad, Athena the hebdomas.—de Iside, 
10. Apollo is called Hebdomaios. 

2 Compare Simon Magus’s “Standing One.” I stood before thee.—Philo, Legal 
Alleg. III. 2. 

3 Philo Jud. de mundi opificio, 33. Compare the Kabalah Ayin, the No thing. 

* A. H. Sayce, II. 299. 

5 the Powers of God. Justin vs. Trypho, p. 50, speaks of the Kurios (the Lord) of 
the Powers. The modern world understands the Kabalah; and when Christianism is 
identified with the Kabalah (and S. Munk, Palestine, p. 520, says that some Kabalist 
theories are found in the Evangels, and Acts of the Apostles, and p. 522, mentions 
Metatron) the subject of the origin of Christianism receives additional light. For 
Christianism came out from Arabia (—Galatians, i. 18; ii. 15) and the Jewish language 
is a form of the Arabian speech. 

6 The Monad is there primarily (primitively, before all) where the Paternal Monad 
exists.—Cory, p. 244. The Paternal MoDad is the rb ov (the Divine Life in the ab¬ 
stract) ; but the Monad from the unit is the Logos. 

7 The Nikolaitans held that there were three personae in succession, the Christos, 


680 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(deminoratione) and another Christos, who has been made later 
than the other aeons, with the holy spirit: and another Salva¬ 
tor who was put together not by the Father of all things (i.e. 
the God of the Jews) but by those aeons who were made in 
diminishing status (deminoratione) etc. etc. This is a Valen- 
tinian gnosis. But Kerinthus taught that there is a primal 
God, the Unknown Father, who did not make the world. He 
sowed in men the Nikolaitan doctrine, the gnostic opinion, that 
the Christos and Salvator on high was not born; and although 
he descended upon Iesu in the form of a dove, yet that he flew 
back again. But how is it that he knows so much 1 of the doc¬ 
trine of the Gospel of Matthew ? Especially at a time when 
Judea expected a warlike King of the Jews! What turned the 
hope of a Great King, the Messiah, into the conception of the 
New Testament non-resistant ? The Jordan gnosis connects 
with Eastern Monachism. As the Gnostics resigned the world 
and crucified the flesh in order to obtain the resurrection in 
the kingdom of the heavens, so too St. Matthew emphasised 
this doctrine in the crucifixion of Iesu. His martyrdom illus¬ 
trated the martyrdom of the flesh. The author of ‘ Antiqua 
Mater,’ p. 235, raises the question whether the Iesu thus con¬ 
nected with the Christ was not an ideal of Gnostic origin. The 
character of Iesu in the Gospels is a complete illustration of 
the gnostic doctrine of self-denial, such as was found among 
the Essenes, Nazoria, Ebionim, Therapeutae, and monoa.— 

Onlybegotten, and the Logos. In that case there could be no idea of a crucifixion, 
since all three were considered to be incorporeal essences. Then these Christians knew 
nothing of Iesu. Rev. ii. 9 must then refer to the dead Adon, the Paschal Lamb. 

1 How came Karpokrates and Kerinthus about 115-135, to hear of the theory of a 
Messiah Crucified (in a.d. 33) when the Jews were expecting the Son of Dauid, the 
warlike Messiah of Jewish hope and Apokalyptic revelation up to 134 ? One, too, pre¬ 
pared to surrender to Caesar what Caesar had already acquired, much to the displeasure 
of the Jews. The friends of Josephus might favor such a policy, but they were not 
ready to recognise a Messiah by it. The Essene and theEbionite of Edom might admit 
the principle of non-resistance, but the Idumean came to the rescue of the City and 
Temple. The gnosis of the Ebionites of each kind was in full power over the adherents 
of the Christos. The world was crucified to them and the Encratites. The Gospel 
of Matthew used by the Ebionites was called by both Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen 
the Gospel according to the Hebrews.—Supernatural Religion, I. p. 423. 5th ed. : 
quotes Clemens, Strom, ii. 9. § 45; Origen in Joh. t. ii. 6 (Op. iv. p. 63 f.); Horn, in 
Jerem., xv. 4. Eusebius, H. E. III. cap. 27, states that the Ebionites used only the 
“ Gospel according to the Hebrews.” The last, then, was called the Hebrew Matthew. 
Consequently the Ebionites did not use our Matthew, and we do not know what was in 
their Gospel. Does the expression Hebrews imply that the phrase was coined else¬ 
where ? 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 681 

) 

Matthew, xvi. 24; xix. 21. Self-denial is figured in circum¬ 
cision, baptism, mortification and crucifixion of the flesh. The 
conversation of the Jewish gnostics turned largely upon death 
and the resurrection. What did the 40 days’ fast in the Desert 
signify if not the fast of the Nazorene, Ebionite and Iessaian 
gnosis ? If we turn to Josephus’s Life, or to Matthew, iii. 3-7 ; 
xi. 7 f., we find the deserts the abodes of anchorites driven there 
by the gnosis of their God to escape from temptation and the 
sins of the world. The gnosis was the source of the Essene 
monasteries and Tlierapeute convents! The Nazorenes and 
Ebionites embraced the Knowledge of God. Why ? They held 
that the body is the prison of the soul! Destroy the body,—and 
the soul shall rise in three days. Blessed are the pure in the 
heart, for they shall see the God! This was the Jordan gno¬ 
sis 1 of the God. When we find such expressions as “the 

3 Every mind understands the Deity, for mind is not without what is mind-per¬ 
ceived, and the mind-perceived (the yorjroi') is not apart from mind.—Cory, p. 249. The 
soul being bright fire remains immortal and is mistress of life.—Psellus, 28 ; Piet. 11. 
Cory, p. 243. The doctrine of the incarnation admitted the gnosis in confessing a 
Christos; but self-denial is inculcated in the crucifixion, and the favorite theory of the 
resurrection of souls confirmed in the doctrine of the Resurrection of Iesu. Was the 
doctrine of the incarnation of the Messiah and his crucifixion taught before 138, or in 
the Four Evangels posterior to 140 ? Under two Minds the life-generating fountain of 
souls is comprehended (enclosed).—Cory, p. 253; Dam. de princip. Father-generated 
Light, for he alone, having gathered from the strength of the Father the flower of 
mind, has the power of understanding the Paternal Mind.—Proclus, in Timaeum, 242; 
Cory, 253, 254. But the Ebionite 1ST. T. gnosis denies that the Son knows all that the 
Father does.—Matthew, xxiv. 30. Sinaiti^us. The Primal Fire beyond did not enclose 
his power within Matter by works, but by Mind. For the Architect of the fiery world 
is Mind of Mind.—Proclus, in Theolog. 333 ; in Timaeum 157; Cory, p. 244. He shall 
baptize with spirit and fire.—Matthew, iii. 11, 12. The gnosis here is the same in both 
quotations, the Father Mind and the Logos Mind, and the Gheber fire in both. There 
were two Bels, the first Saturn,—the second, Sol.—Movers, I. 186, 185. The Sun sees 
the pure Circle in the heavens.—Cory, Anc. Fragm. p. 266. The (sun’s) disk is carried 
in the starless, much above the inerratic (non-planetic) loftier (circle). And so he does 
not occupy the centre of the planets, but of the three worlds.—Julian, Oratio V. p. 
334. The tomb of Saturn was in the Caucasus mountains.—Clementine Homily, V. 23. 
Before all things that really exist and before the whole ideal forms there is One God 
prior to the First God and King ; and from this One the self-originated God caused 
himself to shine forth.—Kenrick, Egypt, I. 303; Cory, Anc. Fragments. So, too, Mat¬ 
thew, xxv. 34, 40. Here you have the Babylonian Father and Son, the Oriental Gno¬ 
sis, professing Knowledge of things on high ! The very doctrine of Philo in regard to 
the inhabitants of realms above. But the soul is not a bright emanation from fire (a 
conception of the fireworshippers). It is the manifestation of the powers of a com¬ 
plete organism, the indication or exponent of a completed circuit in the animate sys¬ 
tem. Soul is not life, else the insane have souls, having life. In fact, the gnosis 
knows very little about the human constitution and even less concerning supernal 
things. It is religious sentiment based on pure imagination. Colossians, i. 16, con- 


682 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


falsely named gnosis ” and “ Gnostic falsifiers ” this is merely 
an effort of the later Irenaens party to assault the left wing of 
the gnostics, the extremist Gnostics; taking all the credit to 
themselves as being possessed of better knowledge. Whereas 
we have seen how good the right wing of the gnostics really 
was, and how pure it claimed to be in Egypt, in Hermes, in 
Mons Nitria, in Nabathea, Adoma, Moab, and all along the 
Jordan. The ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’ appears (from what 
little is reported of its gnosis) rather high colored, to judge 
from the description of the fire in the Jordan at the baptism. 
St. Jerome admits that the Gospel of the Nazorenes came from 
one source (with our Greek Matthew) but that “ different by¬ 
ways of rivulets ” had been discharged into it. We can guess 
what this means! That the earliest gnosis and Nazorian-Ebion- 
ite Christology in the Gospel of the Nazoraioi would not 
have suited Irenaeus, or the Roman Katholic Church of St. 
Jerome’s time. The Palestine gnosis was Nazorian, Sabian, 
Ebionite and Hebrew. 1 When Jerome got into the land of the 
Older Ebionim, or studied the Gospel of the Nazarenes in the 
library at Caesarea, he found it out. All this goes to show that 
a change occurred from the views of the Ebionites to our or¬ 
dinary Four Gospels. There was something that needed to be 
added to or taken away from them. 

The Son of Man has been elected and concealed before 
the Lord of the spirits before the world was made, and unto 
eternity he will be before Him.—Henoch, xlviii. 6, xlix. 2. For 
previously (before all things) was he concealed, and the Most 
High has kept him. . . . —Henoch, lxii. 7. The Angel of the 
Lord is the Adon (Lord) the face of God, sent to prepare the 
way of the face of God.—Galatinus, de Arcanis, III. fol. 77. 
It is not of so much consequence to find out how the Jewish 
Messiah, the Son of Dauid, got turned round into the Christos 
a Divine Person, as it is to feel sure of the fact! Isaiah, lxiii. 
9, psalm ii., and Micah, v. 2, may establish this, but when the 

tains the Logos doctrine of Philo Judaeus and St. John’s Gospel, and is as gnostic as 
Saturninus was. Physical injury, on the principle that the soul is an entity separate 
from the body, ought not to affect the thinking mind, but it does. 

1 St. Jerome says that he has translated writings of the Apostle and Evangelist 
(Apostoli atque Evangelistae scripta). These scripta, written in Hebrew and trans¬ 
lated by St. Jerome, are the pseudo-Matthaei evangelium, known as the liber de ortu 
beatae Mariae et infantia Salvatoris.—Compare Tischendorf, Ev. Apocrypha, pp. xxv.- 
xxx., 50, 51. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 683 

Jewish Sibyl tells us that ‘ God shall send from the sun a 
King ’ and Matthew xxv. mentions “ the King,” we know that 
we are standing on Ebionite and Kabalist ground.—Matthew, 
viii. 4. That the Babylonian or Jewish Saturn was also held 
by the doctrine of the priests to be the Sun we learn from 
Movers, I. 185, Numbers, xxv. 4, and psalm xix. 4, 6, Septuagint, 
Yulgate, and Arabic versions. The Sibyl having got us over 
this difficulty, we can understand the way the hiatus from 1 
Samuel, xvi. 1, 12, to Isaiah, lxiii. 9, to the Saviour Angel Iesua, 
has been bridged over through the Logos as Angel of the Cov¬ 
enant. The ‘ Son of Dauid ’ is Ebionite.—Matthew, i. 16,17, ii. 
2, v. 3, 5, x. 7-28 ; Luke, ix. 3. It is among these Nazoria and 
Ebionim (with all their Aeons, names of the Angels, and 
gnosis) that we have to look for the ‘ apostles 5 of the Iessaians. 
The Sibyl, Isaiah, lxiii., Micah, v. 2, Daniel, vii. 13-25, the Apo- 
kalypse and Justin Martyr, follow the one straight line of 
Philo’s Logos. The Apokalypse is a work preceding Justin 
Martyr’s time and well known to him. Like Daniel vii. it 
represents the Saints. It knows no more of the Gospel his¬ 
tory of Iesus than Paul did. It only knows “ the Lord Cruci¬ 
fied in Borne,” the Lamb slain. 1 It has the doctrine of the 
Logos, in common with Philo and Justin Martyr, and the 
White Horse of the Persian Sabian Sungod Mitlira. It is 
Ebionite (Bev. ii. 20, iii. 9, 12, iv. 4, v. 11, vii. 11, ix. 19, 20, 21, 
xii. 6, 14, xiv. 4, xv. 3, xviii. 4; Matthew, xvii. 2). It has the 
24 Elders dressed in white; compare the Highpriest and 24 
priests in Ezekiel, viii. 16. The apostolic period we may set 
down as later than Jerusalem’s fall (69-70), in the Messianic 
period, say, from a.d. 100 to 135; this was the time for Nazo- 
rene and Ebionite 4 apostles ’ to be stirring in the ‘ Travels.’ 
But to connect the Apokalypse with the Jewish Angel Iesua see 
Bev. i. 16, 18, ii. 18, iii. 5, vii. 14, 17, xi. 18, xiv. 13. The Angel 
Iesua (Isa. lxiii. 9 ; Bodenschatz, K. V. d. Juden, II. 191) would 
in due course appear as the ‘ Merciful Power ’ of Philo’s Logos 
in Bev. iii. 5, 21 ; vii. 9, 10, 14, 17. Mithra is Logos, Mediator, 
lifts up the souls to heaven, is born Dec. 25th in a cave, and of 


1 This may be figuratively spoken ! The persecution of the Christians in the 
Great City, Rome, might have been and probably was thought to be persecution and 
crucifixion of Christ. This would date the first notion of a Crucified Christos pos¬ 
terior to A.D. 130-135, after Bar Cocheba. Daniel prophesies a killing, but not a cruci¬ 
fying. 


684 


TEE GEEBERS OF EEBRON. 


a Virgin. 1 —Rev. xii. 1, 2, 5, 6. We know that the Apokalypse’s 
prophecy of the Destruction of Rome never came to pass (Rev. 
xvii. 3, 5, 6, 9, 10) and was not likely to have been made later, 
or very much later, than the death of Bar Cocheba (or Coziba) 
about a.d. 133. The coming- of the Jewish Messiah may have 
still been expected by the Messianists as late as a.d. 140, pos¬ 
sibly. When Rev. vii. 9, 10, and xi. 15 exhibit the Saviour of 
all nations we know that the Diaspora or the Ebionite, has got 
into Asia Minor (Rev. i. 11, ii. 6, 15, iii. 9) but not away from 
the exclusiveness of those that lived over the Jordan and under 
the Law of Moses (—Matthew, v. 17,18 ; viii. 4; x. 5, 6 ; xv. 24) 
not far away from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. When 
we bear in mind that Asarel was the Kronos (Saturn) of Asaria 
(Sarra) or Syria, that Kronos in the Babylonian Flood-story 
represents the office of Iahoh (Life-god) as the primordial un¬ 
created (anfangsloser) Being without beginning that was re¬ 
garded as Creator 2 and Father of men and Gods (Movers, I. 
261), it is not surprising that the Israelites, coveting Kanaan 
(Syria), should have kept Saturday (dies Saturni) sacred to 
Saturn and others kept Sunday sacred to Sol, like the other 
Sabians. So, too, in the Thebais, in Egypt, Kneph was con¬ 
sidered to be uncreated and immortal. Where was the knowl¬ 
edge (gnosis) of heavenly things to have an end ? The wor¬ 
ship of Saturn was genuinely Phoenician 3 (—Movers, I. 25).— 
Daniel, i. 3, 5 ; vii. 22. And the Arabian Magoi (astrologers) 
had foreseen in the East the star of the Jewish Messiah and 
Saviour.—Matthew, ii. 2. 

The Persians regarded Mithra as the Chief of the Izeds 
(Angels), in Babylonia he was held to be the Logos (as too in 
the Apokalypse), Philo regarded the Logos as the Great Arch- 


1 The God, then, was born a man, and himself Kurios (Sungod and Lord) he saved 
us, giving the sign of the Virgin.—Euseb. V. cap. 8. Eusebius must have read this in 
the Septuagint Greek ; but the Hebrew has ha-olma the virgin, the girl. 

2 Colossians, i. 16. But the Messiah was to be called by the Tetragrammaton the 
Name of God.—Galatinus, de Arcanis, capita, ix., x. Liber, III. fols. 71, 72. The Mes¬ 
siah then was God the Creator; and back of him was the Ayin, the Unrevealed entity ! 
And this is his Name that they shall call him, Iahoh Zedeknu (Iahoh, being the Four 
Letters Ihoh).—Jeremiah, xxiii. 6. Thus the Messiah came to be regarded as God the 
Logos and Creator. This was Babylonian doctrine. So Galatinus, III. x. 77 ; Malachi, 
iii. 1, 2, 3. 

3 The worship of Phoenician deities extended to Pontus on the Black Sea.—Movers, 
I. 21. Phoenician settlements on the Black Sea. The Adonia were celebrated in Make- 
donia. Markion came from Pontus. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 685 


angel, of many names; consequently, the names Gabriel, 
Metatron and Michael or “ Angel Iesua ” could be applied to 
him ; some gnostic writers spoke of the Angel Gabriel as tak¬ 
ing the place of the Logos (Irenaeus, p. 87 ; Dunlap, Sod, II. 
pp. 3, 18) ; the Ebionites regarded the Son as Archangel, less 
than the God; Justin Martyr says that the Son was called 
Angel; Epiphanius says that the Ebionites considered him an 
Archangel; while the followers of John the Baptist at Bassora 
regarded Gabriel as the most splendid of all the Angels, the 
first-begotten Son.—Codex Nazoria, I. 165, 247, 267, 283 ; II. 
116, 117. Norberg in his preface p. viii. says that no other 
Aeon was prior to Gabriel. The Essenes attached great im¬ 
portance to the Angel Names, and St. Luke, i. 26, 35, ascribes 
to Gabriel divine function. The Jews considered him the 
Angel of Fire, which appeared in Exodus iii. 2, 4, 6, 14, 16 ; 
Judges, xiii. 20, 22. In the beginning the First Cause existed 
alone : He thought: I will let the worlds issue from Me. He 
let them go forth, Water, Light, impermanent Matter, and the 
waters. Water was above the firmament which supports it. 
Then He formed out of the Waters the Spirit. He looked on 
it, and its mouth opened like an egg; out of its mouth pro¬ 
ceeded Speech, and from the Speech, Eire. Gabriel, then, cor¬ 
responds to this Logos of the Hindu Philosophy. “He 
framed all creatures,” said the Hindu. The Angel Gabriel is 
the Son of God begotten upon Light, and he undertook to 
create the world.—Adams, View of Religions, 118. Called and 
sent by the Lord on high was an Aeon, whose name w~as Abel 
Ziua, also Gabriel. Apostolos (Legate) he was called.—Codex 
Nazoria, pp. 22, 164, 165. Starting on this foundation of Ga¬ 
briel the Angel of the Lord, Matthew i. 20 merely says “ an 
angel of the Lord,” changing the whole aspect of the Ebionite 
theology, while Luke expressly mentions Gabriel as the divine 
instrument of communication, at the same time that he subor¬ 
dinates Gabriel to Iesu as Matthew subordinates “ an Angel.” 
But Philo Judaeus says that the Logos is the Oldest Angel, 
the Great Archangel of many names. The Codex Nazoria, I. 
2-21, commences with the praise of the most High Eternal 
King of Light. But St. Matthew calls attention to him so 
late as chapter xxv. because he puts the Yirgin-born Iesu first, 
and adduces his Essaian-Iessaean-Ebionite self-denial in chap¬ 
ters, v., vi., vii., x., xix. He drops Gabriel as King of Fire and 


686 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Light, and preaches the Son of the Man as Son of God. The¬ 
ology was free in St. Matthew’s time, even if it did adopt the 
Essene system of presbyters or elders. Gabrail Apostolos 
was also named Ptahil and Abel Ziua.—Codex Nazoria, II. p. 
210. The news of the fall of Jerusalem produced its effect as 
far as the mouth of the Euphrates. The Codex Nazoria, II. 
298, 299, 302, 303, refers to it, and (like Menander and Satur- 
ninus, who declared the Chaldean doctrine that the world was 
made by Seven Star Angels) states that Seven Star Angels 
built the City Jerusalem. Its fall set every one thinking, in 
Antioch, Samaria, in beyond the Jordan, and Nabathea (where 
the Nazorians were strongest), about “in principio omnium 
generationum Rex ille aeternus ” (ram wa-ghebir ol kolahon 
aloha dibereshit kolahon dara hoa Malka dimin qadim)! In 
the language of the Zabian priest, sceptre in hand : I renew 
your baptism in the name of the Father and of our Saviour 
John, who, as he baptized the Jews in the Jordan and saved 
them, will also save you. — Norberg, preface, p. xviii. These 
Christians or Nazoria had crucified the flesh.—Galatians, i. 17 ; 
v. 24. 

All thy body shall be photeinon, luminous with Light.— 
Matthew, vi. 22. Tamas in Sanskrit means Darkness. 1 The 
darkness under Persian serpentine symbols was adored by 
the Jews. 2 The Adonis-garden, the Garden of Tamas, 3 was 
called Tamaseion. 4 After an acquaintance with the Serpent 
at the tree of life and getting a knowledge 5 of evil, Eua (as¬ 
sociated with Semele in the Greek Mysteries) in the Darkness 
of Hades gives birth to two sons, the Dioscuri, Ken (or Chna) 
and his brother Abelios, 6 the God of Light. The Garden of 
Adan was in Hades, the Genesis of the Mysteries, and Eua is 
Proserpine in the arms of the Adonis (Aidoneus) in Hades, 
flirting with the power of Life and Death, in the gloomy man¬ 
sions below, while Kenaa 7 gets or acquires possession of Adam 
(Adonis, Osiris, Iacchos,—a holy, heavenly horn of Mene) and 

1 Lorinser, Bhagavat-Gita, Lesung II. page 24, note 35. 

2 Ezekiel, viii. 10. 

3 Tamuz, Thammuz. 

4 Ovid’s Tamaseuxn. 

5 Compare withgnonai and gnosis Chna (yeV«, genesis) the brother of Isiris (Osiris, 
Abel, Bel). 

6 Apollo, Bal, Bel. 

2 Qenah (HfcOp). 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 687 


declares that she has possessed a husband who is Iahoh. 1 The 
image of the Lebanon Aphrodite stood in the inner line of 
columns of the Jewish Temple at the north entrance. 2 Adonis 
goes to Hades at the approach of winter (represented by the 
symbol of a serpent in Persia, but in Syria as a wild boar) 
with the reduction of light, heat, and life. The Kenaa in her 
grief was represented in the Lebanon, as well as in Jerusalem, 
the very picture of woe, cast down on a block of marble, her 
head covered, her aspect sad, resting her face on her left hand 
inside her robe, while tears seem to gather as the beholder 
gazes. 3 Thus scripture reveals the Mysteries. 

And in Venah every life is comprehended. 4 

She is the Mother of all living!—Genesis, iii. 20. 

The altar of the image of the Qena&.—Ezekiel, viii. 5. 

Now if Ken and Abel are the Dioscuri, Light and Darkness 
(and they may as well stand for that as for anything else), 
then we have Plutarch’s idea carried out that there must be 
a principle of Good and another of Evil. This is the very 
idea of the Ebionites.—Gerhard Uhlhorn, Horn, und Recogn., 
185. The author of Genesis shrewdly does not let Evil appear 
in the Beginning as coming from the Source of all things (as 
that might be contested), nor does he admit that Adam (as 
God’s first human creation, into whom the divine pneuma ha- 
chaiim was infused by Alohim himself) was evil until after 
Eua (his wife) had gone to the Diable. That fiery Woman 
(Ash-ah) whom (as Venah, or Venus) the Serpent addressed. 
The Hebrew Scribe must have seemed to be an Encratite. 

Rise, wretched goddess in thy robes of woe and beat thy bosom. Aphrodite, 
having let fall her braided hair, wanders up and down the glades, sad, unkempt, 
unsandalled, and the brambles tear her as she goes, and cull her sacred blood. 
Then wailing piercingly she is borne through long valleys, crying for her As- 
surian 5 6 Spouse, and calling on her Youth ! But around him dark blood was 

1 Iao, Dionysus in the moon. Kenithi = I have possession, I have gotten.—Gen. 
iv. 1. Heua, in Hebrew, is the Greek Eua ; Brandt, p. 37, reads Hawa. 

2 Ezekiel, viii. 3, 5, 14; Macrobius, I. 21, 5; Movers, p. 585. 

3 Macrobius, I. 21. 5. 

4 Et in Bina comprehenditur omnis vita.—Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, Appa¬ 
ratus in librum Sohar, p. 391. Venus the Original Mother of the race.—Aeschylus, 

Seven against Thebes, 140, 141. 

6 Asar (Sol, Asur, Surya), Asherah. Apollo is beauteous, ever Young.—Kallima- 
chus, Hymn to Apollo. 


(*>88 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


gashing up about his navel and his breasts were empurpled from his thighs, and 
the parts beneath his breasts, white before, became deep red to Adonis. All 
mountains and the oaks 1 say : Ai Adonin ! 2 And rivers sorrow for the woes of 
Aphrodite, and springs on the mountains weep for her Adonis, and flowers red¬ 
den from grief : whilst Kutliereia sings mournfully along all woody mountain 
passes and along cities. 3 

In this exciting religions revival of woe in the Mourning for 
the Assurian Adon, it is to be inferred that the Hebrew ‘ Asari- 
elim ’ or Asrielites took a prominent part. See Ezekiel, viii. 9, 
14. Bel, quadam ratione sacrorum, is both Saturn and Sol; 
i.e., Israel and Shemes=Sliemal. 

Thou hast bought us for the God with thy blood.—Rev. vi. 9. 

Whitened their robes in the blood of the Lamb.—Rev. vii. 14. 

The Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christos.—Rev. xi. 15. 

The Kingdom of our God and the Power of His Christos.—Rev. xii. 10. 

The Accuser of our Brothers is cast down, the Accuser of them before the 
God by day and by night.—Rev- xii. 10. 


Justin Martyr regards the suffering of the Messiah,- as does 
the Apokalypse, from the point of view of Daniel, ix. 26. The 
Christos is here identical with the Lamb having seven horns 
and seven eyes. The Adversary is the Devil, Satan ; and the 
scene is Jewish Messianism; else Michael would not be 
brought in as Jewish Angel to contend against Satan. It 
looks as if this Jewish Messianist book came from the Dias¬ 
pora into Christian hands, by whom it was slightly altered. 
After the year 70 a very considerable portion of the Jews must 
have been in Syria and Asia Minor, as far east as Damaslms 
and Nisibis. The Messiah (Christos) in the Apokalypse (which 

1 Alon bacothisthe “ oak of Mourning ”—Gen. xxxv. 8—for Adonis.—See Ezechiel, 
vi. 13, where their idols were on the mountain-tops, under every thick oak, and under 
every green tree ! The oaks bewailed Daphnis.—Theokr. Idyl, vii. The Lamb dies 
when the Adon dies at the fall of the leaf. He rises again the third day ! 

2 In Hebrew, Hoi Adon, Hoi “Adonino.”—Mourning for “our Lord.” How ad¬ 
mirably he reclines on a silver couch ; just shedding the first down from his temples, 
the thrice beloved Adonis who is beloved even in Acheron.—Theokritus, Idyl, xv. 
Sprinkle him with myrtles ..sprinkle him with unguents, with perfumes!—Idyl, xv. 
They offer to the manes of Adonis as to one dead, and the day after the morrow they 
tell the myth that he live^, and send him to the air.—Lucian, de Syria Dea, 6. The 
third day he rose from the dead ! Apollo sits on the right hand to Dios.—Kallimachus, 
Hymn to Apollo. “ The sun, moon and eleven stars made obeisance to him ! ”— Gen. 
xxxvii. 9. See the Apollo-zodiac, pp. 673, 674, where only eleven signs are shown ; the 
Lamb being left out. Hence he is the Lamb of Dios. 

3 Theokritus, xv. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 689 


is late) was regarded by the Hellenist Christians (or Chris¬ 
tianized Jews of the Diaspora) as the Paschal Lamb. The 
word “Gentiles” reveals a Jewish or quasi Jewish writer. So 
Rev. ii. 9; iii. 9; vii. 4-9; xxi. 12-14. That the Apokalypse is 
a late work Rev. ii. 23 (All the churches shall know) sufficiently 
indicates.—Rev. i. 31. 

But to you I say, the rest in Tliuateira wlio do not hold this Didache (teaching) 
who knew not the Depths of the Satan, as they say, I will cast upon you no 
Other burden, but what you have hold firmly until the time when I come. And 
he that succeeds and keeps my works to the end, I will give to him plenary 
power in regard to the Gentiles (the Nations) and he shall rule them with an 
iron staff, as earthen vessels they are broken.—Rev. ii. 24. 

This looks immensely Jewish, like Rev. xxii. 15 which says: 
“ Outside are the Dogs! ” Can the writer have come from the 
Transjordan. 1 

At the time of the burning summer heat, when the vege¬ 
tables began to wilt and respiration became difficult, Gebal 2 
was changed to a theatre of mourning festivals in the course 
of which the Phoenicians shared in the desolation of Nature. 
From all surrounding points outside processions converged 
towards the Holy City. The women ran in groups, their hair 
flying, garments torn, with naked feet, cut their flesh with 
knives 3 4 and whipped themselves with fury, uttering cries of 
grief for the recent death of Adon, killed on Mt. Lebanon. 1 
The eunuch 5 priests conducted this cortege to the monotonous 
sound of the tambourine and the mournful flute which moaned 
an elegiac air; it was the plaintive hymn of the passion and 
the death of the God of love who has expired. The women of 
the city joined themselves to those that came from the country, 
and the band continued in this way to increase. To copy the 
pious example that was given them, the men armed themselves 
with scourges with a handle of ebony and whipped one an- 


1 See Rev. ix. 14, and the Euphrates. The words “ All the Ecclesias ” either show 
that the Diaspora had separated from Judaism at a very much earlier period than we 
had formerly supposed and that their organisation into Ecclesias had been of long 
standing, or else that the Apokalypse, written by the Diaspora, has been subsequently 
interpolated or rewritten, which is possible. Matthew, viii. 4, is as Ebionite Jewish as 
possible, and Rev. ii. 23 shows a very extended status of the Greek Diaspora. 

2 Compare the name Kaboul.—Joshua, xix. 27. 

3 Specially forbidden by the Mosaic Law. 

4 See Luke, xxiii. 27. 

5 compare the “eunuchs” in Matthew, xix. 12. 

44 


690 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


otlier. The distribution of blows increased as they proceeded, 
the lashes whistled in the air, the blood spirted on the faces 
and splashed the walls; the streets were filled with flagel¬ 
lants, 1 soon they overflowed with them; the mortification 2 
then reached its highest point. Suddenly the funereal corteges 
moved out upon the hill and directed themselves confusedly 
towards the Temple. There, in the first hall, the body of the 
God martyr was deposited, reposing upon a catafalque covered 
with purple and illuminated by glittering torches. The blood 
still ran all hot from his wound. At the four corners of the 
hall four great censers scattered in the atmosphere the perfume 
of myrrh. 3 The gifts brought by the Magi to Adonis were 
gold, frankincense and myrrh ; 4 gold being the sun’s metal and 
color. From Mylitta proceeded the Sun and all his celestial 
cohort. The Mother is superior to the Son and has the lion 
(the solar emblem) under her feet. So also the divine Bel is 
the Lover of his Mother. 5 

The Messiah was the face of God.—Galatinus, de Arcanis, 
Book III. cap. x. Justin has to explain what the £ Lamb ’ 
denotes. 6 Justin says that the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb 
was a symbol of the suffering of the Christos, after which 
Jerusalem was to be destroyed. Paul connects the slaying 
of the Jewish Paschal Lamb with Iesus crucified as the Chris¬ 
tian Passover.—Ernest de Bunsen, p. 345. We know that the 
notion of a Dying Sun was prevalent throughout the East 
from Egypt to Hindustan. Homer mentions Herakles in 
Hades (he descended into hell). Krishna (Herakles) dies in 
India. Herakles dies (in a Greek Myth), Dionysus has his 
passion, Osiris rises from Hades. Nork, Beal-Worterbuch, II. 

1 Hence the Christian order of the Flagellants.—Dunlap, Sod, I. 42. 

2 Mortify the flesh ! 

3 P. Gener, la mort et le diable, 61, 62. Myrrh is what the Magi offered to the 
Angel Iesoua.—Matthew, ii. 11. Les representations de la grande deesse . . . —ces 
representations ne sont que des anthropomorphismes, c’est a dire des divinisations des 
altieres femmes de l’Asie Mineure et de la civilisation de l’Euphrate, qui demontrent 
manifestement la preponderance obtenue par la femme en Chaldee. Telles devaient 
etre en effet, les femmes Semites, images vivantes de Venus Mylitta, au temperament 
de feu toujours ardentes, insatiables, inassouvies, toujours harcelees par une inalterable 
soif d’amour que les forces d’un homme etaient impuissantes a eteindre.—P. Gener, 356. 

4 Matthew, ii. 11; xvii. 2. 

3 P. Gener, 354, 355. 

6 Unless he had explained this, the Christians et al. might never have heard of it. 
Perhaps it was news to every one. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 691 


175, calls Apollo ‘ Sol Infernus.’ The passion of Dionysus is 
a sacred myth about the Resurrection.—Plutarch, de Esu 
Carnium, vii. Adonis dies, and rises again the third day. 
Therefore when Matthew’s Gospel was written for the Ebion- 
ites not far from a.d. 150-155, it naturally follows that the 
resurrection-myth about the death and resurrection of Diony¬ 
sus, Mithra, Osiris, Bacchus, Adon, would not be left out of 
the Sabian-Ebionite story concerning the King Sun (the 
Christos 1 ) and the Evil Principle (Rome, represented by 
Pilate). As a vaccinated body assimilates a kindred vario¬ 
loid virus, so a mind impregnated with the solar myth readily 
assimilated another proposition based on the death and resur¬ 
rection of the Adon ! The crucifixion of the Angel Iesua 2 is 
not, as an idea, so remote from the death and resurrection of 
the Adon. 

After rewriting Ebionism in the Gospel of Matthew, the 
last step was to rewrite the Pauline preaching in the Book 
of Acts, so as to bring the Northern and Southern churches 
into harmony.—See Galatians, i. 17-24. Philo’s writings show 
the probability that in the year one of our era and previously 
the Essenes expected an Archangel or Messiah as one of a 
series of Divine incarnations.—Ernest de Bunsen, p. 118. 
Daniel, vii. 13, 14, proves the same. What had come to the 
Ebionites in the first century, perhaps earlier, was Essaeism. 
This was the main doctrine of Nazorenes and Ebionim in the 
transjordan region. This doctrine was preached as Messianic ! 
Of course, a Messiah must have preached it! If Iessaian, Ies- 
sene, the assumed founder of such Iessaian preachings would 


1 The Sungod greatest of the Gods in heaven, whom all the heaven’s Gods obey as 
King.—Hermes, v. 3. 

2 The Jews regarded the Angel of the Lord as God.—Exod. iii. 2, 4, 6, 14 ; Judg. 
xiii. 22. The King is Lord of the Angel-hosts.—Isa. vi. 5; Matthew, iv. 11 ; v. 35; 
xxv. 31, 34. Simon Magus asserted that his (own) angels made the world. Menander 
said as much of his angels. Saturninus held that very subordinate angels made the 
world. The Sethites appear to have regarded the Christos in the place of the actual Seth. 
Simon Magus claimed that in a phantasmal semblance of the Supreme Power (the 
Megas Dunamis) of the God he had not suffered, but had gone through a quasi passion. 
Karpokrates and Kerinthus, like various Ebionite divisions, regarded Iesu as Joseph’s 
son, and that the world was made by angels. So that the destruction of Jerusalem in 
putting an end to the power of the Temple in fact revealed a very great latitude in ex¬ 
plaining the Old Testament besides opening the way for a large crop of individual 
opinions (haeresies). Ebion in many things resembled Kerinthus; but in some things 
it resembled St. Matthew’s Gospel. 


692 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


naturally receive a similar name Ieso, Iesu, Iesua. 1 Hence, 
too, the Ebionites, as Essene pupils, were called Iessaioi. But 
the distinguished Philo Judaeus, although he lived until after 
a.d. 50, never heard of the founder of Christianism, named Iesua. 
If he did, he must have mentioned it. How came some of the 
Ebionites to assent to the doctrine of Matthew’s narrative ? 
It was Essene. How came the narrative of the crucifixion to 
be written 1 ? For a purpose. Besides, Josephus could be freely 
used, to supply suggestions in aid of the object in view'. 2 Again, 
Rome was hated and the source of all evil; and Pilate was not 
entirely forgotten. How was it that the Ebionite Church 
broke away from Essenism ? Or that Paulin ism was brought 
within the Christian Communion ? Tatian and the Encratites 
adhered to self-denial. 

Kerintlius was Diasporan and Judaist-Ebionite. The Apok- 

1 Philo calls the firstborn Logos (Word) the Oldest of the Angels.—Philo, Confusio 
Linguarum, 28. The Ebionim held the Christos to be an Angel. Some say Adam is 
pneuma, the Christos, and above the Angels. Others among them say that he is from 
on high (avoiOav) but comes down in Adam (entering) the Patriarchs when he wills, 
assuming the body. That the same came at the End of the Days and put on the body 
and was seen a man (that is, in human shape), and was crucified and rose from the dead 
and ascended (on high). When they please, they say No, but the pneuma came into 
him, which is the Christos, and he put on (wore) him who is called Iesou.” And they 
indeed receive the Evangel according to Matthew. For they, like the Kerinthians, use 
this alone. And they call it kata Ebraious (According to the Hebrews).—Epiphanius, 
Adv. Haer. Liber I. Tom. II. xxx. 3. Here we have the Adam-Christ of the Clemen¬ 
tine Homilies. Epiphanius, however, is a late writer. The Light of the world.—John, 
ix. 5. One is the King of Light in his Kingdom, nor is there any higher than he. This 
is the Crown of the Kabbalists.—Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 49. The Ebionites regarded the 
Christos as the Light of the future world, the Devil as the God of the present. The 
faction of the Ebionites was compounded (duplex). For some asserted that Iesu was 
purely and simply a man, and generated by Ioseph and Maria. Others confessed that 
he was conceived from the Holy Spirit by the Virgin, but they admitted so much in such 
a way as to deny that he was God and Logos or existed anteriorly.—Eusebius, H. E. 
III. 21. Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 16, says : They say that Iesu was born of the seed of a 
man and thus by election called a son of God, the Christos coming from on high (from 
the av<o9ev) on him in the form of a dove. 

Philo Judaeus, Life of Moses, Book III. 14, speaks of the Son of the Father as ob¬ 
taining forgiveness of sins ; and in his Tract on the Ten Commandments, 33, he speaks 
of the Great King (the Messiah) as in Matthew, xxv. 34, and one of the early Latin 
Hymns (see Rambach Anthol. vol. I.) uses this expression. Thus we see that the Great 
King Anointed, the Angel Iesua, and Saviour Angel was regarded as the Son of the God 
by Jews, by Philo and the Ebionites, as Son, as Angel-King ; but not in the flesh, and not 
according to the Mythology of Matthew. The Book of Henoch (the first written part) 
is dated by Drummond in the last half of the 2nd century before Christ; and the ref¬ 
erences to the Concealed Son of the Man may be prior to our era ; compare the Mes¬ 
sianic passages in the Sohar. 

3 Compare Jos. Ant. XVIII. 1, 3, 5. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 693 


alypse is Essenian and very Jewish originally ; not Christian. 
Ernst von Bunsen regards Kerinthus as the probable author 
of the Apokalypse of John. Early presbyterian tradition of the 
Roman and of the Alexandrian Church pointed, he thinks, to 
Kerinthus as the real author of John’s Apokalypse. The pres¬ 
byter John was buried at Ephesus. Paul (he says) refers to 
perverse elders at Ephesus, while John of the Apokalypse 
mentions elders at Ephesus who wrongly called themselves 
Apostles. Whilst there is nothing in the Apokalypse which, 
from what we know of Kerinthus, he could not have written, 
the Christology of the Apokalypse clearly includes that of 
Kerinthus, as transmitted by Irenaeus. The connection of the 
doctrine of Kerinthus and the Apokalypse of John with the 
Eastern and Essenic gnosis is undeniable. The Lion of Judah> 
the Boot of Dauid, represents the Seven Planets and the 
death of the Messiah in Dan. ix. 26, and also represents Daniel, 
vii. 13, 14.—Bev. v. 5-9. Represents also the Logos.—Rev. i. 
13, 16 ; xix. 11,13,14. Rev. xiii. 5 repeats a remarkable phrase 
in Daniel, vii. 8. The same double personality of a celestial 
and at the same time a terrestrial Messiah, which is the char¬ 
acteristic feature of the Christology of the Apokalypse, is as¬ 
sumed in the pre-Christian targum after Jonatlian, where the 
Messianic Word of God is said to rejoice over God’s servant 
the Messiah.— Bunsen, 313-315. The same distinction was 
made by Kerinthus, whose Christology, in every essential 
point, may be regarded as identical with that in the Revela¬ 
tion of ‘ John.’ Even the view of Kerinthus that Christ, be¬ 
cause a ‘ spiritual being,’ departed from Jesus before he 
suffered, is not excluded by the doctrine of Christ in the Apok¬ 
alypse. According to Irenaeus, I. xxv (26) Jesus suffered 
and rose again. Consequently Kerinthus did believe in the 
human nature of Jesus.—Bunsen, 315 ; Rev. v. 9 ; xxii. 16, 21. 
That is, Irenaeus would have us think so. His Kerinthus is 
suspiciously bare of details. Thus according to Kerinthus and 
‘ John ’ the presbyter perhaps, the man Jesus was after his 
death united with the Christ, but the part of Messiah seems in 
the Apokalypsis, xix. 11 ff. and xxii. 10 to have been reserved 
for the immediate future. It is clear, however, that the Apok¬ 
alypse while in several places referring to the blood of the 
Lamb and its redemption, does not altogether adopt the posi¬ 
tion of the Gospel of Matthew, and it by Sodom and Egypt 


694 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(xi. 8) certainly does not mean Jerusalem but Rome.—Compare 
Rev. xvii., xviii. Hence, as mention is made therein of Apostles 
and Saints, it might be open to doubt whether the author did 
not live prior to the publication of the Gospel according to 
Matthew. It is evident that the Mithra idea, the Metatron 
idea, the Messias idea, and the doctrine of the Son as Angel- 
king had coalesced in the expectation of a Son of- Dauid (Da¬ 
vid). Here we get the human part of the Iesua! The Gospel 
of Matthew supplies a Virginal Birth for the Iesua, and ‘the 
followers of Kerinthus are said to have used the Matthew-gos- 
pel although Kerinthus did not believe in a Virginal Birth. 
Being so Jewish and so antipauline, the Apokalypse, intimate 
with the 7 cities of Asia, has the appearance of having gone 
through one edition in an earlier form, before interpolations 
brought it into its present shape at a later period. It makes 
no reference to the Crucifixion that Matthew describes. Rev. 
xi. 8, 9, refers to the Jews slain in Rome. A Jew would not 
call Jerusalem Sodom, though he might call Rome Babylon. 
The Apokalypse here follows Daniel, ix. 26, and was evidently 
written prior to the Gospel according to Matthew. 

Kerinthus belonged to the Ebionite party, and, if he had 
ever seen any, would have rejected Paulinist Epistles. Com¬ 
pare Rev. ii. 14, 15. The views of Kerinthus were confirmed 
by his followers; for, like the anti-paulinist Ebionites, they 
continued to use only the Matthew-Gospel up to the fourth 
century (—Irenaeus, I. xxvi (27); Supernat. Religion, I. 420, 
421). There were Ebionites still in the time of Epiphanius 
(f 403), who connected Christ with angels and archangels, as 
this is done by the Revelation of John. It can be proved that 
Ebionites and Elkesaitans, like Iessaeans and probably all Pal¬ 
estinian sects, rejected the Paulinist Epistles, as also the 
canonical Acts.—Ernest de Bunsen, 319 ; Iren. Haer. I. xxvi.; 
Orig. c. Cels. V. 61, 65, etc.; Euseb. H. E. iii. 27 ; Theod. Haer. 
fab. ii. 1 ; Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 3, 16; Hilgenfeld, Zeitschr. 
f. W. T., 1875. 

Connected with the planetary symbolism of the Sacred 
Candlestick Christ is considered by “John” the first of seven 
archangels. He is able to open the seven seals.—Bunsen, 312. 
The 1st Corinthians, xv. 28 (like the Ebionites) regards Christ 
as the Great Archangel. Matthew, x. 5, is Ebionite.—Irenaeus, 
I. xxvi. The Ebionite in Syria formed in the second century 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 695 


the centre of the Christian sects. Hence the controversy be¬ 
tween the Jew and the Greek.—Gal. i. 15 ; Matthew, x. 5. 

The pre-christian Judaism included within itself a prefigu¬ 
ration of Christianism.—Hilgenfeld, Jiid. Apokalyptik, p. ix. 
“ Ebion, from whom indeed the Ebionites proceeded, following 
next in order and thinking the same as these, a many-formed 
monstrosity, and so to speak realising in himself the serpent 
form of the fabled hydra with many heads, rose up again to 
life, being indeed from their school, but proclaiming* and 
teaching other things beyond them, as if one should collect for 
himself a decoration of different stones of value and a clothing 
of many-colored dress, and shall adorn himself famously, so 
too this (Ebion) on the contrary taking every terrible and 
destructive and disgusting preaching, both unseemly and in¬ 
credible full of what is undesirable from every haeresis, has 
stamped himself upon all. For indeed it has the abomination 
of Samareitans, but the name of Jews, but the opinion of Os- 
saians (Asayans, Essaians) and Nazoraians and Nasaraians, the 
particular form of Kerinthians, the wickedness of Karpokra- 
tians, and wishes to have the appellation of Christians, for 
surely it has not the practice and the opinion and the gnosis 
and the assent of the Evangels and Apostles about faith. But 
being in the midst of all (so to speak) it is none, but in regard 
to Ebion is fulfilled what is written : ‘ I stood by in every 
evil, between Church and Synagogue.’ Therefore being a Sa- 
mareitan indeed, on account of the beastliness, he refuses the 
name. And confessing himself Jew he is opposed to the Jews, 
although agreeing with them in part, as afterwards we shall 
show in the proofs regarding him and the confutation against 
them, with God’s aid. 

“ For this Ebion was a contemporary of these, but starts 
from them with them, and in the first place said that the 
Christos was born from conjunction (intercourse) and seed of 
a man, that is, Joseph, as too has already been said by us be¬ 
fore, that thinking the same as the others in all respects he 
differed only in this, in adhering to the Law of the Judaism in 
Sabbatism and the Circumcision and in all the other (duties) 
which are performed by Jews and Samareitans. And he ac¬ 
complishes still more (usages) beyond the Jews, in like man¬ 
ner with the Samareitans. For he laid down a custom to 
avoid touching any of the other castes ,(dAAo€ Svuv). And every 


696 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


day, if perhaps he should be guilty of incontinence, to be bap¬ 
tized in the waters if he had a supply of sea waters or other¬ 
wise. But also if on going up from the plunge (descent) in 
the waters and baptism he should meet anyone, he runs back 
again in like manner to be baptized, often together with his 
clothes. And now virginity and continence are altogether for¬ 
bidden among them as also among the other liaeresies like 
this one. For once they sanctified virginity, perhaps on ac¬ 
count of James the Lord’s brother, 1 and they inscribe their 
writings to presbyters and virgins. 2 And the beginning of 
this was after Jerusalem destroyed. 3 For since all who be¬ 
lieved in Christos mostly dwelt in the Peraia at that time in a 
certain city called Pella of the Decapolis which is mentioned 
in the Gospel, near the Bataneia and Basantis region, the 
Ebion was motived on this account, that they at that time re¬ 
moved there and remained there. And after the settlement he 
begins to hold his ground in Kokabe a certain village towards 
the parts of the Kara aim, Arnem, and Astarotli, in the Basan¬ 
tis district, so as the knowledge coming to us embraces (in¬ 
cludes). From that time he (Ebion) begins his evil teaching 
whence I suppose too the impious Nazarenes have been ex¬ 
hibited, for he conjoined to them and they to him each impart¬ 
ed of his own wickedness to the other. And they differ one 
from the other in something, but in evil disposition they copied 
one another.”—Epiphanius, Liber, I. Tom. II. contra Haer. 
xxx. 1, 2. 

Epiphanius, writing in the 4th century, 200 years after the 
Ebionite Gospel of Matthew, is a witness to the fact that the 
Ebionites lived beyond the Jordan near the Iessaioi or Es- 
senes, and at one period retained the Essene and Therapeute 
practice of virginity. 4 This is confirmed in 1 Cor. vii. 34, 38. 
Epiphanius says that the Nazorenes were before Christ and 
knew not Christ. Irenaeus states that the Ebionites used only 

1 It was the Essene usage, according to Josephus ; the Therapeute custom, so said 
Philo. 

2 1 Cor. vii. 34, 38. 

3 The Nazorenes and Ebionites were before our era ; on the authority of Epiphanius 
for the Nazoraioi; see Isaiah, xxix. 19 for the Ebioni (poor) of Adoma (?). P. E. Lu¬ 
cius tries to show that the Therapeutae of Philo were Christian monks of a later 
period. But Eusebius differs from him, claiming them as earliest Christians, and de¬ 
claring their usages as still practised in the Christian community. 

4 Rev. xiv. 4. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 697 


the Gospel of Matthew. 1 Matthew teaches Healing, poverty 
(ebionism), self-denial (nazarenism), eunuchism, virginity (paul- 
inism). Acts teaches communism and poverty (ebionism); 
Philo in the first half of the first century (in the treatise on a 
theoretical life of the Therapeutae) lays down the doctrine of 
Judaist celibacy and self-denial; Josephus, at the close of the 
first century, describes the Jewish Healers (Iessaioi, Essaioi) 
as celibates, communists, poor (ebionite), self-denying (Nazo- 
raioi), eunuchs ; Philo locates them in many lands. We find 
a sect the Iatrikoi (Physicians) in India, self-denying. What 
does all this show ? That communism and askesis, coupled 
with healing, spread from India to the Euphrates, Arabia, the 
Jordan, the Nile deserts, to Antiocheia and even to Tarsus. 
Josephus relates that, besides the Essenes living under the 
direction of curators in their silent monasteries, there were 
others of the order living in cities,—consequently living in the 
outside world. Here we come upon the Ebionites, not living 
in monasteries, but practicing the Essene regimen, pure Na- 
zoraians, Nazarenes. They might well have been called Iatricoi, 
Therapeutae, Healers, Servants of the Spirit, as Philo seems 
to have regarded them. So that Eusebius was not far from 
the truth when he claimed the Therapeutae as Christians. 
They were very much Ebionite ! 

According to Ernest de Bunsen, 312, the conception of 
Christ the first of 7 angels exactly parallels the Eastern Serosli 
first of 7 archangels. The Persian Angel Serosh (Sraosha) was 
a Mediator, like Mitlira. Elxai (apparently a Budhist, from 
Arabia or Iran perhaps) came forward in Nabathaea, Arabia 
Petraea, or around Wasith and Basra in Trajan’s time about 
a.d. 100, having received from the Parthians in the city of Sera 
a book which was called after him. Like the Essene Secret 
Books concerning the Angels Elxai’s Book was probably made 
known only to the Initiated among the Essenes, Ebionites, and 
Nazorian Baptists or Mandaites the disciples of John. Com¬ 
pare Galatians, i. 17. Ernest de Bunsen connects Elxai with 

1 Compare Matthew, xix. 8, 12, with the eunuchs of Rev. xiv. 4. These Ebionites 
might have regarded themselves as Beni Israel and the outsiders as dogs, and talked of 
Power over the Gentiles. —Matthew, x. 5. Rev. xi. 2 mentions the Temple and the 
Court of the Gentiles. The Apokalypse is the work of a Jew or an Ebionite, but the 
idea of the Christos as Healer, in the way described in Matthew’s Gospel account of 
Iesous, cannot be found in it. It is hostile to Rome the City of the Gentiles.—Rev. 
xvi. 19. It is Messiauist, but not the Gospel. 


698 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the East, with Zoroastrianism and Budhism. Of course Go- 
tama-Budha having been already previously represented as 
the Saviour Angel there was nothing entirely new in the pro¬ 
mulgation of the Budha or Logos in the flesh ; but the publi¬ 
cation of this idea might not be received with much favor at 
first, as being a foreign importation: when however it was put 
forward as the £ Messiah Son of Dauid ’ (—ps. lxxxix. 20) after 
Hadrian had erected the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the 
spot where the Temple of the Jews had stood, the proximate 
coming of the Messiah might be regarded under a different 
aspect. Daniel, ix. 26, says that the Messiah shall be cut off. 
So-Rev. v. 9 ; Dan. vii. 14. A Matthew was perhaps needed to 
connect the human persona with the memories of the Jewish 
war against the Roman power; and his crucifixion might then 
form the denouement of the narrative. At all events the 
Essenes, known since B.c. 143, performed no bloody sacrifices, 
neither did the Budhists, nor the Jews after a.d. 70; so that it 
was competent for the Diaspora at Alexandria, at Antioch, or 
beyond the Jordan to go over, as far as it chose, to any Essene 
views: for Josephus describes them as to be found in every 
city 135 years after the Essene sect was first mentioned. From 
this point of view it is not necessary to show Essenism in 
John’s Gospel, or in the Epistle of John, or in the Apokalypse, 
or in Paulinist epistles.—1 Cor. vii. It would not be surpris¬ 
ing to find it among parts of the Diaspora in the second cen¬ 
tury, particularly in Arabia.—Galatians, i. 17, 21; Romans, 
xiv. 21. Ming Ti who reigned in China a.d. 58, dreamed that 
he saw a Divine Being with a body like gold, of the height of 
70 feet, surrounded by a glory like the sun. This was the de¬ 
scription of Budha; and there was an image of gold, of the 
same height, in the province of Babylon. Consequently the 
Eastern Diaspora in the plain of Doura must have known such 
images whether of Bel or Budha. Compare the description in 
Acts, ix. 3; xxii. 6, 8, 9. Paul is here described as having a 
vision of the shekinah, which in the doctrine of the Kabalists 
is the Angel Metatron, or Mithra the Mediator and Saviour 
(“ Metatron Malka, Malacli malachim ”) the Angel-King. As 
the Kabalah goes back to Babylon, and Simeon ben Iochai lived 
in the beginning of the 2nd century of our era, the Diaspora 
must have known the Babylonian, Essene and Kabalah myste¬ 
ries.—1 Tim. iii. 16; Philipp, ii. 6, 9 ; Coloss. ii. 2, 9, 18. What 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 699 

a change from the time when the women twined booths to the 
Asliera, the Syrian type of the Knria of Simon Magus.—2 
Kings, xxiii. 7. Ernest de Bunsen, 117, states that the Elkesa- 
ites rejected the Pauline Epistles, and that Hippolytus, Bishop 
of Portus near Ostia, testifies to the presence of Elkesaitans in 
Rome about a,d. 280, that is, about one hundred years after 
Irenaeus wrote in favor of the New Testament Scriptures. 
These last indicate a stage subsequent to that stage of Essen- 
ism which Philo and Josephus exhibit, except that a succes¬ 
sion of Christs has a Budhist look. 

Epiplianius says that the Essenes continued ‘ in their first 
position, and have not altered at all.’ No mention is made by 
any writer of the Messianic conceptions of the Essenes. Bun¬ 
sen thinks that, as Elkesai became a member of their corpora¬ 
tion, the Essenes may be assumed to have held before Elkesai 
and John the Baptist the Budhistic doctrine of the Angel Mes¬ 
siah, and that within about fifty years after Philo’s death (who 
believed in the Great Archangel of many names) Elkesai ap¬ 
plied this doctrine to Iesua, the Saviour. Hippolytus said 
that the Christos was said by Elkesai to have been born fre¬ 
quently and previously, and would be born again.—Bunsen, 
Angel-Messiah, 116-118; Dunlap, Sod, II. 21, 35; Theodoret. 
Haer. Fab. II. vii. But, outside of Budhism, we have not seen 
the assertion made of such a succession of manifestations, ex¬ 
cept in the case of Elkesai (Elxai); and he could not have, as 
a teacher, propounded this doctrine of late Budhism before 
a.d. 97-100, although others might have done so. So that, as 
far as the districts of Wasith and Bassora (Basra) are con¬ 
cerned, the teaching of Elkesai practically belongs to the time 
following the death of Josephus, who lays no stress on any 
such matter ; although by patching Exodus, iii. 6, Judges, xiii. 
22, Daniel, vii. 13, 14, viii. 15, 16, and the suspected passages 
in Josephus together something Messianic might be made out 
as pertaining to the time of Philo.—Exodus, xxiii. 20, 21, 23. 
If then Philo represents by his logos-doctrine the theory of the 
religion of the Alexandrines in the first half of the first cen¬ 
tury the New Testament writings represent the theory of a 
century later. If the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline 
Epistles are late products of theology in the second half of the 
Second Century, then we have no confirmation that the Evan¬ 
gels are historically correct, or more than partisan theological 


700 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


brochures in the arena of Essenism, Ebionism, and Messian- 
ism, and the Epistle of John, I. ii. 22 is a hostile return shot 
at the Kerintliians. So that the Messianic period during the 
first century and a half of our era is not fully described. We 
can from certain evidences merely infer the order of dogmatic 
changes. 

The first effects of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple 
(Matthew, xxvi. 61, John, ii. 19 are evidently posterior 1 to a.d. 
65-70) must have stunned the people of Palestine. When they 
recovered from the shock many recalled the Messianic prophe¬ 
cies. Now was the time to look for the Jewish Messiah, for 
now they most would need him. Where is the Saviour Angel ? 
The God will not desert his people in their extremity. Lord, 
wilt thou restore the monarchy to the Israel at this time ?— 
Acts, i. 6. “ I come soon.”—Rev. xxii. 12, 20. The time is 

at hand, says the Apokalypse. The Messiah will quickly come 
to raise the Temple anew, build it again, 4 the Romans shall 
be rooted out,’ £ God shall send from the sun a King,’ 2 and the 
Kingdom shall be restored 3 to Israel.—Acts, i. 6. This dis¬ 
position to look for the King lasted till 133, and, while it lasted, 
was no time for apostles to preach that the Jewish Messiah 
had already come and perished 4 at the hands of Pontius 
Pilate. Therefore the date of the Apokalypse should seem to 
be about 120-135. But after the destruction of Bar Cocheba, 
when the edge of expectation of the Messiah’s coming was 
considerably dulled, converts might possibly be gained to the 
idea that the Messiah had come a hundred years before. The 
lineaments of tradition and history had by that time somewhat 
faded in the minds of the vulgar, and exact knowledge was the 
property of the few, not of the many. While the Messiah’s 
proximate coming was a people’s hope, Kerinthus, an Ebion- 
ite Gnostic, or Judaist, was not likely to look for a man to 

1 Matthew, xxiv. 24, is apparently as late as a.d. 145; since we have no special ac¬ 
count of ‘ ‘ false Christs ” in the first century unless the false Messiahs of the Roman 
War in Judea are meant. 

2 Sibylline Books, iii. 590. “ The holy spirit answers them either from the face of 

the Father or from his own (face). Lord of the Powers he is himself the King of the 
Glory.”—Justin, pp. 55, 56. See Matthew, xvii. 2. The Kabalah calls the Seir Anpin 
(Shortface) King.—Kabbala Denud. II. 391. 

3 Come hither with me all who fear the God, who wish to see the good things (the 
benefits) of IerousalSm.—Justin, p. 47, ed. 1551. 

4 aifxaTL o-wTTjpiw,—Justin, p. 47, the blood of the Saviour we have believed in ! One 
testament is what is now, and another Law went out from Sion.—ib. 47. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 701 


represent the Angel Iesua ; and it is easy to observe (Irenaeus, 
I. xxv.) that Kerinthus regarded the Angel Iesua, the Saviour 
Metatron (Irenaeus calls him the Christos), as distinct from 
any flesh and blood. From Simon Magus to the ascetic Sat- 
urninus, and thence to Kerinthus and Karpokrates, the Salvator 
had been considered not a being of flesh and blood ; and for 
this reason they all rejected the astrological portent in the 
sign Yirgo as insufficient evidence that ‘ rj TrapSevos kv yaarpl 
Xrjif/eTai kcll re^crat vtoV,’ —that is (according to the Septuagint and 
Matthew, i. 21, 23) that a virgin of the race of Abraham (as 
Justin says) shall conceive and bear a son. 

Come, let us walk in the light of the Kurios ; for he let go 1 his people, the 
house of Iakob. Come all the Gentiles, let us be gathered into a Ierusalem 
that no more is invaded on account of the sins of the people.—Justin, p. 47. 

The author of the Apokalypse, xxi. 10, gives such an account 
of a Jerusalem in the heavens as shows (notwithstanding the 
“ I come soon.”—Rev. xxii. 20) that he did not himself expect 
its arrival in a hurry. As Kerinthus lived about 115 or later 
and Irenaeus was writing in 185, it is quite possible that, in 
the fifty years between the two, Irenaeus may have got a little 
off the track of Kerinthus personally. While it is impossible 
to find Kerinthus ignorant of the astronomical conception of 
the Sun (Mithra) in the Sign Yirgo and its astrological and 
Kabalist 2 import as a prophecy of what was to take place on 
earth, this is no evidence that Kerinthus or his predecessor 
Saturninus believed in this astrological forecast of human 
events; and, even if we believe Irenaeus , Kerinthus 3 seems to 
have made a profound distinction between the Angel Iesua, the 
Salvator (of Saturninus), and the man Iesu. Salvation is for 
Ialioh (to give).—Jonah, ii. 9. If ever, then, there was a time 
preceding the composition of our Four Gospels (of the New 
Testament) it would seem to have been a.d. 105-130. In 160 
Justin knows the Gospel; in 130 the Apokalypse possibly 
may not have known it. It is a mistake, too, to consider the 
ignorant and superstitious common people of Asia and Pales- 

1 To remit, to pardon, forgive. Justin, p. 50, calls him Helper and Ransomer or 
Redeemer, at the power of whose Name even the daemons tremble. Helper is a name 
suited to the Angel Iesua, the Saviour. 

2 A prototype in heaven of things on earth.—Rev. xxi. 2. 

3 Justin dislikes Saturninus et al. also Markion. There is no evidence that the 
Gospel of the Nazarenes was in existence in a.d. 115-120. 


702 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tine like educated human specimens of our day. Lucian de* 
scribes the Christians in his time as fools, and John, vii. 49 
describes the multitude who know not the Law as accursed! 
These were the poor.—John, xii. 8. And they were Ebionite, in 
so far as they adhered to the Law of Moses (—John, vii. 19) and 
lived in the Desert with the Nazoria. The early parts of the 
Sohar were attributed to Simeon ben Iochai in the first part of 
the 2d century. When the Messias shall be revealed, a certain 
Star shall arise from the region of the east, brilliant beyond 
everything, and Seven 1 other Stars surrounding this star will 
give battle against it from every side daily during seventy 
days, 2 after which the Star shall be again concealed.—The 
Sohar, part 2nd, fol. 3. c. 5. Amsterdam ; Bertholdt, 56. When 
they had seen the Star they rejoiced with a very great joy.— 
Matthew, ii. 10. And, lo, the Star which they saw in the east 3 
went before them. Epiphanius found out that the Kerinthians 
only used a part of the Evangel of Matthew; this is no evi¬ 
dence that the sect had not changed since Kerinthus their 
master lived ; and does not make it certain that he knew the 
Evangel of Matthew. There is some difference between a.d. 
115 and a.d. 367, when Epiphanius was made Bishop of Con¬ 
stants in Cyprus. He might have inferred that he knew Ke¬ 
rinthus because he knew the doctrine of the Kerinthians in his 
own time. 

In Persia, every year, after the harvest the people celebrated 
a festival which necessarily came under the sign of Virgo in 
August. Then the famous star of the Magi, which twelve of 
the most religious persons among them had been for many 
centuries charged with observing, was said to appear. The 
figure of a little child was seen on this star. Some said that 
it represented a woman, others a little child. Our celestial 
Virgin, the sign of harvest, represents both. It was a proph¬ 
ecy, said to be of Zoroaster, that Virgo should conceive a son 

1 In the Codex Nazoria (from Bassora) “ the Seven ” are bad spirits, bad angels. 

2 Metatron (Iesua the Angel) has 70 names.—Sod, II. p. 137. He is King of the 
Angels, ‘ the Great Archangel of many names,’ referred to by Philo as the Oldest Angel, 
the Logos. 

3 or in its rising. Since the Magi saw the Saviour’s Star Christianism is indebted 
in part to astrologers for its origin, to the astrological spheres of the Magians. Mat¬ 
thew, v. vi. vii. are borrowed from the coenobite institutions in the Desert. Compare 
Matth. xxiv. 26 ; Galatians, i. 17. Kerinthus (according to Tertullian) agreed with the 
Bbionites in holding that Iesu was a mere man, sine deitate. He, however, acknowl¬ 
edged the Angel Iesua, the divine person, the Christos, the Metatron, the Logos. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 703 


absque contactu viri, and a star shining during the day would 
appear, and in the centre of it the face of Virgo should be 
seen. 1 And it came to pass, when the Lord Jesus was born at 
Bethlehem of Judaea, in the time of Herod the king, the wise 
men 2 came from the East to Jerusalem, according to the 
prophecy of Zeradusht and brought with them offerings. 3 The 
three Magian kings are in Orion. The Virgin does rise in the 
east, at midnight, at the precise moment at which the birth of 
Christ is fixed. He was born on the very day of the birth of 
Mithra and presented to the people just as this Sun-god was 
formerly presented in the Mysteries in the shape of a child; 4 
there is the sign that the Magi saw in the east. 5 In Cancer, 
which had risen to the meridian at midnight, is the constella¬ 
tion of the Stable and the Ass. 6 The ancients called it Jupi¬ 
ter’s manger. 7 In the north the stars of the Bear are seen, 
and also the coffin of Lazarus. The Oualentinians held that 
the Redeemer’s mission began at 30 years of age (compare 30 
degrees to a sign of the zodiac), and ended in the 12th month. 
His career was that of the solar year, like the 12 labors of 
Herakles; 8 so 12 tribes, 12 apostles. 

The Brahman calls the body a temple or house of God: for 
incarnation is to him the incorporation of the “ spirit ” in man 
that has so shaped the body to dwell therein in all forms. The 
kings were anointed, just as the stone which Iakob anointed, 
as an evidence of the incorporation of the divine spirit with¬ 
in them. The Christian idea of a Massiacha, God-begotten 
appearing on earth in human form to redeem his people was 
already diffused traditionally among the rabbins a long time 
before the Christian era. The kabbalist book Sohar applies 
the expression spirit of Alohim, to the Messiah. The Talmud, 

1 Mankind, 474; Abulfaragius, Hist. Dynast, p. 47, 54. 

2 Magoi. 

3 The three Magian kings are in Orion.—Mankind, 475. 

4 de Iside, 11. 

6 Mankind, 474. 

6 Dionysus, born Dec. 25th, rode on an Ass in triumphal procession.—ibid, 481. 
Bacchus mounted on the Ass placed in the stars of the constellation Cancer, which at 
that period was situated at the summer solstice, the highest portion of the sun’s path, 
which had previously been occupied by the lion.—ibid. 426. Cancer, in which are “ the 
Asses,” is the figure on the standard of Issachar, whom Iacob (Gen. xlix. 14) calls a 
strong Ass.—ibid. 411. Saturn was called the Ass, and the Ass is his domicil.—ibid, 
p. 448. 

7 Sol’s manger. 

8 ibid. 475. See Rev. v. 6. 


704 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Sota fol. 49, uses the phrase, “ heel of the Messiah,” of the 
time when the heel of the Messias shall be bitten by the Ser¬ 
pent. The Beresith Rabba, 98, to Genesis xlix. 10, adds to 
“ till Shilo comes” “This is the Anointed King.” The Sohar 
to Dan. ii. 44 says: In that time of the Messiah God will set up 
a ‘ Kingdom of Heaven.’ The Talmud (Berachoth fol. 56) says 
with reference to Zachariah, ix. 1: Who sees in a dream an 
ass, he will live to see the time of the salvation, for Zacha¬ 
riah said, Thy King comes to thee poor, and rides on an 
ass. Beresith Rabba, 75, says : The word ass means the Mes¬ 
sias, 1 because the prophet said “ poor and rides on an ass.” It 
is however explained above that Dionysus proceeds from the 
constellation of the “ Asses ” to recreate and save nature : also, 
that Silenus was sacred in Judea, and the head of an ass is 
traditionally reported as one of the objects in the Jewish 
temple. The Sohar to Zachariah, xiii. 2, says: The sin shall 
not leave the world until the time when the Messiah shall re¬ 
veal himself! Midrash Thillim, to psalm ii. 7, says : He will 
recognize him as his Son, with the words : “ To-day, I have be¬ 
gotten thee The Sohar to Moses I. fol. 114 : Onwards from 
that day when the evil Serpent persuaded Adam it got power 
over the children of the world, and the world cannot free itself 
any more from the Serpent’s chastisement until King Mas- 
siacha comes. 2 

The God-man was called the Anointed ; for did not Iaqab 
oil a stone even and call it Beth El (the House of El)? How 
much more a man into whom God had himself descended as 
spirit! The rabbins of the pre-apostolic period taught that 
the Redeemer of the world begotten in immaculate conception, 
was identical with the Deity himself; for the Sohar, I. fol. 69. 
col. 3 says: The King Anointed calls himself by the name of 
God. 3 The targum to Zachariah iv. 7 changes or explains as 
follows: And he will let his Messias reveal himself, whose 

1 that is, the Ass is a constellation indicating that the Messiah proceeds from this 
quarter of the heavens. “ Then from the sun God shall send a king.” 

2 These Messianic extracts are from Nork’s Heb*aisch-Chaldaisch-Rabbinisches 
Worterbuch, pp. 393-395. As to Gnosis, “the strife of piety is the knowing the God 
(to yvon>ai rou Oeov) and to hurt no man. Such a soul freed from the body becomes wholly 
mind.”—Hermes, I. x. 19. The extracts from Philo’s gnosis are too numerous to be 
included within the limits of this work. 

3 malcha masiacha dathkara bsema di kodesh baruch hoa. The God the source of 
the most ancient Logos.—Philo, Quod det. 22. The God who stands for the Logos is 
superior to every rational nature.—Philo, Fragm. on Gen. i. 27. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 705 


name is ever since eternity , and he will rule over all lands. 1 On 
this day the King, the Messiah, will depart from the Garden 
of Odan, out of the place called Nest of a bird , and will appear 
in the land of Galil. The King who is the Messiah shall 
appear in the land of Galil. 2 The sign of the Son of the Man 
was seen in the heavens,—coming on the clouds of the heavens. 3 
The Messias ben Dauid will appear at the first blast of the 
trumpet of Michael, and the Jews will assemble about him. 4 

The people walking in Darkness have seen a Great Light.—Isaiah, ix. 2. 

When the morning of the Messia’h shall come, then shall the true Sun shine. 
—Midrash Samuel, 71. col. 1. 


Aniketus (Anicetus) sat at Rome about six years before An¬ 
toninus Pius died. He was 12 years Bishop of Borne. Markion 
first under Antoninus brought forward this God (Markion’s 
Unknown Superior God). Tas mere fact that Markion knows 
“ Paulus Canonicus ” shows (if we agree with Loman) that 
Markion is very late. According to Tertullian, Markion knew 
the Gospel; he came forward under the 2nd Antonine, during 
the episcopates of Aniketus, Soter, and Eleutherus. Eleutherus 
was Bishop of Borne in 177-190. Under elder (!) Antonine. 
—Tertull. adv. Markion, I. xix. Therefore as Markion grew 
stronger and progressed (invaluit sub Aniceto) we find that 
Tertullian only in part confirms Irenaeus, III. iv. p. 243. Mar¬ 
kion’s churches are late.—Tert. I. xvii., xix.; Antiqua Mater, p. 
228. “ From Tiberius to Antoninus Pius (says Tertullian, I. xix.) 
there are about 115 years and 6§ months.” Tiberius died in 
a.d. 37 about. Adding 116 years to 37 the result is about 153- 
154. Anicetus was bishop twelve years, from a.d. 154-166. If 
then Markion’s early renown was under Aniketus, it was be¬ 
tween the years 154 and 166. Therefore, at the same time both 
Justin and Markion exhibit a knowledge of the existence of an 


1 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. pp. 146, 147. The Anointed, the Power of God and 
the Sophia of God.—1 Corinth, i. 24. The concealed Sophia, which God ordained 
before the AiOns (times).—1 Cor. ii. 7. Eden is the supernal Wisdom.—The Idra Suta, 
viii. The Wisdom of the divine essence is called Eden.—Philo, de Somniis, II. § 37. 
The Eternal Wisdom is described as the Garden of Eden.—Meyer’s Jezira, p. 3. d. 16. 
Weg. From this Garden the Messiah goes out.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 1; AuszUge aus dem 
Sohar, p. 30. 

2 ibid. pp. 30, 32. 

3 Matthew, xxiv. 30; xxvi. 64. 

4 Spiegel, Vendidad, I. 36. 

45 


706 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


evangel, which we have supposed was written between a.d. 138 
and 148, assuming that it preceded the Gospel according to 
Matthew. Thus Markibn is not prior to 153 a witness for the 
existence of any one of our four gospels, and only for an earlier 
evangelium, which he might not have seen prior to A.D. 151-153. 
The episcopate of Anicetus began in 154 and lasted twelve 
years.—Diet. Christian Biography, III. p. 816. Between six 
and seven years of these twelve passed under the elder Anto- 
nine. But Markion and Valentinus at first were believers in the 
doctrine of the Catholic Church, under the episcopate of the 
blessed Eleutherus.—Tertullian, On Prescription, cap. xxx.: 
Peter Holmes. Eleutherus as Bishop of Rome followed Ani¬ 
cetus. So that to use Tertullian against himself, Markion and 
Valentinus had not left the Roman Communion until after the 
episcopates of Anicetus and during that of Eleutherus. So 
that Markion’s renown was reached under Markus Aurelius 
Antoninus, the Second Antonine, not Antoninus Pius. 

Kerdon came to Rome under Hyginus who was the ninth 
bishop after the apostles.—Irenaeus, III. iv. p. 242. Eusebius 
calls him the ninth. But Markion following him grew r in 
strength under Anicetus the tenth bishop : Marcion autem illi 
succedens invaluit sub Aniceto decimum locum episcopatus 
continente. 1 —Irenaeus, III. iv. p. 243. Hilgenfeld (Jiid. Apoka- 
lyptik, p. 181) dates the Revision of the Book of Enoch by a 
Christian writer in the time between Saturninus and Markion. 
—Drummond, Jewish Messiah, pp. 56-59. Acts, i. 6, shows that 
the Christian Messiah was in one sense the Jewdsh Messiah 
over again. See also Daniel and the Sohar. Drummond’s ob¬ 
jection that the Christian Reviser of Enoch is so reticent about 
Christos’ history would apply equally to the author of the 
Apokalypse. The Jew-Christian author of the Revise of the 
Book of Enoch was perhaps an Ebionite (adhering to the Law. 
—Drummond, p. 23) and preceded the writing of the Apoka¬ 
lypse and the New Testament Gospels. He might know the 
theory of an incarnation of the Angel Iesua or of the Hae- 
retical views regarding ‘ the Son of the Man,’—a favorite ex¬ 
pression of the Haeretists and of St. Matthew also. The Book 
of Enoch, too, has the very expression, 4 Son of the Man ’ (the 

1 The effect of this date showing the success of Markion to have been c. 154-157 
throws back to c. 155 the Justin writing that mentions Markion. See Diet. Chr. Bio¬ 
graphy, III. p. 816. London, 1882. 


TIIE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 707 


article expressed).—Drummond, p. 54. It lias always been ob¬ 
vious that the Haeretics were earlier than our Four Gospels, 
these last being the final phase, and the latest of many produc¬ 
tions.—Luke, i. 1. Messianism was in Daniel, the Sohar, and 
even in Enoch ; because it was originally a Jewish theory the 
Christian had (at least at first) to copy the Jewish description : 
and he did it with considerable strictness, notwithstanding the 
liberties subsequently taken with Jewish Gnosis. The Ebion- 
ites rejected all the Epistles of Paul, calling him an apostate 
from the Law, and using only the Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews,—that is, the very gospel that Justin Martyr was thought 
to have used.—Supernat. Eel. I. 420 ; Irenaeus, I. xxvi. This 
Ebionite position is the one that Justin takes up ; as might be 
expected of a man born in Flavia Neapolis (just outside of 
Sichem in Samaria); for Justin claims to have been brought 
up near the Jordan, like the Ebionim. Not only does Matthew, 
v. 17-19, viii. 4, x. 5, 6, adhere to the Law of Moses, 1 but Acts, 
i. 4, 6 wants the Jewish monarchy restored at that very time, 
and requires the disciples to stick to Jerusalem and not depart 
from it. 2 This has a strong flavor of the Nazorenes and Ebion- 
ites.—Compare Galatians, i. 17, where “ Paul claims to have 
visited Arabia, where the Nazoria and Ebionim dwelt. Ire¬ 
naeus, I. xxvi. distinctly says that the Ebionites (that is, one 
branch of them) used only the Evangel according to Matthew. 
But Supernatural Religion, I. 420 says that the Nazarene Gos¬ 
pel was that commonly called ‘ the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews,’ and that the same Gospel was in use among the 
Ebionites. This proves that the differences between these two 
Gospels were in certain main points of no serious importance. 
All of them were Ebionite Gospels. 

All prophets prophesied only of the time of the Messiah.—Talmnd, tr. Sab¬ 
bath, fol. 63. 

Seventy weeks are fixed for thy people to seal the vision and anoint the 
Holy of the holy ones . . . unto Messiah Nagir.— Daniel, ix. 24, 25 (the verses 
are condensed for convenience). 

When the Messiah shall be revealed, how many signs and other miracles 
will give themselves to be seen ?—The Sohar, II. fol. 8. Amstel. 

The Messiah will first reveal himself in Galilee, afterwards a Star in the east 
will become visible.—The Sohar, fol. 74. col. 293. 

1 Matth. viii. 4 ; xxiii. 2, 3. 

2 The Ebionites adore Jerusalem as the abode of the God.—Iren. I. xxvi 


708 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Messiah (the Son of Dauid) was not expected to have been 
about to come until the bad Roman Kingdom should have 
governed the whole world during nine months.—Galatinus, de 
Arcanis, lib. IV. fols. 119, 139. After Jerusalem was destroyed, 
talking was more in order than fighting; until a.d. 133-135. 

The transjordan population, Essaeans and others, were so 
exasperated at the Romans (about a.d. 3) that many thousands 
of people arrived in Jerusalem to combat the foreign tyranny. 
Among them were Galileans, Idumeans, Ierichonians, the river 
men, and a throng of Jews more eager than the rest rushed for 
vengeance on Sabinus. 1 Compare Rev. xi. 7, 8, 9; Matthew, x. 5. 

While the world lasts not one iota shall pass away from the Law.—Matthew, 
v. 17, 18. 

When you shall hear of wars and disturbances be not afraid, for these things 
must first be ; but the End is not immediately.—Luke, xxi. 9. 

Look for your Shepherd ... in the End of the world.—Y Esdras, xiv. 34. 

The Anointed King has been appointed to reign over all lands.—The Sohar, 
Comment, to Gen. xl. 10. 

I will raise up to Daud in those days and at that time a just Messiah.— 
Targum of Jonathan ; Galatinus, III. fob 72. 

“The King, the Messiah, will depart from the Garden of Adan.” 2 The 
King Messiah will be revealed.—Targum of Jonathan : Galatinus, de Arcanis, 
IV. fol. 116. 

Matthew, v. 17, 18 are unmistakably Nazorian-Ebionite pas¬ 
sages, breathing an absolutely Ebionite adherence to the Law of 
Moses, but still of the second century order,—the Nazorians 
being ascetics and Iessaeans, holding to the Essene healing 
and morale, and the casting out of devils. As contemporaneous 
with the Kerinthians, the Ebionites (Epiphanius, I. 117, 120, 
ed. Petav.) barely indicate the position of Kerinthus concern¬ 
ing the Christos, while their date is perhaps as early as about 
a.d. 100-125. About a.d. 100 or 125-136 we find a John as 
author of an Apokalypse in which there is extremely little of 
Iesus (and that perhaps added later) and nothing at all like the 
four evangelists excepting the Logos doctrine of Philo. This 
apparently means that the Four Gospels, the Gospel of Peter 
and the Gospel of the Hebrews were not yet written, or had 

1 Josephus, Ant. xvii. 12. 

2 Sohar, II. fob 11. Rabbi Jehosua found Elias and Rabbi Simeon standing in the 
Garden of delight in Paradise.—Galatinus, liber IV. fob 119. When will Messiah 
come ? Ask him ! What is his sign ? Sitting among the poor suffering infirmities.— 
ib. iv. 119. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 709 

not reached the Apokalyptic John ; else he could hardly have 
avoided taking some notice of the reported life of Iesua. 
There seems to have been nothing to prevent the copying a 
Ms. or interpolating it somewhat. The Ms. of Josephus is 
suspected in certain parts. The Nazarenes were Jews adher¬ 
ing to the Law and Circumcision ; and their haeresis (sect) was 
very early, and knew not Christus.—Epiphanius, I. 120, 121. 
What “ knew not Christos ” means is that they date before our 
era ; not to have recognised that any such being as Iesua ever 
lived would have seemed to Epiphanius a denying the Chris¬ 
tos. The Nazorenes and Ebionites being Gnostics, the chance 
of their not knowing about c the Saviour Angel in the bosom 
of the Father ’ was nil. 

There were Seven Solar Rays subordinate to the Chaldaean 
Logos mentioned in Revelation, i. 12, 13, 16. Saturninus held 
that the world was made by Seven Angels and that the God of 
the Jews was one of these Seven. 1 It is not difficult to follow 
this idea directly into Chaldaea. Saturninus expressly recog¬ 
nises the Christos and Saviour.—Irenaeus, I. xxii. To the Sun 
the first day of the week was sacred, to Apollo among the Hel¬ 
lenes, to the Light of the world, among the Christians. The 
Christos therefore has the crown of rays as Apollo has; and 
also the predicate Soter (Saviour) which was given to Zeus, 
Helios, Dionysus and Herakles.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 365. 
Among the Jews the Messiah was the Light and the Logos.— 
See Galatinus, passim. 

In the Codex of the Nasoria the Spirit and the Messiah are 
connected with the number Seven of the Planets. Mesiha, the 
Prophet of the Jews, calls a call (a voice) to the Seven, takes 
them into his troop, each fights for him.—Brandt, 126. The 
Codex Nazoria Mandaites mention the “ Seven ” (Sun, Venus, 
Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Merkury, Mars).—Brandt, Mandaische 
Relig. pp. 52, 61. The Seven (ordered by Ptahil) create the 
body of Adam.—Brandt, p. 36. In the two first tractates of 
the right Genza the Messiaha ranges himself with the true be¬ 
lievers.—Brandt, p. 126. The Babylonian Seven Planet-Gods 
introduce us to the Books of Hermes in which we find that the 
Logos brings forth a creator (Demiourgos) who, being God of 
fire and spirit (compare Matthew, iii. 11), made certain Seven 
Rulers that in circles (orbits) environ the perceptible world, 

1 Irenaeus, I. xxii. 


710 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and their rule is called fate.—Parthei, Hermes, p. 5. This 
brings us directly to the Light and its Seven Lamps in the 
Temple at Jerusalem, to the Seven Angels of Saturninus (and 
the Gnostics) the Angels that created the world. Colossians, 
i. 16, mentions a Creator of the Powers, Thrones, Eulers, and 
Princes in heaven, and Saturninus mentions One Father Un¬ 
known who made Angels, Archangels, Authorities and Powers. 
—Irenaeus, I. xxii. To a Sabian speak of the number 7. Sa- 
baism is the Hermes Eeligion.—Chwolsohn, I. 39, 637, 641. 

And the Heaven was seen in Seven Circles, and the Planets appeared with 
all their (12) Signs (of the zodiac) in star-form, and the stars were divided (in 
divisions) and counted with the Rulers in them, and their circumambient path 
(compare the Seven Stages of the tower of Bel at Babylon) was encompassed by 
the air and by a circular course carried by the divine spirit. 

The Gods (Planets) brought forth, each by his own power, wliat was pre¬ 
scribed to them, and there were four-footed, creeping (snakes), swimming, and 
flying creatures, and all fruitful seeds, grass, flowers and green herb ; who then 
retained in themselves the seeds of reproduction.—Hermes Trismegistus, iii. 2. 3. 

And they sowed the births of men, for a gnosis of divine works.—Hermes, 
iii. 3. 

Menander also held that the world was made by Angels. The 
Books of Hermes are gnostic, so were Jewish and Nazorene 
and Iessaean books, and for that matter the Apokalypse. 
Hermes prepared the basis for a large part of Genesis chap. 1. 
Hermes, iii. 3 gives the doctrine. from which the passage in 
Gen. i. 28 relating to the growth and increase and dominion 
over all that is under the heaven was borrowed. It adds the 
wonderful sowing by means of the course of the Circular Gods, 
—the renovation of nature under the influence of these stars. 
Paul mentions the worship of Angels. This is the Semite-Ara- 
bian worship of the Star-gods and S&ven Planets under the 
direction of the Supreme Logos (Christos) and his Demiurgus- 
deity of fire and spirit. The Gods were manifested in the form 
of Stars (—Menard, Hermes, p. 28) but in enastroid ideas («9 «h 
T at? ivao-rpoLs t’Seat? o7rravd/>im>i).—Parthei, p. 31. The Creator has 
made all not with hands but by his Logos.—ibid. 34. The be¬ 
ginning of good is the Gnosis.—ibid. pp. 39, 62; Menard, pp. 
33, 53. Karpokrates and his followers held that the world was 
made by Angels much inferior to the Unborn Father; and 
Kerinthus held that it was created by a Power very remote and 
separate from the Deus who is over all things. Brandt, p. 61, 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 711 

125, 126 quotes a Nazorian extract “ Kiwan, Ruha, Msilia und 
die Sieben; ” and connects the Spirit and the Seven with the 
Messiah. The words stood for Kiun, Ruacha, Masiacha, and 
the “ Seven.” Chiun is Saturn, Ruacha = Spirit, Mesiaha = 
Messiah. So that Masiacha is connected with the Seven, just 
as in Rev. i. 16 ; showing astronomical theory. 

The Nazorene Iessaeans were contemporaneous with the 
Kerintliians, therefore they must have been Judaists nearly of 
the Kerinthian-Ebionite pattern, knowing the Christos only 
spiritually, not in the flesh. Kerinthus was a Gnostic (see 
Irenaeus, I. xxv. xxvi. pp. 126, 127 ed. Paris 1675) who held (ac¬ 
cording to Irenaeus) the crucifixion and resurrection of Iesu, 
did not admit that he was the Christos, but held that he was 
merely one in whom the Christos operated to work miracles. 
If Kerinthus really taught that the Christos in forma columbae 
descended on the Iesu when he was baptised by John (as Ire¬ 
naeus relates) how came Justin and Epiphanius to be hostile 
to him? It is remarkable that he resembles Matthew so closely 
in the descent of the Dove upon Iesu. Kerinthus agreed very 
closely with the Ebionites, who, Epiphanius says, considered 
the Christos Lord of the Angels, but created. Kerinthus be¬ 
lieved in a primal God, the Unknown Father, who did not 
make the world, rejecting the God of the Jews and attributing 
the creation of the world to a subordinate Angel. Kerinthus 
is supposed to have used some form of the Gospel of the He¬ 
brews. The word Minim (Books of the Minim.—Talmud, Sab¬ 
bath, folio 116) simply means heretics. There were in a.d. 125 
gnostic books, Elxai’s Writings, and other works. Buxtorf 
says that after a.d. 277 Min meant a Manichean, those that be¬ 
lieve in two Gods, who do not believe in the unity of God. 
The name Minim was also given to Zadok and Baiethos, who 
one hundred years before Christ were called Minim. The dis¬ 
ciples of Iesu the Nazarene were also called Minim, as being 
heretics. So, probably, were the transjordan Ebionites. What 
would Kerinthus want with Matthew, i. 18, 19; iii. 16 if, as 
Irenaeus says, he believed Iesu to be not the Messiah, but the 
son of Ioseph and Mary ? Besides, the theory of Delitzsch, 
that Siphri ha Minim means books of the Christians (the Gos¬ 
pel of the Hebrews) before a.d. 130, does not cover the case of 
Kerinthus. For the Gospel of the Hebrews while earlier than 
Justin’s first Apologia (circa a.d. 147-155) can well have been 


712 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


written only twelve years earlier. A knowledge of these books 
is not brought home to Kerinthus in 125, although he knew 
something about the Unknown Father. The Gnostics believed 
the beings overhead in the heavens were spirits, not flesh. 
But this is not all. How came Karpokrates and Kerinthus of 
all Gnostics (about a.d. 125) to know so much about a crucified 
Messiah (crucified about a.d. 33) when most others were looking 
for the Warrior Messiah of Judea's expectation and Apokalyptic 
Revelation up to a.d. 132? It is scarcely possible to believe 
that, while this feeling (realised in the insurrection of Bar 
Cocheba) lasted, any one beyond the Jordan was prepared to 
believe in a nonresistant, crucified, meek and humble Messiah 
or Iesua (Salvator) submissive to Caesar and surrendering to 
Rome the conquered Iudea. The friends of Josephus might 
sympathise with this policy , but they were not ready to find a 
Messiah in it! The Essene and Idumean might admit the 
principle, but they both fought for Ierusalem. Even the 
Apokalypse (circa 125-135) prepares for war.—Rev. vi. ; ix. 14, 
15. These are reasons that seem to make the statement of 
Irenaeus, that Kerinthus knew that there was such a man as 
Iesu, somewhat questionable. What miracles (“ virtutes per- 
fecisse ”) does Irenaeus charge Kerinthus with knowing ? Ob¬ 
viously those mentioned in the Four Gospels! Irenaeus thus 
antedates in the consciousness of Kerinthus a bundle of dog¬ 
mas belonging to our Gospels near twenty years after the time 
of Kerinthus (a.d. 125) the first account of which we get in late 
productions like the Gospel of the Hebrews and the works of 
Justin Martyr. The Gospel of the Hebrews is possibly not re¬ 
ferred to in the Talmud treatise Sabbath, fol. 116. The Gospel 
of Luke, xxi. 20, borrows from Josephus, Wars, iv. cap. 9. § 1, 
which Josephus wrote as late as a.d. 80-90. The Gospel 
writers, in basing the Iesus and the Iessaean communists on 
John the Baptist, have planted the Nazoria in the transjordan 
region in Moab and Basan. Kerinthus was mainly an Ebio- 
nite; 1 for the Ebionites held that the world was made by 

1 Epiphanius tells us that Ebion had the form of the Kerinthians (that the world 
was made by angels). The New Testament holds that the Christos created all things. 
The Ebionites had (so Epiphanius says) the appellation Christians. Kerinthus be¬ 
lieved in a Christos, and the Ebionites in a Christos and in aeons.—Norberg, preface to 
Codex Nazoria, p. v. note 11. So too the Codex Nazoria has aeons; and the question 
arises whether the Four Gospels are not on the Iessene-Nazorian-Ebionite basis re¬ 
formed and later worked over at Antioch under different influences. The split occurs 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 713 


angels. Irenaeus mentioned him as a Christian, and to con¬ 
nect his views in some way with Matthew, i. 18, 19. He be¬ 
at the Irenaeus I. chapters xxiv.-xxvi. on Karpokrates, Kerinthus, and the Ebionites. 
Irenaeus, by saying little, avoids dangerous explanations concerning the origin of 
Ohristianism among the Elchasites, Essenes, Iessaeans, Ebionites, and Nazoria. The 
unity of the plan, the skill, and art of the best description indicate in the author of the 
Gospel of Matthew a writer of the best style, who delivers in Greek the results of 
memoirs of the Nazorian and Iessaean doctrines proclaimed in Arabia Deserta by the 
Ebionim of the Jordan about A. D. 150 or later. We have shown the Ebionism of the 
Gospels already before in this chapter, and “ Jordan was the beginning of the evangels.” 
Metatron, the Iesua, was the King of the Angels, the Christos; and the Christos doc¬ 
trine of the Nazoria was afterwards completed in the Four Gospels, perhaps in the Gos¬ 
pel of the Hebrews (the Gospel of the Nazarenes), by subjoining to the Gnostic King of 
the Jews a human ancestry and a virgin mother, in accordance with a certain interpre¬ 
tation of passages in the Hebrew sacred graphai and an astrological portent in the 
skies. The remark about the “forma columbae” attributed piously, bj r Irenaeus to 
Kerinthus would have a tendency to tide over the existing gap between the pure Gnos¬ 
tics of the Christos party and those who regarded the Iesua as a man. Karpokrates, 
too, like the Kerinthians, held that subordinate angels made the world and that the man 
Iesu was not the Christos. The Karpokratians busied themselves in operating magic 
arts (Irenaeus, I. xxiv.). Magoi apo ton anatolon (—Matthew, ii. 1, 2) indicates the 
Ebionite belief in the magus that he has power to forecast events that happen in this 
world (—Iren. I. xxiv.). The Karpokratians regarded the body as a prison of the soul, 
and the Devil as the first one of the Angels the creators of the world; and held that 
the Diable shuts up the souls, of those that have perished, into other bodies. These 
Karpokratian views (or something similar) may be found among the lost sheep of Israel 
(the Ebionim).—Matthew, xiv. 1, 2. Irenaeus, I. xxvi. indicates Ebionites of the very 
belief contained in Matthew, iii. 16 ; xvi. 16, 27. The Christos is not the Son of Daud. 
—Matthew, xxii. 45. This is somewhat Ebionite, as it agrees with the doctrine 
ascribed to Kerinthus and the Older Ebionim that (as spirit is not matter) the Christos 
is not flesh, but continued to exist in spirit and did not suffer upon the cross. That 
the Ebionites who rejected St. Paul as an apostate from the Jewish Law held a differ¬ 
ent doctrine, respecting the Unknown Father (Matth. xi. 27), from the views of Karpo¬ 
krates and Kerinthus would seem to be partly confirmed by the authors of the New 
Testament Gospels ; but the Christos was regarded by the Ebionim and Jews exactly 
as Karpokrates and Kerinthus regarded him, that is, as not the man Iesu, which the 
expression ‘Son of Dauid’ would imply.—Matthew, i. 6, 16; Luke, iii. 31. The 
stricter sort of Ebionim (the Ebionim proper) were followers of the Jewish Law and 
believed Iesu simply a man (according to Tertullian). Irenaeus puts Karpokrates and 
Kerinthus in this very Ebionite position, which Epiphanius confirms. The Iessaians 
(Essenes) were noted for loving one another Josephus says.—Matthew, x. 8-11. The 
Karpokratians said that salvation was through faith and goodwill; and St. Paul. 1 
Cor. xiii. 13 praises faith, hope, and love. So the Essaian (Essene) basis of ‘pistis ’ 
ran through all as their fundamental dogma. The Karpokratians called themselves 
Gnostics. Irenaeus, however, seems to have known about them at a late period, since 
he mentions Marcellina who was a partisan of the Karpokratian doctrine, came to 
Rome under Anicetus (a.d. 154-166) and led astray many. The author of Antiqua 
Mater, p. 222, says that at the end of the 2nd century the Catholics and Gnostics meant 
two different things by the term ‘Gospel.’ If Irenaeus, I. xxiv. xxv. is correct, Kar¬ 
pokrates and Kerinthus must have been by no means in accord with our New Testa¬ 
ment. The Jew Trypho is represented as holding that as the soul is divine, immortal, 
and part of that Kingly Mind itself, and as that sees the God, so it is possible for us by 


714 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


lieved that the Angel Iesua, the Saviour Angel, was the Chris¬ 
tos and Logos ; and he was prominent at Antioch. The author 
of Antiqua Mater p. 235 raises the question whether the Iesu 
thus connected with Christ was not an ideal of gnostic origin. 1 

our mind to understand the Deity and henceforward to be happy.—Justin, p. 35. The 
human minds are active ; and where they were not cultivated, and ignorance abounded 
in the ancient world, superstition was almost invariably present in large measure. If 
people could not think correctly and scientifically, they must think something else. 
Hence Justin, p. 94, says fire was kindled in the Jordan when Iesou came to the water ; 
and that when Moses spread out his arms at the fight with the Amalekites he, propheti¬ 
cally, made the sign of the cross ! The very fact that the Gospel of the Hebrews needed 
to set the Jordan on fire to advance its theology shows that the opposition to the notion 
of two natures in one Iesu was very strong before that Gospel was written, and that the 
Christos idea then predominated as in the case of Kerinthus. Compare, too, Matthew, 
iii. 11, which exhibits the fire attached to the Messiah’s person, as in Judges, xiii. 20, 
22 . 

1 Justin p. 54, says that the atheoi, impious, unjust and lawless instead of worship¬ 
ping Iesou confess only to his name and call themselves Christians just as those among 
tiie Gentiles who inscribe the Name of the God upon things artificially made, take part 
in criminal and godless mysteries. And to these belong those called Markionites, and 
the Oualentinians, and the Basilidians, and the Satornelians, and others of one name 
and another. It is clear that Justin here draws the line sharply against the Christians 
who do not believe that the Healer was born of a virgin of the race of Abrahm ; and 
among these Christians are named the followers of Saturninus and the rest (meaning 
Karpokrates, Kerinthus, and others). The line being thus drawn, we see that Justin 
wrote later than 155. In Justin’s Apologia, which probably dates about the year 154 
(invaluit sub Anicete Markion), we find the words “ Christon anthropon genomenon 
staurothenai,” ‘the King, born a man, was crucified.’ Even Irenaeus confesses that 
Karpokrates and Kerinthus did not admit that Iesu was the King, the Christos : and 
the Jews and Old Ebionim refused to believe it. The simple matter is this. The He¬ 
brew Bible speaks of a son of Daud (Dauid, David) ; but it also mentions the King, 
the Saviour Presence Angel, and the Nazoria believed in the Son of the God, in the 
King of the Angels, the Metatron and Christos. Here we have the two natures. The 
New Testament tries to ride both horses at once ; but the Ebionites refused to follow 
this lead. The Romans decided to accept the two natures. The Gnostics refused to 
accept the two in one person. But the point is whether, in spite of the statement of 
Irenaeus, Karpokrates and Kerinthus ever knew the name of the Iesu of the Gospels. 

Pliny is supposed to have written his famous letter to Trajan about 112.—Milman, 
Hist. Chr. ed. Harper, 1844. p. 218, note; Antiqua Mater, p. 1 ; Mommsen, Hermes , 
iii. 53, for 1869 ; Bruno Bauer, Christns und die Casaren, 2nd ed. 1879, p. 268 f. An¬ 
tiqua Mater, 3, 29, questions the genuineness of the letters of Pliny and Trajan, exter¬ 
nally unattested, unquoted by Justin Martyr (a silence that tells most gravely against 
them), and the work, apparently, of an apologist. But, supposing there were in a. d. 
112 such Christians as Isaiah, lxiii. 9, Bodenschatz, II. 191, 192, indicate and the 
Christus of Saturninus and Kerinthus at Antioch presupposes, this points to a Chris¬ 
tos and to an Eastern existing gnosis, but not to a man named Iesua (according to Mat¬ 
thew, i. 21). The gnosis had probably spread from Antioch or the transjordan regions 
into the provinces of Asia Minor, and Christianism (a sort of Judaic Philonism) with 
it. There were more Christians (in Julian’s time) in Constantinople and Antioch 
(Milman, 358) than in any other city of the Roman Empire ; and the 4 Gospels (not the 
Gospel of the Hebrew Nazoria) were in the Greek tongue. The Christians sang a hymn 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 715 


It would seem that there must have been a stage of the Ebion- 
ite gnosis to which Karpokrates and Kerinthus belonged, 1 
which preceded the Gospel of the Hebrews (the Gospel of the 
Nazoria) and the 4 New Testament gospels, the three synoptic 
gospels showing a marked advance beyond a preceding gnos¬ 
tic status, that was antecedent to a.d. 120. 

At Colossae in the western part of Phrygia Apollo (the 
Mithra-Sun) takes the place of the Lamb in the sign Aries. 
The Resurrection of the Lamb from Darkness occurred at the 
March Equinox. The Great Lamb gives new life to nature, for 
it is the Equinoctial Sign of the Passage of the Sun from the 
region below to the upper Hemisphere, the northern regions. 
The Sun renews nature, having destroyed the former world, on 
the ruins of which the Lamb raised a new one on the 25tli of 
March. The first day of the first month was the first of the Jew¬ 
ish month Nisan which began March 25tli, and was called Pas¬ 
sage of the Lord. The death of the Lord was placed at March 
23d. In the Persian Mysteries the body of a Young Man was ex¬ 
hibited which was figured to be restored to life. By his suffer¬ 
ings he was believed to have worked their salvation, and on 

to the Christos as their God, an Essaian and Nazorian custom before the Sun rose up! 
As in the Sibylline Book, so in the doctrine of Manes, the dwelling of the Christos was 
in the sun.—Milman, pp. 280, 305. ed. Harper, 1844. The Great Helios, the living and 
animated (empsuchon) image of the mindperceived Father.—Julian; Milman, p. 351, 
352, 354. In a.d. 350, the Adonia were still celebrated at Antioch to the Sun !—Mil- 
man, 358; compare Matthew, xvii. 2; Rev. i. 13, 15, 16. 

Tacitus writing about 112-115 and speaking of Christiani confounds the Christians 
with the Messianist Jews in Nero’s time. The words Messiah and Christos being 
equivalents, Tacitus simply dates back the Christians of the year 112 to the Messianists 
of 64 who were not yet Christians. There was a false Messiah in Judea in 60-63 and 
another as early as a.d. 45, according to Jahn, Hebrew Commonwealth, 368, 374. An 
impostor or false Messiah appeared in Samaria in Pilate’s time.—Jahn, p. 358. Antiqua 
Mater, p. 5, infers that Tacitus could not have known the distinction between believers 
in a Messiah and believers in the Messiah Iesu. Tacitus does not mention the name 
Iesu, but merely Christus. Antiqua Mater, p. 14, note 2, expresses a strong doubt of 
the genuineness of the passages in Pliny and Tacitus. No Jew would have called Iesu 
by the name Christus ; and if Tacitus had received the information from any other 
source the name, Iesu or Iesus, must have accompanied it. 

1 The ideal figure of Simon the Magus doubtless represents the ‘ glorification of 
Christianity ’ in the Gnostic preaching. And the conclusion is probably that in the 
Gnostic movement we see the real beginning of the conquests of the Christiani, in other- 
words, the victory of Hellenic religion and speculation over the narrower and less 
flexible spirit of Judaism.—Antiqua Mater, 50, 51. See Hilgenfeld, Ketzergeschichte and 
R. A. Lipsius, Die Apokr. Apostel Gesch., 1883. We see some of this in the Logos- 
writings of Philo Judaeus. Philo studied Greek philosophy. Philo mentions no Iesu, 
Elxai mentions no Iesu, the Apokalvpse originally (as we think) mentioned no Iesu, be¬ 
cause the Lamb is the Adon, and Jews wrote the Apokalvpse.—Rev. ii. 9, vii. 4-9. 


716 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


this account he was called their Saviour. His priest watched 
his tomb to midnight of the vigil of March 25th, in loud cries 
and in darkness, when suddenly the light burst forth and the 
priest cried, Eejoice, Sacred Initiated, Your God has arisen! 
His death, his pains, and sufferings have worked your salvation. 
—Mankind, by a Baliol College M.A. pp. 487-489. A similar 
ceremony takes place every year at Easter in the tomb of the 
Sun at Jerusalem. “ The Lamb was dead and is alive again.” 
The Lamb restores all things. In Egypt a pile of wood was 
represented on a monument (engraved in Montfaucon, Antiq. 
Expliq. Supplem. pi. 51), composed of three heaps of wood, 
consisting of ten logs each, which number is equal to that of 
the decans of the first Sign (each sign 30 decans). On each 
heap is seen the Equinoctial Lamb, Aries, and above a huge 
sun, whose rays extend to the ground.—ib. p. 402. It was a 
tradition among the Jews, who transmitted it to the Chris¬ 
tians, that the Christos would come at midnight of the Yigil of 
the Pascha. The triumph of the Sun, according to the Persians, 
is his return to Aries or the Lamb. The sun of the equinox 
must always be drawn with the attributes of the Lamb. It is 
sometimes a Young Man leading a ram. sometimes with horns 
of a ram on his head, like the Libyan Ammon, whose throne 
was placed in the sign Aries ; sometimes a Slaughtered Lamb 
was represented, as in Eev. v. 6, 9. As the King, the Christos, 
the Mithra, the Saviour Angel is always the Sun he must be 
represented in Aries as the Spring Lamb slain. In scripture 
he is called by the mystic name, the Lamb. His mysteries are 
the mysteries of the spotless Lamb ; the world is renewed by 
the blood of the Lamb. The blood of the Adon slain by a boar 
is mentioned in Syrian and Sabian myths. Adonis dies March 
22nd and rises again the third day. Then the enemy of the 
Lamb, the great serpent, is cast down into hell, as in Ptev. xii. 
7-12; xx. 2, 3. These were the Judaist Mitlira-Sabian mysteries 
beyond the Jordan. The Persians celebrated at the beginning 
of the New Year the sun’s entrance into the Lamb. Julius 
Firmicus, Profana Eeligione, 3, 8, 9, 22, 27, describes the Mys¬ 
teries that accompanied Oriental and Greek Messianism, the 
medium between Jewish Messianism and Greek Christianism. 
The Gnostics called their Christos Iao (the Sun). Compare 
Movers, I. 539 to 552-558; Macrob. I. xviii. 20. The Sun in 
Aries was called the Lamb because his Mysteries (of Adonis, 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 717 


Mithra, Osiris, Attis, etc.) were celebrated under the first sign 
of the zodiac, the Lamb, which commenced the career of the 
sungod.—Mankind, pp. 496-523 ; Jul. Firmicus, 8. 

Dicis etiam : x°“P 6 vv(x<pie } x°“P e v * ov • 

You say too: Hail Bridegroom, hail New Light.—Firmicus, 19. 

The Mourning for Adon, the Sun, the Lamb, and Lord is given 
in Jul. Firmicus, 8, 9. “ The sons of the Bridegroom cannot 

mourn while the Bridegroom is with them.”—Matthew, ix. 15. 
The Bridegroom is the Lord Sun in Aries. The Kingdom on 
high shall be likened to ten virgins, who taking their lamps 
(at midnight, March 25th) went out to meet the Bridegroom 
(the New Light of the risen Adon).—ibid. xxv. 1. Adon is the 
Bridegroom returned from Hades. The earliest emblems of the 
Saviour which the Christians allowed were the Good Shepherd, 
the Lamb, and the fish.—King’s Gnostics, p. 138. The Lamb 
standing on Mt. Sion!—Bev. xiv. 1. The Celestial Lamb is 
the Sun in Aries.—Mankind by M.A. of Baliol College, pp. 
427, 433, 436. He is the Adon who dies and rises again the 
third day. This is the ancient Syrian myth.—Lucian, Dea 
Syria, 6. The Twelve apostles of the Lamb in Rev. xxi. 14 are 
Twelve angels, says “ Mankind,” p. 412. The word Kurios 
(Lord) in Rev. xi. 8, 15, means the Father, not the Messiah. 
The same word Lord applies to both. See John, x. 30; xiv. 
10. Eusebius, H. E. vi. 38 says that the Elkesaites reject the 
apostles altogether. The Apokalypse seems to have done as 
the Elkesaites did! Here, then, we come upon the pre-apos- 
tolic status of Christianism. The Twelve are only Angels. 
The Apostles and their Gospels are a later invention. This 
explains Justin’s almost entire ignorance of the Apostles. In 
fact, Matthew tells very little about them. He mentions Peter 
and Zebedee’s children, like Justin. 


Dione, formerly fleeing from the terrible Typhon 
At the time when Zeus took up arms for Heaven, 

Came to the Euphrates attended by little Cupid 

And sat down on the margin of the River of Palestine. 

The poplar and reeds occupied the heights of the banks 

And the willows gave her hope that by these too She could be hidden. 
While concealed, the wood resounded with wind : She pales 
With fear, and believes to have fallen into the Enemy’s hands. 


718 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


And as She held in her bosom the Son She says: Help, 

Nymphs, give aid to TWO Gods! 

No delay, She leaped ; two twin fish held Her up : 

For which thing, now, you see, the stars have a reward ; 

Therefore they consider it forbidden to place this kind on the tables, 

Nor do the timid Syrians injure the mouths of fish.—Ovid, Fast. ii. 462. 

As the Apokalypse mentions the Starry Virgin and Child it 
certainly could not at the same time mention the human nature 
of Iesu. The God of Israel is the Eternal Wisdom united with 
the soul of the Messiah.—Knorr von Rosenrorth, Kabbala Denu- 
data, III. 271. But it is clear that the prophesy of the Virgin- 
born Sun coming on the clouds of heaven was read by astrology 
in the sign Virgo,—a Woman holding a child in her arms and 
nursing him.—Dunlap, Sod. II. 125 ff. and authorities there 
quoted. The Talmud forbids implements having the image 
of this Nursing Mother and Son. The Sohar, II. 76 a, says 
that the deepest secrets lie hidden in the constellations and 
stars. 1 Albumazar, p. 78, describes this Heavenly Nurse, the 

1 Milman says that in Mani’s theory the spirits of evil had been bound to the stars. 
Hence the malignant influence of the constellations.—Milman, p. 281. The Codex Na- 
zoria, I. p. 44, mentions the 7 and the 12 who govern the day and the night! The Seven 
and the Twelve were evil spirits in the Codex Nazoria. Norberg’s Codex Nazoria, II. 
p. 266, gives a bad disposition to Ruacha and Massiacha and Seven Stars and Twelve 
Stars. When Noldeke mentions the year 650 it must be remembered that in this col¬ 
lection of the Codex Nazoria (ed. Norberg) the names Gabarail, Anush (Anos), Setel, 
(Seth), Adam, and Massiacha (Messiah), as well as the Seven and the Twelve Stellars 
(or Stars) occur ; so that some of the ideas must be still older (from 300-600.—Brandt) 
than A. D. 650. Ihrer Grundlage, ja zum Theil ihrem Wortlage nach, mogen sogar 
manche Stucke noch in die Sasanidenzeit hinaufreichen.—Noldeke, Manda. Gram. p. 
xxii. That is from 230 to 300. The conception of a Jewish Messiah is as old as the 
Book of Daniel. Consequently, the Messiah, Gabarail (Gabriel), and Nazoria carry us 
directly to the time when Luke’s Gospel was written, which, according to the author 
of Supernatural Religion, is later than A.D. 150. Gabarael is the Man or Mind (and 
Word) of the Unknown Deity (—Exodus, iii. 2, 4), consequently, the Angel Gabarael, or 
Gabriel, takes the place of the Logos, as some Gnostics said. Religious prejudice should 
not prevent our notice of these historically associated connections. And the super¬ 
stitions of Jewish and Christian gnosis are not of sufficient worth to justify belittling 
the labors of the few sincere inquirers after truth (as it was supposed to be) in the times 
of the Nazorenes. The progress of mankind out of the natural status is not furthered 
by stifling history or teaching Jewish and transjordan superstitions. If the suggestion 
by the author of ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ that neither of our Four Gospels appeared 
before a.d. 150 is a well grounded suspicion, then we should look for a certain soreness 
in orthodox authors in approaching the period of Saturninus, Karpokrates and Kerin- 
thus (say, a.d. 135-138). Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius (I. p. 117 ed. Petau.), 
each in a different way, manifest sensitiveness when they come to Kerinthus. The 
only way a swordsman can tell when he is hit is by the pain he feels ; and this manifes¬ 
tation of feeling often apprises his opponent of what has occurred. It makes a vast 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 719 


Virgin and her Child. Judea and Galilee belonged to the sign 
Virgo, says Albumazar. When the morning of the Messiah 
shall come then shall the true Sun rise.—Midrash Samuel, fol. 
71. col. 1. But there is an infant Boy at the breast . . . verily 
the Boy Metatron who is called Sadi.— Kabbala Denudata, II. 
231; In trod, in Sohar. Finally John (Bev. xii. 1) gives us the 
Chaldaean Moongod or this very Zodiacal Mother, “a Woman 
who has come into possession of the Sun,” with the Moon under 
her feet. Here Metatron, the Angel Iesua (Bodenschatz, II. 191) 
appears as the Boy born of a Virgin. Consequently this horo¬ 
scope goes back to the time of Saturninus, to a.d. 100 at least, if 
not long earlier.—See Dunlap, Sod, II. 125-147. Among the 
Nazoria the Angel Gabriel was the first of the Aeons. Among 
some of the Gnostics the Angel Gabriel took the place of the 
Logos ; and in Luke’s Gospel he seems to take that very 
place. He is the Jewish Fire-angel Aqbar, Gabariel, Gabriel, 
and presides with the Archangel Michael over the hells. The 
introduction of the Chaldaean and Philonian Logos between 
the Father and Gabriel made the Angel of the Lord, Gabriel, 
the Messenger of the Logos. The Dialogue between Justin 
and Trypho Keim dates a.d. 160-164. The author of ‘ Antiqua 
Mater ’ dates Justin’s literary activity about the middle of the 
second century 147-167. But the Angel Gabriel takes the 
place of the Logos.—Irenaeus, I. xii. p. 86. And since Justin 
knows the “ Birth from the Virgin ” and since the Apokalypse 
refers to the Virgin and Son, we are forced to carry back the 
Virginal Birth, as dogma, towards a.d. 135 ; the astrological 
question becomes of considerable moment here, inasmuch as 

difference whether Justin’s “Euangelion” (the Gospel of the Nazorenes or the “me¬ 
moirs ”) were composed in 145 (?) or 160, or later. Justin knows (in about a.d. 160) the 
name of neither Matthew, Mark, Luke, nor John ; but only Peter, Zebedee’s children, 
and one nameless Evangel! The intense Judaism of the whole matter is exhibited in 
the Sohar (the Kabalah) and in those Old Testament passages that mention a king of 
Dauid’s line as well as in those that refer to the Angel-King as Saviour.—Isaiah, lxiii. 
9 ; psalm, ii.; Micah, v. 2. The Old Testament, in these passages, contradicts itself ; 
consequently the Christians who stuck to the Law and the Prophets must ex necessi¬ 
tate rei contradict one another. Karpokrates and Kerinthus evidently are witnesses to 
an early diverse interpretation of the Law and the Prophets in reference to the Jewish 
Messiah. The mere fact that Kerinthus stuck to his Angels show how closely he was 
connected with Jewish gnosis ; for we cannot read at all in ‘Genesis’ without coming 
across the Angel-gnosis of the Malach Iahoh, the Angel Lord. The Bible itself caused 
the split between the Nazoria of the East and the Western Fathers who followed a 
party in the East. Irenaeus himself was a native of Asia-Minor. The so-called Paul 
the same. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna the same. 


720 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


it is impossible to state at what period tliis astronomical 
theory of a Virgin coming into possession of the Sun first ap¬ 
peared. It probably existed already before the first century. 
Consequently it was current in the time of Kerinthus and Kar- 
pokrates ; and then perhaps Irenaeus would have correctly as¬ 
cribed to Kerinthus a knowledge of the theory (derived from 
astrology and the Kabalah) that Metatron (Iesua) had really 
been born of a virgin daughter of Abralim. Astrology, then, 
not fact, seems to have been one of the sources of this belief,— 
in which neither Simon, Menander, Saturninus, Kerinthus, nor 
Karpokrates took part as far as we know. The controversialist 
Irenaeus was not likely to get nearer to the views of Kerin¬ 
thus than what was current respecting the KerintKians ; and 
Irenaeus allows that Kerinthus was no believer in the immacu¬ 
late conception. Then he could hardly have believed that 
the Kingly Power of the Logos (Matthew, xxvi. 53), the Angel 
Iesua, the Saviour Metatron, was in any man ; for Kerinthus 
was a Gnostic : and these despised the flesh and adhered to 
the spirit. 1 This is subindicated even by Irenaeus in his 
statement that Kerinthus held that the King (the Christos) 
did not suffer, but continued pure spirit. The Angel Iesua had 
nothing to do with flesh. 

The Messias shall be revealed in the land Galilee and a certain Star appear¬ 
ing in the eastern quarter shall swallow up seven stars in the northern quarter 
of the heavens.—Sohar, part 1. fol. 119 ; Bertlioldt, 50. 

Whatever the Astrologer shall have said they will believe brought from the 
very fount of Ilammon.—Juvenal, vi. 552-4. 

1 The First Way is called the Secret Wisdom (the Highest Crown) and is the Light 
of the Primitive Intelligence (Maskal Kadmon).—The Jesira, 1. This book dates from 
the first century. 

In this first state the Infinite God himself can be understood by the name of the 
‘ Father’ which the Writings of our New Covenant so often use. But the Light being 
let down by the Infinite through a canal into the ‘ primal Adam ’ or Messiah, and 
united with him can be called by the name Son, can be referred (applicari) to the 
name Son. And the Influx let down from him to the lower parts can be referred to the 
character of the Holy Ghost.—Knorr, Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae, pp. 6, 7. 

Said R. Shimaon to R. Elieser his son: Elieser, at the time when the Messiah 
shall be revealed, how many signs and other miracles will give themselves to be seen 
in the world ?—Sohar, part II. fol. 8. Amst.; Bertholdt, 168. The Son is Seir Anpin, 
the Image of the Father.—Israelite Indeed, II. 64, 65. In the Hermetic Gnosis, the 
Father is Boundless Light. All things were revealed to me in a moment and I see a 
sight without bounds, all things having become Light.—Hermes, Poimander, 4. The 
Son is therefore called Light of Light, and Light of the world ; the 2nd century 
Kabalah is the basis of Christian gnosis, and the Essenism of the Iessaians the source 
of Christian morals and self-denial. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 721 


Seir Anpin (Short Face) is the Sun. —Dunlap, Sod, II. 125, 131, 
133, 138 ; Kabbala Denudata, II. 231; Sohar, III. fol. 91. Seir 
Anpin is the Soul of the Messiah joined with the eternal 
Logos.—Kabbala Denudata, III. 241. Seir Anpin was called 
King.—ibid. II. 391. The Messia becomes identified with the 
Angel Iesua and Mithra, Metatron and Logos.—Matth. xxv. 
40, 41. 

The duality of the divine nature was held by Chaldaeans, 
Sabians, Jews, and Egyptians. Therefore the Sonship in 
Adam is dual.—Gen. ii. 23; John, x. 30. The ‘great sign in 
the heavens ’ (Rev. xii. 1) brings in the element of transjordan 
and perhaps Ebionite astrology. The Chaldaeans represented 
the Moongod (Allah Sin) as hermaphrodite, therefore having 
come into possession of the Sun. The double gender is here 
distinctly indicated by the sun and moon being placed to¬ 
gether as emblems of the biune Light of the world (John, viii. 
12, x. 30 ; Gen. ii. 22, 23), Adam-Christos of the Ebionim. In 
the case of the Ebionites, the Diabolos (Adversary, in Persian 
lore) has always to be brought in as counteracting the Good 
Principle!—Gerhard Uhlhorn, Die Horn. u. Recog. p. 185 ; Rev. 
xii. 3-5. The Moonprinciple (very much in the style of the 
Primal Fire in the theory of Simon Magus) is male-female, 
and from Her is to proceed the Messianic Christos “ who is to 
rule all the nations (Gentiles) with an iron staff.” The Great 
Red Dragon (Satan) is waiting to destroy her Child the Mes¬ 
siah ; who is caught up to the throne of the God. The Woman 
significantly escapes into the Desert , where the Ebionites re¬ 
sided. Michael and his angels give the Satan enough to do. 
The war (of fate) must be fought out in heaven itself. The 
power of the Paschal Lamb is shown in the conquest of Light 
over Darkness, for the blood of the Lamb may be regarded as 
shed in the fray with Darkness, in which Mithra-Christos is 
the victor. The ‘ accuser of our brethren ’ is then the Adver¬ 
sary, the Devil. This is symbolical of the contention between 
Ahuramasda and Ahriman! Alas for the earth and sea, for 
the Devil has come down to you!—Rev. xii. 12. Now if the 
author of the Apokalypse identifies the Logos with Mithra, 
Metatron (Mettron), the Angel Iesoua, and the Messiah, he is 
speaking of superhuman essences, or natures, and their contest 
with Aliriman-Diabolos in heaven and oh earth ; therefore his 
theme is not the man Jesus, but the Lamb, the Saviour Angel 
46 


722 


THE GHEBER& OF HEBRON. 


Mithra who is Angel Iesua, in Isaiah, lxiii. 9 and Bodenschatz, 
II. 191. The Starry Virgin and Her Child belong to ancient 
astrology, Her Child is the Lord of Light, Metatron, Mithra ; 
and speaking of entirely superhuman personae and the con¬ 
flict between Light and Darkness, the Holder of the Seven- 
planet Candlestick and the Lamb with 7 horns (orbits) and 7 
eyes (planet-stars), the writer does not mention the virgin of 
flesh nor a child in human flesh, but the Adon, the Son in the 
Sign Virgo when the moon makes a conjunction with the sun 
in that sign. It is true that the Messiah had come to be re¬ 
garded as a being in heaven. The Sibylline Book treats the 
£ king ’ as one to be sent from the Sun. Therefore Bev. v. 5 
treats the Messiah as 4 Son of Dauid ’ nominally, either be¬ 
cause the two expressions had come to mean the same, or else 
because the expression could easily be inserted, in manuscript 
times, before printing was invented. Consequently, the first 
draft of the Apokalypse preceded all the four Gospels ! That 
it preceded the Gospel according to Peter is probable, since 
it mentions the name of no apostle. The warning ‘ I come 
quickly ’ might suit any Messianist work after a.d. 70-80. 
The Bevelation treats of no particular apostles, consequently 
it knew of no human Jesus, because the human Jesus is to be 
known through the Glad Tidings obtained through his 
apostles.—Matthew, x., xxviii. 19, 20 ; John, xx. 21. The whole 
conception of the Apokalypse is based on the Mithra mys¬ 
teries ; and the conflict between the powers of Light and Dark¬ 
ness. Salvation was preached from the Jews, as the Apoka¬ 
lypse shows, or at least from the Ebionites, as we have shown. 
—Rev. v. 9, vii. 17, xi. 12, xii. 10, 11, xiv. 1, 4 ; John, iv. 25, 
xii. 34. Rome seems to have been regarded by the author of 
Revelations as in league with the Adversary, and the burning 
of Rome is foretold.—Rev. xvii. 9 ; xviii. 9, 10. Adrian’s treat¬ 
ment of Jews and Jerusalem after Barcocheba fell, about 134, 
would not encourage any Jew of the 12 tribes to hope for 
Rome’s destruction ; consequently, it must have been while the 
hope of Messianism lasted, that is, prior to 134-5 that the 
Apokalypse was written: and it looks as if the Christians after¬ 
wards found suggestions in it that led to the ultimate compo¬ 
sition of the Gospels. 

Like the Lamb in' the Apokalypse, the Lion also is an em¬ 
blem of the Sun. Seven Angels serve before God’s Holy veil. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 723 


—Pirke Eliezer, iv. 1 The Hebrew God will reveal his Mes¬ 
siah.—Jon. ben Usiel to Zachar. iv. 7. 2 Croesus sent to Delphi 
a golden lion. On an Assyrian seal is found the impression of 
a king, attended by a priest, in act of adoration before a Deity 
standing on a lion and surrounded by Seven Stars.—Layard’s 
Bab. and Nin. 154. It is the Logos in the centre of the Baby¬ 
lonian Seven Planets, standing in his emblem the sun. As the 
Mithra is the King, the Christos, we find the same symbolism 
in Revelation, i. 16, 17 ; iv. 5 ; x. 5 ; xix. 11, 13 ; Exodus, xxv. 37. 
It is the Chaldaean God of the Seven Rays, who appears as 
the Lion of Judah in Rev. v. 5. Revelation is prior to the 
Gospels. 

The Ruha (the spirit) and Msiha were included by the 
Mandaites in the number (Seven) of the planets.—Brandt, 126, 
127. Among the Mandaites they are regarded as Seven Devils, 
and Nebo is their Messiah. The first day of the week, dies 
solis, was sacred to the Sun as chief planet in the system of the 
old astrologers, 3 to Apollo by the Hellenes, to him who is 
called by the Christians the Light of the world. Apollo’s 
circle of rays could not therefore be wanting to Christ who 
has the appellation Soter, Redeemer, which belongs to Zeus 
(Paus. Arcad. YIII. 30), Helios {Ibid. 31), Dionysus and Hera- 
kles. First-fruits to the Lamb.—Rev. xiv. 4. Christ obtained 
this designation because the Heathen-Christians interchanged 
him with the very one who, in the month of the Lamb (Aries) 
wakes nature from her winter-sleep. Hence he is Waker of 
the Dead, 4 who has taken from death his sting, the Lamb of 
God as trampling on the Serpent, because the serpent-star 
Ophiuchus is a neighbor of Libra. In Spring, Mithra enters 
the sign of the Lamb, the Young Ram. 

Libra ariesque parem reddunt noctemque diemque 
Hac erit in libra cum lucem vincere noctes 
Incipiunt, vel cum medio concedere vere. 

So one equinox is the death of the other. In the autumn 
equinox the serpent had become the cause of the mortality of 
Adam, but in the Yernal equinox the other Adam had van- 

1 Gforer, I. 277. 

2 ibid. II. 82. 

3 Rev. xii. 1. 

* Compare the “ Wake ” of Herakles.— Dunlap, Sod, I. 123 ; Josephus Ant. viii. 5. 
Herakles is the spirit that strikes, overcomes and dissevers. Hence his club. 


724 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


quished Deatli, trodden upon the head of the Serpent. 1 A 
cock was painted on Apollo’s hand ; 2 and Krishna treads upon 
the Serpent! The cock was the Sun’s symbol. 

The cock crew. — John, xviii. 27. So Matthew, xvii. 2; Rev. i. 16. 

A Virgin Immaculate, comely in body, beautiful in face, modest in habit, with 
long hair, holding two ears (of corn) in her hand, sitting upon a golden throne : 
nursing a Boy, 3 and justly satisfying him, in the place which is called Hebraea; 
a Boy I say by certain nations named Iliesus, meaning Eiza, whom we call in 
Greek Christas who has risen with the Virgin as if sitting on the same throne 
and not touching ; at the same time also the star of the ear of corn which is the 
end of the Serpent.—Albumazar. 4 

Ovid’s Yenus accompanied by the little Cupids, at the Pa- 
lestina water, is the Mighty Mother, the Primal Mother, the 
Mother of all that live ; and Eros is the dawning Sun.—Max 
Muller, Comparative Mythology, p. 81. In framing creation 
Eros is the vicar of Zeus; so Serosli took the place of Or- 
muzd.—Ernest de Bunsen, p. 61. The by John described Woman 
(Rev. xii. 1, 5, 13) with the Child (Messiah) is not Maria, the 
mother of the Son of Dauid, but she is the Heavenly Wisdom, 
the Unspotted Yirgo who in the sun’s tent dwells with God. 
(—Ernst von Bunsen, Symbol des Kreuzes, p. 131 ; Psalm, xix. 
4, Septuagint Greek). On account of this union of the Wis¬ 
dom or Sophia with the Sun moving each year into his 12 
Houses John describes the Woman as the Sign in the heavens 
clothed with the Sun, witli Luna under her feet and on her 
head the Crown of the Twelve Signs.—ib. 131. The Child 
caught up to the God’s throne may be Greek-Christian, or 
apostolic Christian ; but the connection between Yirgo and 
Luna savors strongly of a sort of Hellenist-Sabianism (or Greek 
Sabianism if there was su£h a thing) that hardly could have 
been confined to the first century of our era. In the Crowned 
Woman with the Moon under her feet can we not see the 
“ Queen of heaven ” (—Jeremiah, xliv. 17-25), the Eua-Atliena- 
Yirgo (whose symbols were the moon and owl), the Regina 
Deum of Yirgil ? The association of the Serpent (Rev. xii. 5, 
14) with this Luna-Woman reminds one of the antagonism be- 

1 Nork, Bibl. Mythologie, II. 365, 366. 

2 Plutarch, Pyth. Priest, 12. I 

3 Horus, Apollo, Paian, Iesua the Saviour Angel. 

4 Albumazar, Intr. in Astronomiam, p. 78. He wrote expressly from the Persian 
astrologers. Dunlap, S5d, I. 129. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 725 


tween the Good and Evil Principles (—De Iside, 8, 10, 18). 
The King Osiris (Light of the world) is ambushed by the de¬ 
vices of the Diable (Typhon. Satan) who, hunting near the 
moon, finds the vessel (the ark or body in which the Good 
Principle is contained) and tears it into 14 pieces (or days). 
Which the element of Darkness might be expected to do. 
Here in the Apokalypse (a.d. c. 125-138) we find the Virgin 
Mother of all life likewise pursued by the Adversary until the 
Saviour (Osiris-Messiach-King) is caught up to the throne of 
the God (—Kev. xii. 5) as in Daniel, vii. 13. Daniel and Plutarch 
de Iside both belong to an earlier period than the Apokalypse, 
and St. Matthew’s Virgin Maria is evidently a still later form 
of the Sabian myth ; for in all but Matthew’s version we meet 
with only the supernatural and superhuman forms of the Sa¬ 
viour Principle. In the evangels, however, the flesh is intro¬ 
duced in the case of the Virgin and Child; and this of neces¬ 
sity : for how otherwise could a teacher of several chapters full 
of Essene-Iessaian legislation, morality, self-denial, mortifica¬ 
tion of the flesh, and holding out the chance of saving the soul 
by crucifixion of the body, have been introduced as a preacher 
of the Kingdom except in the flesh ? The evangelist was an 
Ebionite. He knew that the successfulness of preaching de¬ 
pends more on preaching old saws than on new truths. Es- 
senism, Judaism and the Messiah, these were his topics, rein¬ 
forced by miracles. If they crowded to John’s baptism without 
one miracle what would they not receive when supported (quod 
scriptum) by miracles in writing ? 

Was there not a cave at Bethlehem where Adon (Mithra) 
was adored in a.d. 386 ? Justin Martyr and St. Jerome say so. 
Was there a Iesu among the Iessaeans ? Josephus had an 
opportunity to mention one, if there had been such, in liis 
accounts of the Essenes. The name Iesu is mentioned in writ¬ 
ings that apparently are posterior to a.d. 100. Iesua, however, 
is the name of the King of the angels (Mettron, Mithra), the 
Christos of the Kabalah. 1 There were two sorts of Sabians 
about a.d. 900: one sort recognized Iesu Christos as Prophet, 
the rest adored the Sun . 2 This represents views as early as 

1 Messiah means Anointed, Christos, Metatron, Mithra, Sosiosh.—Rev. xix. 11. 

2 Chwolsohn, die Ssabier, I. 192. Zeus is the Sun. Zeus-Belus is the Chaldean 
Saviour. “ And there is there a temple of Zeus the Saviour, and as you go in there is 
a fane where the Argive women mourn Adonis.”—Pausanias, II. 20. 6. Apollo is the 


726 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the 2nd century probably. This is possibly Sarapis; for Lep- 
sius found a temple in Gebel Dochan dedicated to £c Zeus-He- 
lios-Serapis.” Metatron stands before the Throne ; the Anoint¬ 
ed King has been appointed to reign over all hosts.—The 
Sohar to Gen. xl. 10. The Essaeans and Therapeutae were 
Sun-worshippers and Mithro-baptists. The Spirit of Alohim 
is the Spirit of the King Messiah.—Sohar, ibid. The religion 
of the Sabians is that of the Old Chaldeans. 1 These adored 
Mithra and Adonis in the cave ; the Jews in the Grotto at 
Bethlehem. The Tradition calls the shortface (Seir Anpin) 
the ‘ King.’—Kabbala Denudata, II. 391. “ The Sabians are,” 

says Chwolsolin, “ a sect of the Jews and Christians, who shaved 
the middle of the head, prayed to the planets and angels, and 
deprived themselves of virility. 2 The Apokalypse is Sabian, 
because it represents Iesua shining as the Sun, in the very form 
of the Chaldaean Sun, with crowns, and on a horse. 3 Jordan 
was the beginning of the Nazorian writings and the Nazarene 
evangels. 

Apollonius of Tyana in Kappadokia, of an ancient and 
wealthy family, was born about the commencement of the 
Christian era, became a Pythagorean, denied himself, refrain¬ 
ing from animal food, going barefoot, and was initiated into 
the mysteries of the healing art. He resided chiefly in Pam- 
phylia and Kilikia, for five years passing through the Pytha¬ 
gorean discipline of silence. Isaiah is referred to as going 
barefoot for three years, and the sole use of the words yea and 
nay, in Matthew v. 37, without further intercourse may be re¬ 
garded as Pythagorean. Apollonius went to Antioch and 

Grecian Saviour and Healer. Aeskulapius raised the dead and healed the sick.—Pau- 
sanias, II. 27. 3, 4; V. 13’. 4. The same things are ascribed to Krisna, Chresno and 
Christos. 

1 Chwolsohn, II. 490. 

2 ibid. I. 187, 635 ; II. 631, 633; so Isa. lvi. 3, 4 ; Matth. xix. 12. Genesis, xix. 2 
calls the angels Lords. So does Codex Nazoria, II. 56, 57. It stands on the Old Tes¬ 
tament footing. 

8 Rev. i. 12-16; xix. 11-15; Matthew, xvii. 2. Dionysus (lacchos) liberates the 
souls.—K. O. Midler, Hist. Greek Lit. 238. The lion is the emblem of lacchos 
(—Nonnus, xliii. 2, 7), Apollo and Mithra (Rev. v. 5). Ia’hoh (IacAoh) raises the souls 
(l Samuel, ii. 6), and Sokrates related on Magian authority, that the soul departed to 
an uncertain place and that those who have partaken of the Mysteries have the best 
place in the regions of the pious.—The Axiochus, 19, 20 ; so Rev. iii. 4 ; vi. 9, 10. The 
Chaldaeans call the God Iao instead of the Mind-perceived Light; and he (Dionysus) 
is often called Sabaoth, signifying that he is above the Seven Circles (of the planets).— 
Lydus, de Mensibus, 83. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 727 


Ephesus. He claimed to have raised the shade of Achilles, 
and is said to have cast out a demon. The inhabitants of 
Tyana dedicated a temple to his name, the Ephesians erected 
a statue to him under the name of Herakles Alexikakos, for 
delivering 1 them from the plague, Hadrian collected his letters, 
the Emperor Severus regarded him as a divinely inspired per¬ 
son, Caracalla erected a temple to him. His doctrines seem to 
have been extremely moral and pure. 1 The narratives in Phi- 
lostratus and Lucian are among the most remarkable 4 evidences 
of Christianity ’ in the true sense of that phrase. They throw 
light upon that intense yearning after a Saviour God and after 
salvation in the comprehensive acceptation of the word, and 
upon that strong 4 disposition to believe ’ that the dreams of 
the heart have been realised, without which the luxuriant 
growth of religious legend cannot be understood. We must 
hold that the 4 tragedy ’ of the Tyanean was known by heart in 
Asia Minor at the same time that the tragedy of ‘ the impaled 
sophist ’ in Palestine, as Lucian speaks, was known ; and that 
the coincidences between them are due to the common life in 
the supernatural from which they sprung. Apollo and Askle- 
pios were deities chiefly worshipped in Asia Minor and Greece. 
The divine human being of the new rite was opposed to other 
names long cherished in the Hellenic heart. The practical 
X?roof that the idea of the Virgin-born came from Hellenic re¬ 
ligion we derive from the Apologist Justin himself. 2 We have 
seen that the Ebionite and Gnostic tradition of the Son of Jo¬ 
seph was in all probability the elder; and if so, the transition 
to the tradition of the Son of the Virgin Mary sprung up on 
ground where Hellenic beliefs had taken root. 3 In the teletae 
(contemporaneous with the life of Apollonius) Apuleius found 
no reference to Christiani or Cliristus : the deities honored are 
Serapis, Isis (the many-named Queen of heaven), Fortuna and 
Mithras the chief priest. And yet—removing these names— 
there is nothing of which the description in general so power¬ 
fully reminds us as the actual ceremonies of the Greek Church 

1 Alexandros (who was taught by the trainer of Apollonius, and followed just after 
him) said that Pontus was full of atheists and Christiani. At a telete (a sort of mys¬ 
tery) that he held, he, in a proclamation similar to the one made at the great Eleusinian 
mysteries, solemnly warned away atheists, Christiani and Epikureans.—Antiqua Mater, 
264. 

2 Ant. Mater, 266; Apol. I. 21; Trypho, 69. 

3 Antiqua Mater, 266. 


728 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


at the present day, which again lineally descend from the 
ancient Mysteries. The connection with the Christiani is 
through the Gnostic or Pythagorean teaching of the Monad, 
"the beginning of all, and the cause of all good things.—Anti- 
qua Mater, 266-9. The spiritual essence needed neither name 
nor form. To Serapis or to Christ the public w T as ready to 
bow. The study of Hellenic philosophy and religion leads to 
the acceptance of Christianity. The conclusion seems to hold 
good that the New People and the New Religion were of Gen¬ 
tile rather than of Jewish origin. Prom the first the charges 
of magic and association with the Mithra-mysteries were 
brought against the Christiani. The Gnostics from about the 
middle of the 2nd century bore and propagated the Christian 
name. They were the real depositaries of the evangelical 
tradition. They had reached the real meaning of the Mysteries. 
The Mysteries of Dionysus and Herakles prepared the way for 
the New Mysteries of the Christiani. These last would never 
have been heard of but for that syncretistic system of doctrine 
and practice combining Hellenic and Oriental mysteries, 
founded by Simon and his followers and propagated in the 
congenial soil of heathendom.—ibid. 282 ff. 

Serapis is the Logos of St. John. 1 The noble manhood of 
the god (Serapis) sat with dignity on a golden throne that was 
covered with a blaze of jewels ; his gracious and solemn face 
looked down on the crowd of worshippers. The hair that 
curled upon his thoughtful brow and the kalathos 2 that crowned 
it were of pure gold. At his feet crouched Cerberus, raising 
his three fierce heads with glistening ruby eyes. The body 
of the god—a model of strength in repose—and the drapery 
were of gold and ivory. In its perfect harmony as a whole 
and the exquisite beauty of every detail this statue bore the 
stamp of supreme power and divine majesty. When such a 
divinity as this should rise from his throne the earth indeed 
might quake and the heavens tremble! Before such a Lord 
the strongest might gladly bow, for no mortal ever shone in 
such radiant beauty. This sovereign must triumph over every 
foe, even over death—the monster that lay writhing in im¬ 
potent rage at his feet! 3 As late as a.d. 361 we find the Em- 

1 John, Gospel, i. 1-4; Matthew, iii. 11, 12; Colossians, i. 16. 

2 The Modius, or measure of corn. 

3 Ebers, Serapis, 240, 241. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 729 


peror Julian writing of Serapis, Apollo, the Mother of the 
Gods, and the old Greek religious mysteries and philosophy, 
which still survived among the learned citizens of Rome about 
two centuries after Markion (c. 150-166) had taught and Justin 
written. 

One Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, is Sarapis.—Julian, Oratio, iv. p. 136. 

Observe the abundance of detail in the description of the ark 
of Iachoh Adonai in Exodus, compare it with the minute pre¬ 
scriptions concerning the ark of Serapis in the fourth part of 
the Zeitsclirift fur agyptische Sprache und Allerthumskunde. 1 
The inference is that the two religions had certain points in 
common, and that the Old Testament contains a late form of 
the Jewish public religion. Christians and the Jewish patri¬ 
arch attended service at the Temple of Serapis. 2 

The most ancient shrine of Serapis is at Memphis. Into 
this neither strangers nor priests can enter before they bury 
Apis. 3 Serapis is the name of him who orders the universe. 4 
The worshippers of Serapis are Christians, and those who call 
themselves followers of Christ pay their devotions to Serapis ; 
every chief of a Jewish synagogue, every Samaritan, each 
Christian priest ... all worship Serapis. The Patriarch him¬ 
self whenever he goes to Egypt is compelled by some to wor¬ 
ship Serapis, by others, Christ. 3 And even now (250 years 
after Christ) in the unfolding of the Holy Serapis verily the 
worship of fire and water takes place. When the chaunting 
priest appears and takes the water and the fire, then he stands 
up opposite the door and in the native tongue of the Egyp¬ 
tians wakes the God whose entire nature consists of blood and 
spirit. 6 This is the worship of Adonis-Ia’hoh 7 or Iacchos- 
Dionysus. The mixture of the worship of Serapis with that 

1 Art. Das Osiris-mysterium von Tentyra, p. 95. 

2 Vide correspondence between Trajan and the consul Servian. 

3 Pausanias, I. xviii. And they say that the Isis, after the death of Osiris, took 
an oath never again to receive man’s embrace.—Diodorus Sic. I. § 22. This is the 
Hebrew worship of the Queen of heaven, the Mysteries of the Bona (or Bena) Dea, the 
men not being admitted. tl Without our men, did we not make cakes to Her.”—Jerem. 
xliv. 19. 

4 Plutarch, de Iside, 29. 

3 Wilkinson, Mod. Egypt, I. 162. 

« Porphyry, de Abst. iv. p. 54. ed. Florentiae, 1548. Ptah and Apis are fire and 
water. Apis was kept at Memphis in the temple of Ptah. 

7 See Luke, xxiii. 27. 


730 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of Christ and other beliefs, says the author of “ Mankind,” is 
so clear in early Christianity that it is impossible to doubt it. 
Socrates tells us that when the temple of Serapis at Alexandria 
was demolished by one of the Christian emperors the mono¬ 
gram of Christ was discovered beneath the foundation. Serapis 
is a mystic number, seven letters, referring to the seven planets 
as in the Apokalypse. The tonsure of the priests of Isis and 
Serapis is exactly continued by the modern monks. 1 

According to Zoroaster there were two primeval causes, ex¬ 
istence and nonexistence. In the beginning there was a pair of 
twins, the good and the base. 2 United, those two created; the 
one created reality, the other, nonexistence. Angro-mainyus 
is the hurtful mind or spirit. Such is the original Zoroastrian 
notion of the two creative spirits who formerly were two parts 
of the Divine Being. There was the Good Mind creating good, 
true, and perfect things ; while all that is bad is traced to the 
Evil Mind. They are the two moving causes of the universe, 
united from the beginning and therefore called Twins. They 
are united in Ahuramazda himself.—Haug, Essays on the 
Parsis, 149, 150, 303, 305. The exact substance of this Zoroas¬ 
trian view is found among the Christian Ebionites in Syria :: 
posterior to 160 after our era. Satan appears among the Sons 
of the God in Job; and the Apokalypse, a work more than 
twenty years prior to the Clementine Homilies, points to the 
Adversary of the Messiali-Christ.—Bev. xx. 

The Persians were much like the Jews. They isolated the 
leprous, and, like the Jews, must not touch a dead body. 4 The 
Persians, 5 Chaldeans and Egyptians 6 held that in the first decan 
of the sign Yirgo rises a pure young maid, an Immaculate Vir- 

1 Mankind, p. 501. “ The Christ of the canonical gospels had several mythical 

prototypes, such as Horus, Iu-em-hept, or Khunsu, and sometimes the copy is derived 
from one original and sometimes from another. We shall find that as fast as the 
historic Christ of the four gospels disintegrates and falls to pieces the mythical proto - 
types reclaim and gather up the fragments for their own as with the grasp of gravita¬ 
tion.”—G. Massey, II. 416. 

2 TheDiabolos (Diable) and his angels.—Matthew, xxv. 41. 

3 Uhlhorn, Clem. Horn, and Recog. 185. The Divine Wisdom produced the bad 
Kain first, Abel second. Darkness before the Mourned. 

4 Nork, Braminen und Rabbinen, 92, 93, 94; just after death, in a dead man’s 
house the water is emptied from vessels. Euripides mentions the holy water placed at 
the door of the departed. In Egypt the waterpot precedes every ceremony in the 
temples. The holy water purified. 

5 Hyde, 385 ; Abulpharagius, 54. 

8 Albumazar, p. 78. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 731 


gin, holding in her arms and satisfying him, nursing the Boy 
Eiza, in the place called Hebraea. 1 The Persian at the age of 
fifteen assumes the girdle ; the more religious Jews would not 
say a benediction or utter the name of God without putting 
on the girdle. 2 In the Clementines, Peter denies the fall of 
Adam, naturally, since Adam is the Man, the Crown; the world 
of the Kabalist balance (of the two sexes) issues from him, and 
he is the Son of the God, being a hermaphrodite deity, and 
having in him the souls of all the Israelites. 3 If the represen¬ 
tation of a Nursing Mother is found and a Sar Apis, then the 
Nursing Mother is to be referred to the name of Eua (Eve) who 
nursed all the entire world. Sar Apis refers to the name of 
Ioseph who ruled and satisfied the whole entire world. He 
carries a measure ; and so She carries Her Son, and so suckles 
him.—Talmud Tract, Avodasara, p. 43. Amsterdam ed. Dr. 
Cruse translated the passage. Ewald, Abodali Sarah, p. 303, 
writes : “ When one finds implements on which stands the rep¬ 
resentation of a Nurse or that of Serapis, then these are for¬ 
bidden. The Nurse means Eva who was the wet-nurse of the 
whole world; Serapis means Ioseph 4 who was a prince and 
provided the whole world with bread and thereby appeased 
men. Only then is the image of a man forbidden when he has 
a measure in his hand, and the representation of a Nurse, when 
she has a Son in her arms.”—Compare Ezekiel, xl. 3, 5. The 
measuring reed was a supernatural symbol (Ezekiel, xliii. 2-7), 
and Sarapis was the Great Divinity of Alexandria. The Egyp¬ 
tian statue of a Goddess with the Child in her arms (—Wilkin¬ 
son, Modern Egypt, II. 6) represented Eua (Issa, Isis, Eva); and 
Vergil, Eclogue, iv., mentions the Mother with the Little Boy, 
delayed ten months; while Cicero refers the Birth of Jove to 
the Rise of the constellation Virgo.—Cic. N. D. I. 15. This is 
Ammonios (the Kabalist Wisdom, Amanuel), Ha Aur, the 
Light, Horus. “ The Lion and the Virgin, whence will be the 
ripening of the grape.” — Nonnus, xii. 37, 38. Since the Magi 
saw the Saviour Star, we must find the origin of Christianism 

1 Albumazar, Intro, in Astrom. p. 78; Univ. Hist. V. 418. 

2 Aloysius Novarinus, Schediasmata Sacroprophana, ed. Lyons, 1635. p. 8. 

3 Kabbala Denudata, Introductio in Sohar, pp. 205, 311. The Magus knew the 
pater and mater, of the Kabalist Tradition in Adam. 

4 Asaph was an Arabian Deity. Compare Seb, Sabi, Sabos, Sev, = Saturn. Sapliir 
was Asaph’s city. Io Sev. Ioseph is probably a Kabalist form of Saturn or Diony¬ 
sus =■ Kronos. 


732 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in connection with Jewish and Sabian Astrology, Magism and 
Kabalah. The Magusha in the Syriac Testament and among 
the Persians signified men famous for wisdom as well as for 
religion. Thus Magi from the heavens recognised the Messiali 
before the Jews acknowledged him in their scriptures.—Com¬ 
pare Wolfius, p. 12. A Star shall arise out of Iaqab.—Num¬ 
bers, xxiv. 17. The square on the head of the coffin always 
contains the Euler of the sun’s House Virgo, and as Isis some¬ 
times signifies the female Sun, she expresses the Virgo as 
Mistress of the House. 1 The Persians also had the sign Virgo 
and her Child Eiza (Iesu).—Dunlap, Sod, II. 128, 129; and 
authors quoted. The Messiah will first reveal himself in Ga- 
lilaia, afterwards a Star in the East will be seen.—The Sohar, 
fol. 74. col. 17, 18. Simeon ben Iochai, its prime author, died 
some years after a.d. 70 (—Gelinek, die Kabbala, p. 70). The 
King Messiah will be revealed going out from the Garden of 
Adan. 2 And he will be revealed in the land Galil, since that was 
the first place that was devastated in the Holy Land; there¬ 
fore he will be revealed there first.—The Sohar. 3 The Messiah 
ben Dauid will go forth, but to him another Messiah will be 
added, the Son of Ioseph—Sohar, III. fol. 82. b. But after 72 
weeks the Messiah shall be cut off.—Dan. ix. 26. He will be 
revealed in Galilee, for there the Captivity began.—Ialkut Cha- 
dash, fol. 142. col. 4. 4 The entire demon doctrine of the Persians 
underlies Moses and the Gospels. Zoroaster lets the sun be 
created in the 4th period; Genesis, on the 4th day. From the 
Persian tree of life comes the form of a man and woman united 
in one ; and the Serpent of the Adonis-garden is Aliriman, 
Angramainyous. 

Est ager, indigenae Tamaseum nomine dicnnt. . . . 

Medio nitet arber in arvo.—Ovid, Metam. x. 

Now if in the Garden of the Messiah we place Ioseph (Sev, Sa¬ 
turn) and Maria (the Lady) we would have there the Adamus 
and the Eua. But some of the Elkesaites, Essenes, Ebionim 
or Sampsaioi said that Adam is the Christos.—Bishop Epi- 
phanius, Haer. xxx. 3. 


1 Seyffarth, St. Louis Akade'my. 

2 the Lord Adon. 

s Bertholdt, 77, 80, 81, 85, quotes these Sohar passages, 

♦ibid. 80. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 733 


Josephus, Ant. xviii. 1. 1, mentions the Taxation in the 
year a.d. 6 or 7, when Iudas the Galilean or Gaulanite and 
Saddouk the Pharisee protested against it.—Schiirer, I. 406. 
The Evangelist Luke refers to such a Registration (Census) 
by Quirinius, placing it in the last time of Herod the Great, 
that is, ten to twelve years too early.—Schiirer, I. 427, 431. 
Quirinius made but one Registration and that is the one re¬ 
ferred to by Luke.—ibid, 432, 447. It was the first one ordered 
by Augustus in Judaea, and could not have been made until 
after the death of Herod and after Judaea became a Roman 
Province (which it was not in Herod’s lifetime). It is ridicu¬ 
lous to suppose that all the nation was to be turned out of their 
homes and compelled to travel about the country to find a place 
of family origin to be taxed there.—Schiirer, I. 437, 438, 439. 
St. Luke was necessitated to take this course and make such 
a representation in order to point to the “ Son of David.” His 
object was to prove a Messiah to have existed in that period 
and to identify him as the Son of Dauid. So his way was clear 
to represent him in that light. If the Jews were likely to deny 
that such a Messiah appeared at the time mentioned so much 
the more essential was it to (if the fact could not be shown) 
demonstrate it by argument or offer a genealogy. Hence it 
was necessary for the writer’s purpose to make such use of 
Josephus as he could, and to superadd unhistorical statements. 
If we assume that the evangelists wrote historical novels about 
the Jewish Messiah, the whole mj^stery is cleared up at once. 
“Joseph could not, nor Maria with him, have been caused to 
journey to Bethlehem on account of a Roman Census.”—D. 
Emil Schiirer, Gesch. d. Jiidischen Yolkes, I. p. 437. The 
person who w'as to be estimated (for the purpose of taxation) 
had to appear and declare in his place of residence or in the 
chief place within the taxation-district; and a Roman Census 
could not be undertaken in Herod’s time (because he was a 
King and Ally, or Socius, of the Roman People, who alone 
governed, controlled, and taxed his own people).—ibid. I. 438, 
439. But when, in the year A.D. 7, Quirinius undertook to 
make a Census or Registration Herod the Great had been dead 
(ten to twelve years) and Judea had been made a Roman Prov¬ 
ince. Then a Roman Census could legally be taken. Luke’s 
misstatement was therefore made on purpose to show that a 
Son of Dauid existed at that period (in the days of Herod), and 


734 


THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the genealogies in Matthew and Luke were made up expressly 
as evidence to the same effect.—Matthew, i. 20 ; Luke, iii. 23, 
31. “ False in one particular, false in all ” is the ancient 

motto. Josephus begins his Eighteenth Book with the ac¬ 
count of the sending Kurenios into Judaea to make the esti¬ 
mate for this very taxation, and the efforts of Iudas the 
Gaulanite to induce the Jews to revolt on account of this tax. 
An uncritical population in Syria (filled with Messianic hopes) 
would not quarrel with the w'ay the register read, if it seemed 
to point to a Son of Dauid, as this was the aim of the Regis¬ 
ters of Matthew and Luke. But Josephus, Ant. xviii. 1. 1, 
gives a direct contradiction to Matthew, ii. 1-3, by showing 
that the Census was taken after the decease of Herod and when 
Judaea had become a Roman Province. Josephus, who is best 
instructed and especially thorough regarding the last years of 
Herod, knows nothing of a Roman Census in Herod’s time. 
The only Roman Census in Judaea was posterior to Herod’s 
time and in the year a.d. 7. — Schiirer, I. 444-447, 453. The 
evangelist has made an unhistorical statement.—ibid. 454. 
Herod died in the year 4 before our era.—Schiirer, I. 344. 
There could not have been a Roman census taken while Herod 
lived, and Josephus knows of none prior to a.d. 7.—Ibid. I. 
438, 439, 442, 443. 

Since the text of Josephus was of assistance in writing the 
evangels, it was natural to make a further use of his writings 
as a support of the Christian party. This could be done by 
interpolations sustaining the doctrines of the Christians. The 
passages in Josephus, Ant. xviii. 3. 3 and xx. 9. 1 (about Jesus 
Christ and Jacobus his brother) appear to be interpolations.— 
Schiirer, I. 456-459, 486, 487. Origen has read in his Josephus 
another passage about the death of Jakobus in which the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple is considered divine 
punishment for the execution of Jakobus; and this passage, 
being found in none of our manuscripts of Josephus, can be 
certainly regarded as a Christian interpolation.—ibid. I. 486, 
487 note. The Messiah-King was expected in about B.c. 63-48, 
and again in the time of Antony and Kleopatra—ibid. II. 
430, 431; Orac. Sibyll. III. 36-92, 46-50. The hagnos anax is 
the Messiah. The Jews seem to have admitted that the Mes¬ 
siah must suffer.—Daniel, ix. 26 ; Schiirer, II. 465; Justin, 
Dialogue, c. 68, 89. The travelling Iessaioi were called 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 735 


“ Brothers.”—Schiirer, II. 474. Josephus, Wars, II. 8. 4, has 
the expression ‘ Adelphoi.’ Matthew, xxviii. 10 has the words 
“ the Adelphoi.”—Codex Sinaiticus. Thus the Nazorene-Ies- 
saeans are identified with the Essaean-Essenes, in name, mode 
of life, cures, etc. even to the casting- out of devils ; but as a 
new sect, laying claim to the Essene foundations, there was 
some difference in the practice, as regards the use of wine and 
oil. 

There is no doubt of the predicament in which the early 
Church was placed in default of regular proceedings by coro¬ 
ner’s inquest. A corpus was as necessary then as now. No 
body was found.—Matthew, xxvii. 64; xxviii. 6. A physical 
resurrection was a sine qua non.—Antiqua Mater, p. 179. 
Justin, seeing the difficulty, refers to a mythical Acta Pilati. 
Irenaeus saw the same difficulty, and tried to make Kerinthus 
appear to admit the most difficult point that the Christians 
had to prove, namely, that Matthew’s Iesu was not absolutely 
a myth. The Church (as coroner) had to find the body! It 
never could, because of the doctrine of Saturninus, Salvatorem 
autem innatum demonstravit et incorporalem et sine figura 
putative autem visum hominem, which means that the Saviour 
was unborn, without body (asomatos), shapeless or without 
form, but in imagination (you would suppose) a man seen.— 
Irenaeus, I. xxii., xxiii. Irenaeus was adroit enough in his 
short account of Kerinthus to let him admit the very point at 
issue, the existence of Iesu. Irenaeus knew that it could not be 
proved, so he puts this important admission in the mouth of 
the other side! He makes Kerinthus say that Iesu suffered. 
How under heaven could Kerinthus have known anything 
about the matter?? When Epiplianius said that the ‘Ebion- 
ites decided that Iesu was sprung from the seed of a man,’ this 
statement puts the Ebionites on record as having made such 
an admission, 1 but we have no evidence to show that this set 
of Ebionites knew anything about the matter. This admis¬ 
sion does not supply the missing corpus! Very likely Kar- 
pokrates never heard of Petrus and Paulus ; but Irenaeus drags 
them into his account of Karpokrates by way of suggestion, 
exhortation, and illustration. This sort of argumentation may 
be dubbed suggestive sentimentalist. Irenaeus wrote his first 

1 Epiphanius lived between 350 and 403, and was an interested party. He was 
brought up by Egyptian monks and was averse to all liberal science. 


736 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


three books about 185-187.—Supernat. Bel. II. 213. Plutarch, 
learned in Greek and Eoman religion, touches on Jewish ab¬ 
stinence in food and on the ‘ mysteries of the Hebrews,’ but 
mentions no Christians. He died about A.D. 125.—Antiqua 
Mater, 1, 9. The questionable passages in Josephus are held 
to be interpolations. Antiqua Mater suspects that the roving 
apostles, missionaries, saints, and liagioi were the source 
from which Christianism ultimately proceeded. The apostles 
are not identifiable with any known historical persons.—ibid. 
34. 

Budha’s death was admitted to have occurred at B.c. 543. 
He was a King’s son. Which does not altogether remind one 
of the Son of Dauid, although both w T ere claimed to be of the 
royal line. There was a succession of Budhas expected in 
India (—Spiegel, Avesta, I. 37); and the legend of Krishna 
pierced with arrows 1 must have been known in Lower Baby¬ 
lonia, Arabia and Judea to the Iessaioi in the first century, 
since Hindu gnosis was already known to the Iessaians living 
in monasteria. The doctrine of self-denial is given by Philo 
and other writers; but the mythology of the further East also 
passed to the people of Palestine and the Jordan. The Essenes 
kept the names of their angels secret. There were three 
highest deities among the Sethians, 2 1st Man, 2nd Man, 3d 
the Light, which they called Christos ; Philo came out with 
his view that the Oldest Angel (compare Mithra, born Dec. 25th 
at Christmas) was the Divine Wisdom and Word of creation ; 
and Elchasai obtained from the East ideas that he spread 
among the Nazoria of the Jordan. His baptism was in the 
name of the Great and Most High God and in the name of the 
Great King his Son. He held also that there was one Christos 
above and one below, and that the last formerly dwelt in many. 
The Sethian view is very similar to the Nikolaitan doctrine 
that there were three ; 1st the Pather, 2nd the Only begotten, 
3d, the Logos true Son of the Onlybegotten. Irenaeus, I. 

1 See Zachariah, xii. 10. They shall look on me whom they have pierced. Here 
Justin could have made out a prophecy regarding either Krishna or Christos. In 
Persia it was expected that Caoshan? (the Helper) would come to annihilate the Chief 
of the bad spirits and his bands. 

2 They say that the Iesu is different from the Christos, but born from a virgin ; 
that the Christos descended, on Iesu, from the heavens : they denied the resurrection 
of the flesh of Iesu.—Theodoret, I. xiv. The Four Gospels answer this. Iesuah, in 
Hebrew means Salus, Safety, Salvator. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 737 


xxxiv. mentions another Three persons, the First Man, the 
Second Man, and Christos the third person of the Three. The 
point to which attention is drawn is that the Nikolaitans were 
gnostics, Early Christians, 1 and, like some of the other gnostics 
that Irenaeus refers to, held the doctrine of Saturninus and 
Markion. Irenaeus, III. xi. p. 257, says that the Nikolaitans 
held that the Father of the Lord is not the same as the creator, 
and that the Christos is not the son of the creator, but con¬ 
tinued without suffering (crucifixion) descending into Iesu the 
son of the creator, and flew back again into his own pleroma : 
and is the beginning of the Onlybegotten, but that the Logos 
is true Son of the Onlybegotten. It is obvious that for three 
hundred years the Incarnation of Yislinu in Krishna had been 
known when the Syrian Gnostics (led on by Chaldaean Gnosis) 
began to put forth systems of Logos-doctrine, Powers, Thrones, 
Dominions, 2 etc. in the regions between the Jordan and the 
Mediterranean seashore. The Babylonian and Philonian gno¬ 
sis with the secret mystery of the Candlestick in the adytum 
of the Jerusalem Temple joined to the doctrine of the King of 
Light weaving “ forms ” was known to the Initiated in the 
Hidden Wisdom of the Essenes, Iessaians, Nazoria, and all 
adepts in the Kabalah. This furnished the doctrine of the 
King as in Psalm, ii. and Apokalypse i. But the two natures, 
the Anointed joined to human flesh, may perhaps be derived 
from the Son of Dauid theory. The gnostics had not admitted 
the flesh any too readily.—Matthew, xxii. 45 denies that the 
Christos is Dauid’s son. But here were Budha, Krishna, and 
Caoshian^ all Messiahs, and the theory of a Jewish Messiah in 
full blast from a.d. 50-120, supported by psalm, ii. and Micah, 
v. 2. Two things are settled; the Iessaeans are Essene theo¬ 
logians ; and Justin Martyr tells the story of the crucifixion 
out of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. 3 But the expres¬ 
sion ‘ the Son of the Man ’ belongs to Palestine gnosis, as any 
one can see by reading Irenaeus. “ It remains for considera¬ 
tion whether the Jesus thus connected with Christ was not an 
ideal of Gnostic origin in that time of Claudius to which the 

1 Like the Iessaians, before Kerinthus.—Irenaeus, III. xi. p. 257; Epiphanius, I. 
pp. 117, 120. Petau. Our present Gospel of Matthew is not the Logia of Matthew 
referred to by Papias.—Supernat. Rel. I. 466. The ‘Oracles ’ did not mean a detailed 
history of Iesu.—I. 466. Yet Justin found it in the Gospel according to the Hebrews. 

2 Dunlap, Sod, II. 27, 28, 29. 

3 Supernat. Rel. I. 311, 324, 333, 421, 427. 

47 


738 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


arck-Gnostic Simon is referred.”—Antiqua Mater, p. 235. 1 The 
Persian Prophet and Messiah 2 is Caoshjang (Sosiosh), referred 
to in Revelation, xix. 11, by his Sosia chora the Sun’s White 
Horse: and the Jewish Sibyl said “then from the sun God 
shall send a King.” This is the Logos.—Rev. xix. 13, Greek. 
It is plain enough that until and after the Pall of Jerusalem 
a Messiah was expected to come ! Only a long time after its 
destruction could any one put forward the supposition that he 
had appeared in Pilate’s regency; and the name Iesua must 
have in some way been interpreted to mean an individual man 
instead of the Angel Metatron, the Malka Malachim. “ The 
Son of the Man sitting on the right of the power and coming 
on the clouds of the heaven ” (—Matthew, xxvi. 64 3 ) has a 
most gnostical look, and affords no resemblance to the two 
natures in Iesu,—being appropriate to the Angel Iesua alone. 
We find among the Valentinians (Irenaeus, 1.1. p. 38) those who 
held that one is the Onlybegotten, according to succession, 
whom they call the beginning, another was born Saviour, and 
another the Logos son of the Onlybegotten, and another the 
Christos produced for the rehabilitation of the pleroma. Let 
us see if this helps to explain the view above given as Niko- 
laitan. The Book of Daniel has the following gnostic succes¬ 
sion : the Ancient of days, the Son or Adam (Dan. vii. 13, 14, 
22, viii. 15,16) and Gabriel (also Michael). Genesis has Alohim 
then Adam the Son of God, both of duplicate gender. The 
Gnostic sect in Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. p. 134, has the First Man 
(the Father), the Second Man (Ennoia, Mind or Logos), called 
the Son of the Man; beneath thesp two we find the feminine 
ruacha; the Third Male is the Christos. Taking all these 
together with Daniel, x. 6, and Ezekiel, i. 26; viii.; x., there 
appears to have been Jewish gnosis enough to serve as a 
tolerable foundation for Nikolaitan doctrine. It looks as if 

1 ibid. I. 410, 411. Kerinthus and Karpokrates used a form of the Gospel of the 
Hebrews.—ib. I. 421. “The facts of a hundred years before Valentinus we cannot 
find conveyed by any continuous tradition: merely the belief that a drama in the 
celestial places had found about that date a denoument in Galilee and Judea the tragical 
end of which was explained away as an illusion.”—Ant. Mater, 221. It is clear that 
there were native Syrian or Palestine accounts (or gospels) which, if they did not satisfy 
St. Jerome, suited the Ebionites and Nazoria (Iessaians) as Messianic narratives. 

2 Dunker, Alt. II. 387, 388. But the Christian Messiah preaches Essenism.— 
Matthew, v., vi., vii., ix., x., xix.; and takes up the Messianic theory of the period of 
Roman occupation of Iudaea. 

3 1 Thess. iv. 17; 2 Thess. i. 7-9. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 


739 


whatever the gnostics before and after Philo had done, it be¬ 
came necessary to make of the Christians a sect independent 
of the Jews, early Messianists, and extremist Gnostics, with¬ 
out abandoning Kabalist gnosis entirely, but leaning towards 
the Nazoria and Ebionim in the Desert. To carry out such a 
scheme required the Gospels to be written. 

The three Magian kings are in Orion. 1 2 “ We know that 
the sign of the Virgin arose on the horizon when our Lord 
Jesus Christ was born. . . . All the mysteries of the divine 
incarnation and all the arcana from his conception to his as¬ 
cension into heaven have been indicated through the heaven 
and prefigured by the stars.” * The Virgin does actually arise 
in the east at midnight, at the precise moment at which the 
birth of Christ is fixed, and he was born on the very day that 
Mithra was made to be born, and he was presented to the 
people of the East in the shape of a child, as in the Mysteries. 
There is the sign that the Magi saw in the east. 3 Nowhere 
are the resemblances between Parsism and Christianity more 
frequent than in the descriptions which the ancients have pre¬ 
served of Mithra. The Mithra-mysteries are represented in a 
cavern, the Christian nativity in the grotto at Bethlehem. The 
ox and the ass are represented (in the Catacombs at Rome) 
around the couch of the new-born Mithra born Dec. 25th. 4 
“ Calling as witness the Rays of the Sun and the God of the. 
Hebrews: ” here the Heptaktis is no other than Sabaoth and 
the Hebrew God Iao. 5 The Angel Metatron includes all the 
Seven Angels that see the face of the King. 6 Here we again 
(in the Hidden Wisdom) have the Logos (the Son of the Man) 
holding the Seven Stars in his hand, 7 the Seven Planets in the 
control of the Logos, the Sun (Mithra) whom the mind alone 
can perceive. This is the Great Mystery of the Christos. 8 In 
Arabian tradition which goes back to the Babylonian Exile, 
in the Kabalah, Isaiah, lxiii. 9, and in Philo, the King of 
the Angels (Malak Iesua, Mettron, Metatron) is the Saviour 

1 Mankind, p. 475. 

2 ibid. 474, 475. 

3 ibid. 474. 

4 F. Nork, Mythen der alten Perser, p. 76-79, and frontispiece. 

6 Movers, I. 552. 

6 Rosenroth, Kabbala Denudata, II. 304. 

7 Exodus, xxv. 37; Rev. i. 12, 13. v. 6. 

e Colossians, iv. 3; 1 Tim. iii. 16. 


740 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and the Angel of the Divine Presence. He was named 
Iesua because he was the Saviour of souls. 1 2 The Angel 
of His Presence saved (—Isa. lxiii. 9) them in their afflic¬ 
tion. This was exactly what was required of a Messiah. 
Therefore the Messiah’s name after the Herod line termi¬ 
nated (if not before) was Iesua, a but as an Angel-King, not 
as a man. The ‘ Son of Dauid,’ at first sight, would sug¬ 
gest a human being. The Eoman War in Judea suggested a 
physical Iesua. The psalms suggested the Angel Son, with¬ 
out flesh. This idea was very early. But we see that in 115- 
120 Kerinthus had scarcely got beyond it. Yet, if the account 
in Irenaeus is to be trusted Kerinthus admitted that Iesus was 
a man, but not the King, the Christos. Take the Gospel of the 
Hebrews, it makes the Messiah out both divine and human. 
Take Justin who used it, he declares the Iesua to have been 
both divine and human. So that the period when Iesua be¬ 
came also Iesous is earlier than the ‘ Gospel according to the 
Hebrews.’ Our Pour Gospels are late workings over of pre¬ 
vious material. 3 It looks as if the miracles in the Evangelia 
Apokrypha were written to support the theory of the tw r o nat¬ 
ures.—ed. Tiscliendorf, p. 98. A sign from Iahoh your Alah, 
ask it in Hades or in the heaven.—Isaiah, vii. 11. Iahoh has 
created a new thing on earth : a Woman shall enclose Gabar.— 
Jeremiah, xxx. 22. Yirgo is the house of Hermes. “ We know 
that our Lord Iesu Christos was born when the Virgin was 
ascending.”—Albertus Magnus, de Univers (in “ Mankind,” p. 
474). Ascend, thou Blessed Virgin !—Euripides, Hippol. 1440. 
The Lion and the Virgin!—Nonnus, xii. 37. According to 
Abarbanel, the sign of Christ’s coming is the junction of 
Saturn and Jupiter in the sign Pisces.—King’s Gnostics, p. 
138. The Messiah, Hermes, lies concealed for nine months in 
Virgo. Mercury is that Power of the Sun, which is the author 
of speech.—Macrobius, I. 285, 305 (ed. bipont.). The Wisdom, 
which is Man and Woman (Adam and Eua) has through its 
Word created another Working Being who is God of fire and 
spirit.—Hermes, I. 30. Adoni himself will give you a sign. 


1 Bodenschatz, K. Y. II. 191, 193; Julian, Orat. Y. 173. 

2 There will be for them a Saviour. The Angel of His Faces will save them.—Isa. 
lxiii. 8, 9. 

3 Supernat. Relig. I. 293, 296, 397. Angelus Dei loquitur in eo.— Pseudo-Matthaei 
Evang. xxxi. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 741 


Behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and he shall 
call his name Amanuel!—Isaiah, vii. 14, Septnagint and 
Hebrew texts combined for this occasion only. 

When you shall see the kingdoms disturbed, one after another, then will 
you expect the Coming of the Anointed.—Beresith Rabba, § 41. 1 

The Son of Dauid does not come until the unjust sway of Rome 
shall have spread itself over the whole world nine months. 2 
Pompey deprived the Jews of the towns they had taken in 
Coele-Syria, annexing them to the province of the Roman 
Governor. 3 

When the expansion of the Gentiles shall happen then Israel shall be saved. 
As it is written, Out of Sion the Saviour will come.—Romans, xi. 26. 4 

From thee Bethlehem Ephratlia, from thee shall go forth, a Saviour whose 
goings out are from eternity, from the days of time.—Miclia, v. 2. 

The contest for supremacy (to the mind of the Jews) was be¬ 
tween Israel and Rome, according to Paul, Romans, xi. 25, 26. 
Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles until the 
times of the Gentiles are ended.—Luke, xxi. 24. The targum 
of Jonathan ben Usiel says that the Romans shall be rooted 
out. According to Matthew, iii. 2, 3, the time had arrived.— 
Mark i. 15. 

Certain Christians “ have altered the Good Tidings from 
its first writing threefold and fourfold and in many ways and 
remodeled it in order to be able to refute the arguments ” (of 
opponents).—Celsus ; in Origen contra Cels. ii. 27 (Greek Text, 
in Supernatural Religion, II. 282, 283 note). Celsus in the 
Latin text (Origen c. Cels. ii. 23. p. 435) says that certain of the 
faithful as if through drunkenness (ws Ik fxedrj s ^kovtus ek to 
rdvai avToU on guard against themselves) did as they pleased in 
changing evangelical scripture in three or four or many ways, 
so that as often as they are refuted they can deny what they 
have thus withdrawn. 5 It is undeniable that the gospels and 

1 Lightfoot, Hor. Heb. 640. 

2 Talmud Babli, Joma, 10. 1; Micha, v. 3. 

3 Josephus, Wars, I. vii. 7. 

4 Psalm, xiv. 7; cx. 2; Isa. lix. 20. The Old Babylon, as city, had in B.C. 130 al¬ 
ready disappeared. The neighboring Borsip, on the whole a moderate and unimportant 
city, still bore in 326 after Christ the name Babel. It was so called in documents.— 
Fuerst, 185 ; Talmud, Lucca. 34 b ; Sabbat, 36 a. See Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. 4, 5, 6. 

5 Origen’s reply is that the only alterations he knows of were by Markion, Valen- 


742 


THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


writings long current in the Church were very numerous.— 
Supernat. Relig. II. 383. Mankind, 376-379. About the Fourth 
Gospel, the same author says : It is undeniable that the writer 
had other Gospels before him when he composed his work and 
that he made use of other materials than his own.—Supern. 
Eel. II. p. 445. Now regarding the Evangelion, he gives a 
description of it which is borrowed from Justin Martyr, Apo¬ 
logia, i. 14 : “ Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by 
him ; for he was no Sophist, but his word was the power of 
God.” This is the exact description of Matthew’s fifth, sixth 
and seventh chapters. There you find the ^brevity and con¬ 
ciseness referred to, and there exclusively. The teachings of 
Iesu are based on the Essene sentiments given in Josephus ; 
hence Epiphanius called the Nazoraioi the Iessaians. This is 
plain enough. It speaks for itself. “ The facts stated by 
Papias fully justify the conclusion that our first and second 
Synoptics cannot be the works said to have been composed by 
Matthew and Mark. The third Synoptic is an avowed compi¬ 
lation by one who was not an eye-witness of the occurrences 
narrated, and the identity of the writer cannot be established. 
As little was the supposed writer of the second Synoptic a 
personal witness of the scenes of his history. The author of 
the fourth Gospel is unknown, 1 and no impartial critic can as- 

tinus, and possibly Luke ; not by the disciples. Here the author of * Supernatural Re¬ 
ligion’ shows that none of our Four Gospels are originals or written by the disciples of 
Iesu. He denies that any writer knew of them prior to A. D. 150. But when Origen 
says that the alteration is no fault of the evangelion (Origen, ed. Latin, II. p. 436), but 
of those that dared boldly to corrupt it, he appears to admit that Celsus was correct on 
that point. 

1 The discourses and dialogues of the Fourth Gospel are “not genuine reports of 
the teaching of Jesus, but mere ideal compositions by the author of the Fourth Gos¬ 
pel.”—Supernat. Relig. n. 469. The Jew of Celsus proceeds to reprehend the disciples 
of Iesu as the inventors of such narratives, adding that they could not even counterfeit 
the appearance of probability in their falsehoods.—Origen, contra Cels. ii. p. 435. Cel¬ 
sus had said that in the time of the passion Iesu felt neither pain nor disquiet: Celsus 
must have been a Gnostic Doketes, who held that Iesu was pure spirit and without 
flesh. Origen replies that the followers could not possibly have been deceived when 
they held Iesu to be the God pointed to in the oracles of the prophets. But Celsus was 
of the opinion that the Prophets did not refer to Iesu at all, although they might have 
meant a certain king, a Messiah perhaps. Origen had shifted the ground away from 
where Celsus was standing. Origen’s retort ‘ that it was easy to counterfeit such (nar¬ 
ratives) or not to write them at all, but unless these were contained in the Evangels we 
(Christians) could not be upbraided on account of Iesus having spoken as he did ’ does 
not prove that the N. T. narratives were genuine , but only that they were in the 
Evangels. Now Celsus questioned the Evangels and their contents. Therefore the reply 
of Origen begs the very question at issue. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 743 


sert the historical character of his narrative.”—Supernatural 
Religion, II. 481. Our three synoptic Gospels were composed 
after the destruction of Jerusalem.—Mankind, p. 382. 

The remarkably clear and accurate explanation in ‘ Super¬ 
natural Religion’ of the nature of our Four Gospels and of 
what is known of the character of the gospels that preceded 
these lays down a foundation for further researches. We may 
yet obtain a clearer view of a still earlier Christianism by ac¬ 
cepting the base of operations thus opportunely presented to 
us by an unusually careful statement of the materials that lie 
before us. We have in certain parts of the Gospel of Matthew 
and in Epiphanius an obviously Essaian-Iessaian basis, of which 
Josephus offers even an earlier substratum in his account of the 
rules for Essene communist life. We can go further and show 
its prototype in the Hindu Iatrikoi, Budhist and Babylonian 
Gnosis and Kabalist Messianic Tradition. The last is nearly 
Christianism ; and it is not a favorite with Jews : although in 
the first and second centuries a product of the Jewish mind. 

The Maria gave birth to the Anointed King and laid him 
in a manger where Magi coming from Arabia found him. So 
the initiated in the Mysteries of Mithra were initiated in a 
grotto in which Mithra is born Dec. 25th. 1 Justin Martyr 
mentions the resemblance between a Persian celebration of 
the Mystery of Mithra and the Christian “ Last Supper.” 
In the Mysteries of Mithra bread and water are laid out in 
the rites. 2 The so-called Daruns-offering is an offering of 
the holy loaves of bread. 3 The Persian confessional resem¬ 
bles the Romanist, the Haoma-offering is like the Mass, and 
there are other similarities such as the resemblance of the 
Persian zaothra to the Water of Consecration, the light always 
kept burning, etc. 4 Persians name Mithra the Mediator. 5 
The Jews and Persians expected a temporal as well as spirit¬ 
ual ruler who would make his people supreme over all their 
oppressors and also reform the religion. That the Kingdom 
should last a thousand years is above all distinctly uttered. 6 

1 Justin Martyr, p. 87. 

2 Justin, Apol. L p. 68. 

3 Spiegel, Avesta, II. lxxix. cxxiii. 

4 ibid, cxxii. 

5 Plutarch, de Iside, 46. 

6 Spiegel, Vend. I. 33; Zeitschr. D. M. G. I. p. 261. Compare the Chiliasm of Ke- 
rinthus. 


744 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Although the Persian view is nearly related to the Jewish, yet 
a Budliist conception has sufficiently close resemblance to it. 
All Budhists agree in expecting the coming of a new Budha 
named Maitreya who will take up the doctrines of Ka^yapa 
and convert many. The eschatology of the later Jews has the 
most striking similarities. Like the Persians they too let 
heavy trials go before the time of the Messias . 1 

The book Abqat Rokel divides the whole eschatology 2 into 
ten periods. Infidel kings shall reign, there will be great 
falling off on the part of those Israelites who are doubtful of 
the Redemption, many sorrows and trials are foretold to those 
that remain true. There will be great heat, sicknesses and 
pestilences, each will dig for himself his own grave. God will 
know how to deliver and preserve the just. Then he will let 
a dew like blood descend upon the earth, the bad will drink 
thereof and die, the good will not be harmed. Then comes 
another, healthful dew, of it the wavering drink. For thirty 
days the sun will be darkened. The Christians shall rule. 
The Jews will be persecuted, their number lessens very much, 
and for a long time they look dn vain for a Savior. Then 
Messias ben Iosef will appear, his name is Nehemia ben 
Chosiel, all Israel wfill hear that the Messias has appeared and 
will gather round him. He will conquer the king of Edom , 3 
he will bring again the Holy Vessels of the Temple to Ierusa- 
lem. Then, however, an Adversary will spring up, Armillus 
or Antichrist. He will say to the foreigners that he is the 
Messias ; they will gather round him and he will conquer all 
cities. Then Nehemia ben Chosiel will rise up and take the 
Law 4 and read to him: I am the Lord of life, thy God, thou 
shalt have no other gods with me ! Armillus will then desire 
the Israelites to pray for him, as the other peoples have done ; 


1 Spiegel, Vendidad, I. 35, 36 ff. “The First Power after the Father of all and 
Lord God is also Son the Logos.”—Justin, 1st Apol. p. 147. Mithra was Logos and 
Chief of the Izeds, in other words, the Archangel Son. 

2 The Abqat Rokel is Jewish and Messianist. It has the doctrine of the Mes¬ 
siah’s reign of a thousand years and the last judgment. Elias is Jewish (—Malachi, 
iv. 5), but also resembles the Jewish Sibyl in expecting the Last Judgment. Here we 
find a resemblance to the Apokalypse. These Judaean-Messianist writings are very 
much alike, but their Jewish traits show that they precede Gospel Christianism. Even 
the word Antichrist originally meant an opponent of the Jewish Messiah ; Armillus, 
for instance. 

3 A euphemism often for the Roman emperor ; like Antichrist for Nero. 

* This looks later than A. D. 70. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE ERIONITES. 745 


a fight will take place, Nehemia ben Chosiel will be killed 
and the angels shall carry up his soul to heaven. Hard times 
again follow for the Jews, they will be driven out of all cities 
and be forced to flee into the desert of Judah . 1 Then Michael 
will blow the trump, and with the first blast Elias 2 and the 
Messias ben Dauid 3 will appear, the Jews will assemble about 
him. Armillus likewise will collect his armies and a great 
battle follow, in which, however, Armillus is beaten. Some 
say that he will have to fight with Elias. Then Michael blows 
again the trump and the dead come to life that lie buried at 
Jerusalem. After a reign that shall last a thousand years 4 
the second resurrection and the Last Judgment shall follow . 5 
Here we have the Persian Mithraism, Budhism and Judaism. 
The Persian Sosiosh (the Word of God on the White Horse) 
will appear suddenly and unexpected ; he will quicken the dead, 
hold a Judgment, reward each according to his works, the old 
earth will die and a sinless one 6 be created . 7 He annihilates 
the power of Death . 8 The Persian great prophet to come 9 was 
Sosiosh, charged to prepare Ormuzd’s reign . 10 The logos on the 
White Horse was the Light of God , 11 the Horseman Sosiosh. 
Sosa meant horse ; and Sosios meant the Man on the horse. 

In the earliest times the ‘ being born again ’ was deeply 
considered. Yide the pyramids! The theory of the world’s 
being saved is referred to by Philo in these words : 

1 Compare Hadrian’s expulsion of all Jews from the Holy City. 

2 Elias was expected to come.—Matth. xi. 14; Malachi, iv. 5. The book Abqat 
Rokelmust draw from a source.later than 135, earlier than Matthew’s Gospel. 

3 Matthew, xxi. 15. 

4 Rev. xx. 3, follows this tradition of the Persians and Jews. 

6 Spiegel, Vendidad, I. 35, 36 ff. See Genesis, xlix. 1. The mention of the Jews 
driven out of all cities into the deserts points to a period later than 135-140. And Mat¬ 
thew’s idea that John the Baptist is 4 the Elias that was to come ’ may have been taken 
from the source of the book Abqat Rokel, posterior to both Titus’ and Hadrian’s expul¬ 
sion of the Jews from Jerusalem. Matthew, xi. 12-15 condenses the tradition above 
given of Jewish distress, and he has been timed (in Supernat. Religion) as of later date 
than A. D. 150. The Persian-Jewish tradition seems older than the Gospel reference 
to it. 

8 the Kingdom of the heavens. 

7 Nork, Bibl. Mythol. IT. 164, 165; Bundehesh, 31; Vendidad, Fargard, xix. 

8 Nork, II. 165. comp. Rev. xx. 13, 14. 

9 compare Matth. xi. 3. 

10 Renan’s Jesus, 15. sosa is Babylonian for horse. Sosios means the horseman. 
Vishnu, coming to slay the wicked. Perseus, Mithra. 

” Genesis, i. 4; John, i. 5; Tatian, p. 152. The Hermes were called 44 Logos that 
is sent from God.”—Justin, Apol. I. 68; Dunlap, Sod, IL 39. 


746 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


In wliat way will be the ‘ again being born’ 1 of all things dissolved into 
fire ? For their essential nature ‘ 2 having been destroyed by fire 3 the fire must 
of necessity be extinguished, being no longer fed. While, then, the fire con¬ 
tinued, the Seminal Principle 4 of the organised arrangement of the world 5 was 
saved ; 6 but when it has been destroyed 1 the Seminal Principle of the orderly 
disposition is destroyed with it. This is unlawful and indeed a twofold impiety 
not only to affirm the world's destruction but also to take away its rebirth, as if 
God rejoiced in disarrangement and ruin and all the sins. 8 

Of fire the form is triple : coal, flame, and the ray. . . . 

If then we should say that in the Conflagration of all things 9 the world is 
destroyed, it would not be coal, on account of the abundant earthy remains, in 
which the fire is necessarily contained. No one of the other bodies then sub¬ 
sists, but earth, water and air are dissolved into pure fire. And indeed not 
flame, for it is a bond of nourishment, and nothing being left it will at once 
be put out for want of fuel. And in addition, the Ray is not produced. For it 
has no entity by itself, but flows out from its precedents, coal and flame, less 
from the one, but much from flame. 

And the coal and flame, as was shown, having no existence in the total con¬ 
flagration, neither would there be any light; and the world cannot take re¬ 
birth, 10 because no seminal cause 11 is smouldering therein.—Philo, de Mundo,14, 
15. 

What is remarkable is that Justin Martyr 12 should have 
preached the Ekpurosis or Conflagration of the world in these 
words : The {prophetic spirit foretold through Moses that there 
will be Ekpurosis ; he said thus : “ Everliving fire will descend 
and consumes down to the Abyss beneath! ” Genesis, xlix. 
1, may have in view something of the sort. 13 Moreover, the 
Jews already had the doctrine of the beginning and the end, 
(the alpha and omega) and the apokastasis besides. Hence 
the NeAV Jerusalem ! 


1 palingenesia. So Rev. xxi. 1. 

2 ousia. 

3 compare Consummatio mundi.—Philippi, p. 44. 

4 the Spermatic Logos. 

5 diakosmeseos. 

6 esozeto. 

7 analothentos. 

8 failings : plemmelesi. ‘Ray is the apostle from flame.’—Philo, de Mundo, 15. 

9 Dies irae, dies ilia, solvet seclum in favilla ! See Malachi, iv. 1 ; Job, xxi. 30 ; 
Matthew, xxiv. 14; xxv. 13. Philos terms this the Ekpurosis. 

10 oTt ovSepiav fyOopoiroCov airiav evpelv ecTTiv out evrbs out’ ckto?, top Kocrpov ape Act : be¬ 
cause no destructive cause can be found, neither within it nor outside of it, that will 
destroy the world.—Philo, de Mundo, 14. 

11 medenos entufomenou spermatikou logou. 

13 Apologia, I. p. 159. 

13 Numbers, xvi. 30, 33, does not quite confirm Justin Martyr’s reading of Moses. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 747 


The Jew and Ebionite took from the Babylonian and Per¬ 
sian ; not from the Greek. The Persian prophesied the Mes¬ 
siah. Daniel takes it up, the Sibyl, the Book of Enoch, the 
Sohar, the book Abqat Bokel, the Apokalypse follow with 
the same idea. The Apokalypse is Hebrew-Ebionite-Diasporan 
in its Messianism, but written only in Greek. For more than 
400 years since Alexander died at Babylon the Greeks had 
been in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt. They had gathered 
the Messianic notions of the Persian and the Jew. The latest 
form of Messianic anticipation and prophecy appears in the 
Abqat Bokel; but it is the Persian-Messianist view, singular¬ 
ly huma7i in its Messiah ben Joseph, its Coming of Elias and 
the Messiah ben David. The Anti-Messiah (Armillus) seems 
not so far removed from the Apokalypt’s description of the 
conflict between Satan and Michael, and the millennium in the 
Apokalypse joins on to the millennium in the Abqat Bokel, 
just as its Last Judgment agrees with that described by the 
Sibyl, Henoch, and the Abqat Bokel. After all comes Mat¬ 
thew with his Elias and his Son of Dauid, as if to copy the 
second century sources of the Abqat Bokel, while the Apoka¬ 
lypse (which, although Messianist, is only known in Greek) 
does not mention Elias, but only the Son of Dauid. The Apok^" 
alypse is written in Greek and there is no pretence that it was 
written in Hebrew. But the Gospel of Matthew, being an orig¬ 
inal work in Greek , built up on the theory of Essenian-Ebion- 
ism, required the appearance of having been an original Jor¬ 
dan work ( c Jordan was the beginning of the evangels,’ said 
Cyril) and therefore was said to have been written in Hebrew. 
The Apokalypse, an earlier work, knows nothing of Matthew’s 
point of view, has no jjarables, no Crucifixion of the Messiah, 
but ranges itself, like the Messianist Jews, on the side of 
Messianism.—Bev. vii. 4-9. If the word Saviour was in it 
originally, it was written in Greek, Iesous. The date of the 
Apokalypse has been put at about a.d. 70, but it is probably 
considerably later; for, with the daily expectance of the Mes¬ 
siah during the siege of Jerusalem by Titus and amid its hor¬ 
rors, there was no chance for any such literary effort; and after 
70 it was for some time uninhabitable : besides, the Jews who 
were not killed were scattered in towns and all over the East. 
Hence the name Diaspora, the Dispersion. The hostility 
everywhere shown to Borne in the ‘ Apokalypse of Ioannes ’ 


748 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


was the result of Eome’s treatment of the Jews in the time of 
Vespasian and Titus and earlier. The work was not written 
long before 130 or 135, and may have proceeded from Antioch 
or Asia Minor.—Rev. v. 9, 10. No Christian could have writ¬ 
ten it. It is Jewish.—Rev. vii. The Lamb stands on Sion.— 
Rev. xiv. 1. Messianism expected the Messiah’s proximate 
coming. The Christians according to Matthew asserted that 
he had already come. Elxai’s views of a succession of such 
manifestations were perhaps not very remote from the views 
of some Christians in reference to the Second Coming. But 
the Gospel had to prove the Messiah's first Coming ! More than 
Iessaean doctrines, healings, parables and the accounts of the 
Crucifixion were required to prove it a fact. Not having any 
direct evidence it was necessary for the author of the first Gos¬ 
pel to fortify his position in every way. He goes to Judaism 
for some proof which the author of the Apokalypse did not 
need, as he was not proving that Iesous had come already. 
Matthew therefore needed the evidence that Elias had ap¬ 
peared.—Malachi, iv. 5. And he was forced to say that the 
Ascetic Mitlirabaptist was Elias. That was a matter of opinion 
rather than proof ! The fact that the Apokalypse was expect¬ 
ing the Messiah to come at once and destroy Rome by fire 
and the armies of heaven led by the Son of God on the White 
Horse, relieved its writer from the necessity of hunting for 
Jewish testimonies to the ‘ sine qua non ’ that Elias must first 
appear! The Baptists and Essenes were good ascetics, de¬ 
stroying the flesh in a manner very far removed from the 
method Rev. xix. 11-21 suggests. Matthew had to argue about 
a case where the corpus .delicti had been stated but not 
proved. But the Apokalypse had not the same case to argue, 
consequently (notwithstanding Rev. xiv. 4) it mentions neither 
Baptist, nor Banous, nor Elias, but brings down Mithra and 
the fires from heaven in the final Judgment, the Messiah’s 
reign, and the End of the world, while the New Jerusalem 
floats like a vision before the seer’s conception away into 
eternity. The Old City must then have been destroyed and 
the hope of rebuilding the City and Temple gone. This rather 
compels one to choose between two dates for the Apokalypse, 
one after the end of the first century, the other after Hadrian 
built Jupiter’s temple on the site of the Temple of the Jews.— 
Comp. Rev. xi. 1-8. Rev. xi. 2 seems to intimate a time when 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 749 


Jerusalem had been rebuilt but in possession of the Gentiles 
still. This might mean either before or after 135. But in the 
case of Ekpurosis, the Judgment of the world by fire, there 
would be no place left for Jerusalem on earth. 

Iudah of Galilee or Gaulonitis was the founder of a new 
sect. His numerous partisans (later Zealots) he urged on to 
revolt, in the days of the Registration, 1 saying that the census 
was nothing else but to bring on open slavery, and summoning 
the nation to the defence of its liberty ; as furnishing on the 
one hand success for the prosperity that depends thereon, and 
on the other to the steadfast, from the good resulting from 
this, will make the honor and renown of him that is high- 
minded : and the Deity no otherwise than for assistance of our 
designs joins zealously for the promotion of them, especially 
when doers of great deeds, standing firmly to their intention, 
give themselves up to bloodshed that is for it. 2 Josephus 
mentions but one new sect in his time, the fourth sect. Judas 
was the leader of the fourth sect of Jewish philosophy. 3 The 
poison of policy is in these words : as if Josephus had said of 
Leonidas at Thermopulai that he was the leader in a new phi¬ 
losophy, the defence of his native soil! 

There is a conception on which minds in India and in 
countries further west have dwelt for many centuries. The 
artist before our era hesitated not to paint a pierced Redeemer 
and Freer of souls in the Mysteries of Osiris and Iacchos, 
Adonis, Herakles, Krishna, Tammus and Dionysus. 

They shall look to Me whom they have pierced !—Zachariah, xii. 10. 

These verses of Zachariah describe the Jewish God as Adoni 
(Adonis, Adonai) and refer to the Mourning for Adonis as the 
Onlybegotten, Iacchos, Ia’hoh, the Mysterious Life-god IAO. 
The Tammuz-myths indicate the pierced Krishna, hung upon 
a tree,—as Adonis’s image was enclosed in the two segments 


1 Luke begins with Herod and the Registration, after Archelaus was deposed; 

Matthew begins with Herod and Archelaus. Beginning with the Registration is an 
appeal to the sympathies of the 4th sect, the rebels under Judas. Another reference 
to the Patriots is seen in the introduction of the Roman Governor and the trial before 
him. 

3 Josephus, Ant. xviii. 1.1. 

3 Josephus, Ant. xviii. 1. 6 ; compare Acts, v. 37. Immediately after Herod’s de¬ 
cease Archelaus, his son, mingled the blood of the country people with their sacrifices. 
—Josephus, Wars, II. 1; Munk, Palestine, p. 560 b. 


750 


THE GHEBEBS OF HE3BOH. 


of a split trunk of a tree. 1 It might be difficult to decide what 
Iatric Healer 2 or Nazarene Iesoua 3 was really meant. There 
was a distinguished Robber (the Robbers belonged to the 
Jewish party of patriots who fought against Rome) in the 
days when the Robber Messiahs were numerous and Pilate 
marched against such characters as Bar Abbas. Pilate put 
down the robbers who infested his province. Was it likely 
that so stern a soldier, as Josephus asserts Pilate to have been, 
really let off Barabbas ? Such an act would have been at vari¬ 
ance with the orders given him. Philo Judaeus tells us that 
Pilate was very obstinate, 4 and Josephus confirms this. Noted 
for his severity, he was, according to the author of the Eu- 
angelium Matthaei, ready to please the Jews! So he let off 
“ Iesous Barabbas ” as Constantine Tischendorf prints the name. 5 
Now Iesous Barabbas was a Robber, 6 perhaps one of the Rob¬ 
ber Messiahs, mentioned by Josephus. The offence charged 
against Iesous was usurpation of the throne. 7 As a Robber 
Messiah, he interfered, by his claim to authority, with the Ro¬ 
man sway, and was not amenable directly to the Jews. The 
Romans had been contravened. The Romans alone could 
punish Iesous Barabbas. 

And the one called Barabbas was in prison with the factious who in the 
sedition had done bloodshed.—Mark, xv. 7. 

As if against a Robber came you out with swords and staves to arrest me ? — 
Matthew, xxvi. 55. 

They had at that time a distinguished 'prisoner (desmion episemon) called 
iesous Barabbas.—Matthew, xxvii. 16. ed. Tischendorf. Leipsic 1850. 

The Robbers stirred up the people to war against the Romans. 8 
Iesous Barabbas (Son of the father) is then to be connected 

1 Like those fastened to a cross, moreover nailed to the tree of helpless and needy 
ignorance.—Philo, de Somniis, ii. 31. 

2 Matthew, ix. 12; Mark, ii. 17; Luke, iv. 23 ; v. 31. 

3 Mark, xiv. 67 : Thou too wert with the Nazarene, the Healer. 

4 Philo, Virtues of Ambassadors, 35, 36, 38. Philo knows of no Iesu. 

6 Editio stereotypa, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1850. Matthew, xxvii. 16, 17. 

6 John, xviii. 40. 

7 Matthew, xxvii. 37 ; Luke, xviii. 3. 

8 Josephus, Ant. xx. ch. 8. § 6. According to Acts, i. 6, the Christian Messianists 
belonged to the party of Jewish patriots. They wanted the Jewish monarchy restored 
at once. The disputed passage in Josephus, Ant. xviii. 3. 3, claims that the Chris¬ 
tians are named from Christos. The author of Acts, xi. 26, claims that they first at 
Antioch were called Christians. They could not have got this name at Antioch until 
a Messianist party came into existence after the fall of Jerusalem; and Josephus prob- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 751 


with the War of the Jews against the Romans, and hence the 
tremendous excitement connected with his name about a cen¬ 
tury later,—an impulse that may have extended itself even to 
the Jew Christians. For no Jew could have been indifferent 
to the fate of his eternal city so terribly destroyed, nor to that 
of the hero whose name it would draw down the Roman ven¬ 
geance to even mention. 

Iudah the Galilean 1 opposed the power of Rome with a 
large force. Their spirit and determination may be learned 
from the speech which Josephus puts in the mouth of Eleazar, 
a chief of the Sikarii, 2 at the close of the war, at Masada. 
“ For we were the first of all to revolt, and we are the last in 
arms against them. I think, moreover, that this hath been 
granted to us as a favor by God, that we have it in our power 
to die honorably and in freedom . . . Let us destroy with fire 
our property and the fortress . . . Our provisions alone let us 
spare ; for these will testify, when we are dead, that we were 
not subdued from want; but that as we had resolved from the 
beginning, we preferred death to servitude.’* 

“ For of old and from the first dawn of reason have the 
national laws and the divine precepts, confirmed by the deeds 
and noble sentiments of our forefathers, continued to teach us 
that life, not death, is a misfortune to men. For it is death 
that gives liberty to the soul 3 and permits it to depart to its prop¬ 
er and pure abode where it will be free from every calamity. 
But so long as it is imprisoned in a mortal body and infected 
with its miseries it is, to speak most truly, dead ; for associa¬ 
tion with what is mortal befits not that which is divine! 4 

ably could not have known in the year 96 that their name was Christians. He does not 
mention such a party, unless as connected with the false Messiahs perhaps. There was 
a Iesu Bar Abbah, who had Robber friends, as one of the Gospels points out. But, 
even in that case, the Josephus passage looks as if it had been tampered with. 

1 Josephus makes him the founder of the fourth Jewish sect;—the Galileans and 
Iessaeans? The Apostles of the Jordan? Was there any connection hinted at be¬ 
tween the indomitable Essene warriors and the Ebionites beyond the Jordan? 

2 Josephus, Ant. xx. 8, 10, mentions the Sikarii as early as A.D. 60. He calls them 
Robbers. 

3 How well Josephus paints the Essene in the army of Judas the Galilean. 

4 Josephus is repeating gnosis. The Jews were already full of it. The Fourth 
Sect was Iessene, and the author of ‘ Mankind, their Origin and Destiny ’ thinks that 
lesou Bar Abba (Son of the Father) perhaps was actually crucified. Josephus, Ant. 
xviii. i. 6, mentions that the Fourth Sect (evidently of the Essene sort) did not mind 
dying strange kinds of deaths. Of these crucifixion was the one most frequently re¬ 
corded by Josephus. It was not usual among the Jews, although Philo knows it. 


752 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


“ Not even while in the body does it present itself to view. 
It enters unperceived, and unseen again withdraws; its own 
nature one and incorruptible, though a cause of change to the 
body. For whatever the soul hath touched lives and flourishes ; 
whatever it has removed from withers and dies; so much of 
immortality is left to it. Let sleep be to you a most convinc¬ 
ing proof of what I say,—sleep, in which the soul, undistracted 
by the body, enjoys apart from it the sweetest rest and, con¬ 
versant with God through its relationship to him, traverses the 
universe and foretells many events of futurity. 

“ Why should we fear death, loving, as we do, the repose of 
sleep ? and how can it be otherwise than foolish, while pursu¬ 
ing the liberty which depends upon our life, to grudge our¬ 
selves that which is eternal ? 

“ Those Indians who profess the discipline of philosophy 
commit their bodies to the fire that thus their souls may be 
separated from their mortal tenements in the utmost purity. 
Elated with courage, we threw off allegiance to the Romans and 
now finally, when invited to accept of safety, we have refused 
to listen to the offer.” 

Ioudas Makkabeus had two centuries previously resolved 
to expel the foreign guard from the citadel overlooking the 
temple and laid close siege to it then. 

Our Greek Matthew is no translation, but an entirely new, 
original work. 1 It is planned with little regard to certain his¬ 
torical dates, as the time of Herod, of Iudah the Galilean, 
Pilate; but with some reference to Josephus, the Iessenes, 
Ebionim and Baptists. One of the singular things in the 
Book of Acts of the Apostles 2 is their asking the Lord “ if at 
this time he should restore the kingdom (or independent govern¬ 
ment) to the Israelites.” A few verses further 3 we find the 
name of the Zealot Simon. 4 A remarkable coincidence and 
purposely intended by the writer. Judas the Gaulonite 5 was 
the Chief of the Zealots. 6 Josephus tells us that there were 

1 Supernat. Rel. I. 477. Matthew, x. shows considerable patriotic feeling ; so does 
Josephus, particularly in his recital of the final end of the last scion of the hero Judas 
of Galilee. 

2 i. 6. 

3 i. 13. 

4 Simon Zclotes—i. 13. 

5 also the “ Galilean.” He perished! 

8 Acts, v. 37; Jos. Ant. xviii. 1.6; xx. 5. 2; Wars, II. 8. 1. 


Rrof Salmon is 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 753 


two men of the same name, 1 both notable and living at the 
same time, and that a time when portents and prodigies of a 
striking kind amazed the Judaean world ; that the one was in¬ 
spired with the belief that he was a prophet, and was, in fact, 
instinct with a certain “divine furythat he preached a gos¬ 
pel of woe through the length and breadth of the land; and 
though they tried and again tried to torture him into silence, 
they could not persuade him to desist. The other Jesus, Jo¬ 
sephus tells us, though of kindred pretensions, was a man of a 
stern and uncompromising spirit, and sought other ends, who 
was forsaken by all his followers after having been betrayed 
by one of them. Now it is the characters of these two men as 
described by Josephus which w r e think gave rise to the con¬ 
ception of the traditional Jesus, while the capital mistake com¬ 
mitted by the Evangelists in their chronology is, we think, due 
to a further confusion in the Greek mind of this Jesus with the 
prophet who suffered under Pontius Pilate. Thus the tradi¬ 
tional narratives are at fault in antedating the time of the 
events and in combining two historical characters into one be¬ 
ing, while the theological instinct has at the same time re¬ 
solved the one back into two by representing the being in 
question as partaker at once of the divine and the human 
natures.—Solomon, The Jesus of History, pp. 166, 172, 175, 
176. 


hardly entitled to say that one of the motives for rejecting the Acts is “ its irreconcil¬ 
able opposition to the Tubingen theory of the mutual hostility of Paul and the original 
Apostles.” Rather it is the “ irreconcilable opposition ” of the Book of Acts to the 
Pauline Epistles which has suggested doubts as to its historical credibility.—Robert B. 
Drummond, in the “ Academy,” July 11th, 1885, p. 21. But, as is elsewhere stated in 
this work, the Pauline writings were not known in the Church, apparently, before late 
in the 2nd century. Mr. Drummond says of the speeches reported in the Acts that 
Prof. Salmon “certainly does not prove that they are not more Luke’s than Paul’s.” 
How he can say that Paul’s speech at Athens (Acts xvii.), with its Seio-iSaip.oi'eo-Tepoi/?, 
flewpw, xeipoTroojrois, \fj-q\a<f>ri<reiai', olKovfievriv, &c., “contains none of Luke’s characteristic 
phrases ” unless he has simply followed Alford without verifying his statement, I do 
not understand.—Drummond, p. 21. These extracts have been inserted here in sup¬ 
port of the author’s suspicion, elsewhere given, that the Christos resurrection from the 
dead is not a conception of the early Ebionites but a later idea, a proposition of the 2nd 
century. Observe that Matthew, xxvi. 32 and Mark, xiv. 28 are not found in a frag¬ 
ment of a Fayum manuscript which is said to be the fragment of a Gospel older than 
those of Matthew and Mark. See New York “ Times,” July 5th, 1885. 

1 Iesua son of Ananus, and Iesua, son of Sapphias, a Galilean. Mr. Solomon regards 
Luke, xxii. 35-38 as extraordinary, inconsistent, and contradictory to Matthew, v. 39, 
40; xxvi. 52. Mr. Solomon, pp. 191, 192, 207, evidently regards the Gospels as put to¬ 
gether for a purpose, and contrary to actual facts. 

48 


754 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


el %v ovtos KdKbv 7 rorfiffas, ovk &v croi TrapeS^Ka/nev avrov. —John, xviii. 30. 

If lie had not done evil we would not have delivered him to you.—John, 
xviii. 30. 

Josephus, in his biography, mentions a certain Iesus a captain 
of Robbers in the confines of Ptolemais, also another Iesus, the 
Galilean, at Jerusalem who had a band of GOO armed men. 
Then we find mentioned a Iesu Bar Abbah engaged in a sedi¬ 
tion at Jerusalem ; and Matthew, x. 34, Luke, xxii. 36, rather 
strangely assume the panoply of war considering that the 
Iessaian said “ those that draw the sword shall perish by the 
sword.”—Matthew, xxvi. 52. But this is rather the art of the 
writer who excites the expectations in one direction, prepared 
to counter them with the Essaian love for others as he orders 
the sword put up, and heals the wound. There must have 
been some clear-headed persons in those days, capable of mak¬ 
ing such a use of Essene materials and the narrative of Jo¬ 
sephus that nearly 1800 years afterwards the world still be¬ 
lieves in the truth of the narrative. 

If it was a fact that there had been a living Iesua among 
the Nazarenes and Ebionites it would not have been necessary 
to prove the existence by extracts out of the Old Testament as 
Justin does. Justin Martyr 1 informs us that there were orig¬ 
inally sketches or memorabilia (apomnemoneumata). Joh. 
Friedr. Bleek, says that the first attempt to make a connected 
exhibition of the Evangelic history probably proceeded not 
from an apostle but from another believer, who used the pre¬ 
viously existing smaller evangelic memoirs and in part verbal 
statements. This Bleek calls the Urevangelium (first evangel), 
which he regards as not written in Judaea but possibly in 
Galilee or the neighborhood. This conception is not far re¬ 
moved from the view of Cyril of Jerusalem that Jordan was 
the beginning of the evangels. He also judges that there was 
an early evangel which was used in the preparation of the 
Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Our own view is that the 

1 For, without any regard to my race, I mean the Samarians, and having inter¬ 
course in writing with the Kaisar, I said that they were led astray, persuaded by the 
Magus in their nation, Simon, whom they say is God up above every Beginning (Gov¬ 
ernor), Potentia and Power.—Justin, Trypho, p. 115. Since Justin mistook the 
statue of Semo Sancus at Rome for Simon Magus it is matter of doubt whether we can 
rely on his writings as genuine ; for, living in Rome, he could have known that Semo 
was not Simon. Then, too, he knows the followers of Markion and Valentinus, show¬ 
ing his acquaintance with a late period, Valentinus being especially late. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 755 


account in Hippolytus, vi. 20, of Simon Magus ordering him¬ 
self to be buried alive by his disciples, but promising that he 
would rise again the third day, may have been made up in the 
course of Christian fiction. If, however, we seek to find the 
source of the Crucifixion idea it is as likely to have been sug¬ 
gested by Rev. xi. 8, where it is clear from the reference to 
Rome that Matthew’s idea of the Crucifixion had not yet been 
reached by the Diaspora. Even if the Gospels of Matthew 
and Luke were based on a preceding account, it was one 
written in Greek.—Bleek, p. 268, 270, 273. Matthew and Luke 
quote from the Greek Septuagint directly.—ib. 269. There 
were many other evangels prior to Luke, i. 1.—ibid. 272. In 
reading Rev. xi. 8, we must at the same time notice that xi. 15 
applies the word Lord in Rev. xi. 8,15,* to the Supreme God and 
does not mean the Christos. It is the Hebrew God who is 
there said to have been crucified at Rome ;—meaning to use the 
word in a figurative sense, and not of the Crucifixion mentioned 
in the gospels. The Christos in Rev. xi. is only the Messiah, 
or the Lamb ; but not the Ancient of Days in Daniel. Iessaean 
and Nazorene and Ebionite alike expected the Messiah to 
come immediately : “ I come quickly.” 1 Matthew’s evangel is 
evidently later. 

See that no one mislead you ; for many will come in the name of me and 
say : I am the Messiah ; and shall mislead many. And you will be about to 
hear of wars and rumors of wars ; see that you are not disturbed, for they 
must happen ; but the End is not yet.—Matthew, xxiv. 4-6. 

These wars and rumors of wars look particularly late , histori¬ 
cally speaking. 

When then you shall see “the abomination of the desolation,” what was 
spoken through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place, let the reader 
perceive mentally ; then let those in the Ioudea flee upon the mountains.— 
Matthew, xxiv. 26. 

The “ abomination ” in Daniel is the altar of Olympian Zeus ; 
that of Matthew, if it were written in Adrian’s time, would 
mean the same ; for Adrian reared a temple to Jupiter Capi- 
tolinus on the spot where the temple of the Jews had stood: 
and, what is to the point, forbade, on pain of death, Jews and 
Christians the issue of Jews to even come near the city. 2 Chris- 

1 Rev. xxii. 12. 

2 Munk, Palestine, 606 b. 


756 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tianism like Judaism is a form of tlie gnosis. If the Christian 
story in our Four Gospels had been prior to the gnosis of Si¬ 
mon Magus and his successors down to the time of Kerinthus, 
the Haeretic Gnostics could not have sprung from a settled 
orthodox Christianism in the evangel. But the Old Testa¬ 
ment, while in some things Hermetic and occasionally taking 
in some effective supplies from Jewish Gnosis, is in part a po¬ 
litical treatise written by scribes of the Jewish hierarchy ; it 
left out part of the current Palestine gnosis. Therefore the 
Magus and the other Gnostics had the Adam and Asah (Gen. 
ii.), the Asar and Ashera, the Osiris and Isis, Kurios and Kuria, 
and all the Sabian-Jewish Angels (instead of the Gospels) to 
start from, 1 besides the Jewish doctrine of the “ Powers ” of 
the Hebrew God, referred to by Philo. The Gnostic Heretics 
followed separated tendencies of Chaldaism and Judaism. 
Spiritus mentis (in Clem. Recog. III. 30) is pneuma mentis. 
They thought that the pneuma was in mind. But they had 
not proved that there was any pneuma.—Acts, xix. 2. 

The Jews liked Cyrus (Kurus) and Persian notions. The 
Mithra-worship and the Mithrabaptisms in the Tigris and Eu¬ 
phrates attracted thpm, as also the doctrine that Mithra w r as 
the Mediator. When the author of ‘Antiqua Mater’ wrote 
“ that Iesus was the son of Joseph and Mary appears also to 
have been the old belief ” (Antiqua Mater, 217 ; Irenaeus, I. 
25. 5 ; Clemens Alex. 3. 2. 5) many might feel disposed to take 
issue with him on this point. Any thing in the 2nd cen¬ 
tury may be regarded as old, but there seems reason to doubt 
that in the first century there was any earlier belief than in a 
Kingly Power, a Saviour Angel (the Son of the God), the Angel 
Iesua of the Jewish and Persian gnosis, the Lord of the An¬ 
gels, the Angel-King Metatron-Mitlira. In other words, the 
doctrine of the Great Archangel in Philo (Exod. iii. 2, 4) and 
before him (in Isaiah) of an Angel Iesua must have preceded 
the notion that this divine person (the fleshless Power of the 
God) became incorporated in any man. The expression Iesua 
the Christos (the Anointed Saviour) implies the preexistence of 
psalm, ii. 7, 12, before the humanity of Iesu was ever thought 
of. The Nazoria of the Paneadis and beyond the Jordan first 
acquired the Greek appellation ‘ Christians ’ at Antioch ; but 

1 The Magus began with the Lord and Lady (the Mother of all living, the Mighty 
Mother).—Gen. iii. 20. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 757 

there was something’ ‘before Antioch,’ as we have endeavored 
to show. Scripture and the Rabbis mentioned the Jewish 
Messiah. The Persians spoke of their Mediator, Mithra ; Ho¬ 
mily xvii. 16 recognised the “ asarkos idea,” and Mani beheld 
the Christos in the sun ! The existence of such a divine person, 
without flesh, must have been admitted long before the evan¬ 
gelist Luke could have written that the holy pneuma would 
come upon a virgin of the Children of the East; for in all the 
Levant the sun was held to be the source of spirit and of 
fire. 1 Hence Saturn’s burning throne 2 and the Gheber-He- 
berou 3 fireworship in Chebron (Hebron)! “ Iahoh auri wa 
Iesoi : ” Iahoh is my Light and my Saviour 4 —has a very late 
Messianist look.—psalm, xxvii. 1. Iahoh Sabaoth is the spi¬ 
ritual potentia (energy) which, according to the Phoenicians 
and Chaldaeans, proceeded from the Most High God (Saturn- 
Belus), as Light-principle, going forth over the 7 Circles. 
This Iao is the Onlybegotten, the first birth , Belus Minor, Zeus 
Belus, Bel-Mithra, the mind-perceived Sun, Sabaoth, whom in 
the Chaldaean ineffable mystagogia (Initiation into the Mys¬ 
teries) the theologians considered to be the God of the Seven 
Bays, who held the Seven Stars in his hand, through whom 
(as Chaldaeans supposed) the souls were raised. 5 The Hebrew 
God is Sabaoth ; and is the Chaldaean God of the Seven Rays. 
The Maniclieans held the Sun, who is Mithra, to be the Chris¬ 
tos. 6 This is Sabian doctrine, as we have seen above. Philo 
Judaeus says that Iahoh is not the abstract divine essence, it¬ 
self, but is the Angel of the Lord. 7 Asada is the Messenger of 
Saturn ; 8 and Iahoh is A1 Sadi.—Gen. xvii. 1. After discover¬ 
ing the Mystery of ‘ Iao over the 7 Circles ’ of the Planetae (a 
Chaldaean astronomical error) and after identifying this Iao 
with the Iesua 9 of the world (Son of Saturn, of the Ancient of 
Days, and of the God of all Time) and identifying him with 
the Chaldaean doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, it is 

1 Matthew, iii. 11, 16; xvii. 2; Rev. i. 16. 

2 see Dunlap, Vestiges of Spirit-History, 117; Ezekiel, i. ; Daniel, vii. 9. 10. 

3 u and ou, the Egyptian plural termination. 

4 The King Messiah is called by the name of the Blessed God.—Sohar to 1 Moses, 
fol. 69. col. 249; in Kork, Hebr. Chald. Rabbin. Worterbuch, p. 394. 

6 Movers, 551-555. 

6 Hammer ; Augustinus, Abhandlung 34. p. 534 ; Seel, 437, 457. 

7 Philo Jud. Leipsic ed. 1828, III. p. 161. 

« Chwolson, Altbabylon. Lit., 136, 156. 

9 Saviour. 


T58 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


not surprising that some Semite evolved the further supposi¬ 
tion of the incarnation of the Saviour Iesua; especially as 
Elxai and the Jews had some notions of the Messiah’s appear¬ 
ance on earth. Iahoh, as Aur 1 and Saviour, is certainly Phi¬ 
lo’s Logos.—Gen. i. 3; John, i. 1, 3. All things came into 
being through him !—Coloss. i. 18. 

Many wanderers are come out into the world who do not admit that Iesous 
Christos came in flesh.— 2 John, 7. 

Every spirit that does not confess that Iesous Christos has come in flesh is 
not from the God.—1 John, iv. 3. 

If there had been any way of proving the actual existence of 
Iesu as a man of the Iessaean order, we should not have seen 
these words of John in print. The author of the epistle had 
no evidence to give to this point, or he would have given it. 2 
Antiqua Mater, 43, says that Justin Martyr awakens doubts as 
to the existence of any individual Pounder at all. Ioudas ap¬ 
peared in the days of the Taxation ; 3 Iesous was born at the 
time of the Taxation. 4 In Josephus we find the sect of Ioudah 
the Galilean mentioned. Both came from Galilee. 5 The words 
“ My kingdom is not of this world ” and “ the kingdom of the 
heavens” are in marked contrast with the Jewish expectation 
of the Messiah’s kingdom on earth, 6 and are presumably pos¬ 
terior to Josephus. So too the prediction that the Temple 
should be destroyed 7 and the allegorical turn given to it im¬ 
ply a post-Yespasian writer. “ We have no king but Caesar ” 8 
and Matthew, xxii. 21 are the reverse of Jewish,—acknowledg¬ 
ing vassalage to Rome ! But, after Jerusalem was destroyed, 
the idea of an earthly kingdom had to be given up, 9 and the 

1 Light.—John, i. 4 ; viii. 12. 

2 Bible Myths, p. 512, has taken this point well. See also the same, p. 514. Jose¬ 
phus, Wars, III. ch. ix. (xvi.) and in his ‘Life’ mentions a Iesu a guerilla chief of the 
band of Robbers who was fighting the Romans near Tiberias. 

3 Acts, v. 37. 

4 Luke, ii. 1-5. 

6 Matthew, ii. 15, 22, 23; iii. 13; xix. 11; xxviii. 10; Mark, xv. 41; Acts, v. 37. 

8 Mark, xv. 32 ; Isa. xxxiii. 17. 

7 John, ii. 19; iv. 21 ; Matthew, xxvi. 61. 

8 John, xix. 15. “ Render his dues to Caesar.”—Matthew, xxii. 21; Mark, xii. 17. 

9 The Kingdom of God shall be taken from you.—Matthew, xxi. 43. Matthew, v. 34 
is Essene. See xvi. 11,12, xix. 21, 22, 29 is Ebionite.—Mark, x. 25. See W. Robertson 
Smith, the Prophets, p. 302. 

In the time of Josephus “they heard that a certain Galilean, named ISsous, stay¬ 
ing at Jerusalem, had a band of six hundred infantry.”—Josephus, Vita, p. 1014. 
ed. Cologne, 1691. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 759 


notion of a divinely-sent Messia’hwas revived in the Iessaean- 
Nazarene mind by the general distress and the need of one. 

How and where was the idea first formed that God must 
become flesh to be Redeemer of the world ? In India. The 
priests there taught that through misuse of freedom evil arose 
in the world of spirits. 1 Adam’s fall can only be understood of 
sjiirits (spiritually). Disobedience, pride, to wish to be like 
God, is sin. 2 The sensuality coming in is its consequence, an 
operation of the curse of God. Adam shall cultivate the 
(weiblichen) field and Eua have pains in childbearing in con¬ 
sequence. Adam was earthly when God clothed him in skins. 
The Creator wished, without prejudice to the 'freedom of 
spirits, to extirpate evil. Therefore he made the corporeal 
world. The world will thus be annihilated as soon as the 
fallen spirits are again purified. 3 But the idea of the world as 
an offering (opfer) could not be deduced out of that Saga. In 
the creation (as the Shastras tell it) this idea could not come 
up, it was an act of Almighty Power, like the Creation of 
spirits itself. These beings (it says) were not yet: the Eternal 
willed, and they were. 4 Soon as to this supranatural concep¬ 
tion the cosmical (spirit and body, idea and formation) was 
added (the two being taken as one) Creation appeared in an¬ 
other point of view. The production of beings “ out of the one 
body,” through emanations, suggested the inference that the 
corporeal beings were parts of the Boundless Infinite itself. 
The Creator was now both Offerer and Offering, he gave him¬ 
self out into the world of matter (Korperwelt) as the means of 
salvation for the fallen spirits. Thence came the idea of a rec- 
onciliationsoffering (Redemption) where the Eternal was re¬ 
garded as Offerer and Offering. To this idea of immolation 
(offering) was joined the doctrine of the death of the Gods. 
At the End of the Days they must be annihilated with the 
world. 5 Brahma, Yishnu and Siva, being emanations out of the 


1 We must here go back to the Mosaic history of creation to perceive the connection 
between biblical and brahmanist accounts of the Fall of man through sin.—Gen. vi. 2, 
4, 5. Compare Essenism B.C. and Rev. xiv. 4. 

2 There was God and Matter, Light and Darkness, good and evil. 

3 Gen. vi. 2, 3. Nork calls the purified spirits a genuine Messianic idea. It is first 
gnostic, then Messianist. 

4 Turkish demonstration : compare John, iii. 27. 

6 Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 150, 151; see Gen. xlix. 1, 10; Rev. xvii. 14; John 


760 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Eternal Unit, he himself suffers the death at the End of the 
days in this “ world offering.”—Nork, 151. The End is, says 1 
Cor. xv. 24, when the Messiah delivers up the Messiah’s King¬ 
dom to the God and Father, when he shall abolish every Arche 
(Beginning) and every authority and power. For he must be 
King until he shall put all his enemies under his feet. Rabbi 
Bechai said that ‘ among the prophets there was a tradition 
that our future redemption will be like in many things to the 
redemption out of Egypt.’ The Redeemer shall reveal himself 
and afterwards be concealed again. 1 In the days of the Mes¬ 
siah the Kingdom shall again come to Israel.—Rabbi Mosche 
bar Majemon, Auslegung uber die Mischna of the Talmud tract 
Sabbath, fol. 120, col. I. 2 They asked the Lord to restore 
again the Kingdom to Israel.—Acts, i. 6. The Kabalist writers 
have any number of references to the Messiah and his King¬ 
dom. After the destruction of Rome the writer of the Apoka- 
lypse brings in the Messiah’s Kingdom, millennium, the End of 
the world and the binding of the Evil One.—Rev. xix., xx. The 
Tikkune Sohar fol. 67 says : In that time when that cursed 
Serpent dies and has been banished, the Serpens sanctus 
reigns. Already before the Apokalypse-writer the Kabalists 
had uttered this hope, and as usual based themselves on pas¬ 
sages in the prophets (Isaiah, xxv. 8; Zakar. xiii. 9).—Nork, 
151. In Pesikta fol. 62 a (Nork, Art. Messias, p. 152) the Mes- 
sias says I will willingly undertake all sufferings. In the Jalkut 
Simeoni, II. fol. 56 b, ‘ the Messiah submitted himself with love 
to those torments. He will send forth his cry to the Lord : 
Lord of the world, Consumed is my strength, my breath van¬ 
ishes away, am I not (made) of flesh and blood? (As the 
prophetic psalmist says, xxii. 15 : My strength is gone like a 
broken pot.) The praised God replies: O Messiah ben Ioseph, 
already at the Creation of the world (the name of the Messiah 
has been created before the sun.—Gen. i. 3) thou didst offer to 
endure these sufferings.—Nork, III. 152 (from ancient Com¬ 
mentaries in Pesikta Rabbathi and Jalkut Simeoni). See also 
Apokalypse, Rev. v. 9; vii. 14; xiii. 8 ; the Lamb slain from 
the foundation of the world! 

Gnosis is in a manner older than Christianism. The old 

1 Eisenmenger, II. pp. 792-3; R. Bechai, Exposition concerning the 5 Books Moses, 
fol. 58. col. 3; fol. 68, col. 2. On Gen. 48, 21. 

2 Eisenmenger, II. 756. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 761 


doctrines of Egypt and Greece, the mysteries of Samothrake, 
Eleusis and Sais could get admission into the three chief sys¬ 
tems of Greek wisdom, Platonism, Pythagoreanism, and Peri- 
pateticism. In the person of Aristobulus the Jews got hold of 
Aristotle; through Philo they mingled, with Platonism; and 
while the Essaians and Therapeutae made the doctrines of 
Egyptian priests their own the Kabalists had taken up the 
system of Zoroaster. Thus was Gnosticism prepared. Gnosis 
as the complete practice of Christian virtues was the life of the 
wise, which Pythagoras and Plato, the Essaeans and Thera¬ 
peutae understood sometimes as religion, sometimes as philos¬ 
ophy. The Kabbala uses the term, King, in reference to the 
Microprosopus (Short face), the Microprosopus is the Son of 
the Father. 1 Gnosticism has borrowed much from the tradi¬ 
tions and theories preserved in the Sohar. All important met¬ 
aphysical and religious principles which make up the basis 
of the Kabbala are older than the Christian dogmas. Not a 
word is said of Christ or Christianity. Not a word is uttered 
against Christianity, as is generally the case in later Jewish 
writings. The Kabbalist book Jezira was composed in the 
time of the first Mishna teachers, that is, during the first cen¬ 
tury before Christ and the first fifty years of the Christian era. 2 
In the beginning the King was weaving forms, light of power 
going forth, the mystery of the concealed that are concealed. 
The King himself is the innermost Light of all lights.—Aidra 
Suta, ix. The King is obviously the Heavenly Wisdom. Com¬ 
pare the King.—Matthew, xxv. 31, 34. Budha said: Let all 
the sins that have been committed in this world fall on me, 
that the world may be delivered. 3 The Messiah bears the sins 
of Israel.—Nork, Worterbuch, 395 ; Jalkut Rubeni, fol. 30. col. 
4. When the King Messiah comes he will stand on the roof of 
the Temple and call out to the Israelites : Miserables, the time 

1 Kabbala Denudata, II. 353, 375, 391. 

2 Gelinek’s translation of Franck, 7, 65, 77, 82, 249, 262 ; Kleuker, 48 IF. The Jezira 
existed before the end of the first century.—Franck, 57. Before the end of the first 
century of our era a science regarded with deep awe had already spread among the 
Jews which was distinct from the Mishna, the Talmud, and the holy books, a mystical 
doctrine which called to its aid the united credit of Tradition and Holy Writ.—Franck, 
52. The Kabbalist rabbins quote constantly from the Old Testament just as its texts 
are interwoven with every page of the New Testament.—Franck, 126 et passim. The 
mystical allegorical mode of teaching was already prevalent in the time of Ptolemy 
Philometor, 150 before Christ.—Jost, I. 371, 393. 

3 Max Muller, Hist. Sanscrit Lit. p. 80. 


762 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of your Redemption is come.—Jalkut Shimoni, On Isaiah, fol. 
56. col. 4. As to the sins, 1 compare John, i. 29 ; iii. 16 ; Matth. 
xxvi. 28. When the Messiah comes, surrounded by all the 
Israelites, then the dead will live again, and become new spir¬ 
itual beings,—and‘will fly like eagles in the air, being new 
beings in body and spirit. 2 —Jalkut Rubeni, fol. 192. col. 1. 
With this compare Matthew, xxvii. 52, 53, and 1 Thessalonians, 
iv. 15-17, which last is evidently based upon the idea expressed 
in the Jalkut Rubeni. The book Abkath rochel says : R. Ia- 
liosa ben Manasia speaks : Those that sleep in Hebron will 
be raised up first.—Eisenmenger, II. 902; Isa. xxvi. 19. The 
rabbins of the first century before and after our era have made 
the road along which the ‘ vacui viatores ’ have travelled (with 
the Essaian gnosis) into Cliristianism. The sleepers 3 of Heb¬ 
ron shall rise !—Avkath Rochel, in Eisenmenger, II. 903. The 
Budhist forbade the cleaving to “ existing things,” the Bud- 
hist, Iatrikos, Iessene, Therapeute, Sarapis monk, went into 
cloisters, the Babylonian ascetics, Iessaians and Christian 
monoi became as if celibates, and cells and monasteries flour¬ 
ished. Kalanus burnt his flesh, the Iessenes, Iessaians, and 
virtuous mortified it. He that loveth father or mother more 
than the Lord is not worthy of him. Leave all and follow 
me ! The Jews for at least 4 centuries looked for the Messiah 
and the Resurrection of the dead, but they did not cease to 
hate their destroyer, Rome : they connected the fall of Rome 
with the Coming of the Messiah. “ Erchomai tachu,” I come 
quickly.—Rev. xxii. Then the millennium ! 

Epiphanius (ed. Petav. I. 120) says that the earlier name of 
the Christians was Iessaeans. Matthew, v., vi., vii., x., xv., xix. 
is Essaean ; and this shows, therefore, that the same word is 
Iessene and Essene. The Gospels of the Iessaeans were on an 
Essene foundation. Who then was the founder of the order 
of Iessaioi ? It would have been replied : The name of the 
founder is Iesu. Iesua means to cure and to save.—Matthew, 

1 He whom Zachariah points to as Rider of an ass will wash white the Israelites 
from their sins.—Bereshith Rabba, division 89, fol. 95. col. 4.—Nork, Lexicon, 394. 
Sin will not depart from the world before the Messiah shall reveal himself.—The Sohar, 
on Zachariah, xiii. 2. In a future time sin will be taken away from the Sons of Adam. 
—Eisenmenger, II. 828; Nezach Israel, fol. 54. col. 2. cap. 45. 

a Eisenmenger. II. 772, 774. 

3 the dead. The names Iahosa and Hebron recall (ch = h) the names Iachos 
(Iacchos) and Khebron, = Life and Power, 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 763 


i. 21 ; Epiphan. Haer. xxix. 1, 4. They are Jews and nothing 
else.—ibid. 7; Matthew, x. 5. The Kainites were also called 
Iudaites because they asserted that the Euangels were written 
by men, who yet concealed the spirit of Judaism. The Gospel 
of Matthew then, is Essene, Nazorene, and Ebionite. Like 
the author of the Apokalypse, the author of Luke’s Gospel 
never forgets the war with home. 1 The theologians and other 
adversaries took advantage of Jerusalem’s fall to attack the 
Jewdsh religion. Keep your souls in patience! But when 
you shall see Jerusalem encompassed by encampments then 
know that her destruction is at hand. Then let those in the 
Judaea flee into the mountains, and let those in the midst of 
it get out of the place, and let those on the farms not enter 
within her.—Luke, xix. 19 f. This very generation shall not 
pass away until all shall happen.—Luke, xxi. 32. Josephus 
died about a.d. 102. He says: Vespasian walls in on every 
side those in Jerusalem, putting up encampments at Ierico and 
Aclida.—Wars, iv. 9. 1. Vespasian subdues the places near Je¬ 
rusalem.—Wars, iv. 10, 2. It is plain that the writer of Luke’s 
Gospel took these details from Josephus. Consequently his 
Gospel must be later than the history which Josephus wrote. 
At the beginning of the second century, 2 while the title Christos 
was known, Iesu was not existent for history. 3 — Antiqua Mater, 


3 Luke xxiii. 2; contra Luke, xx. 25. 

2 The Messianic fever of excitement must have occurred in connection with and 
subsequent to the siege of the Holy City, and the Euangelion was not probably ready, 
nor, probably, were there any Twelve Apostles of Iesu at hand until long after Jerusalem 
was destroyed.—Matthew, xxvi. 61. Then Simon Magus (about 90-100) it is said was 
thought to have suffered in Judea, when he did not suffer.—Iren. I. xx. But Simon 
Magus (at a time not very remote from the beginning of the 2nd century) is said to have 
ordered his disciples to bury him alive in a trench, saying that he would rise on the 
third day.—Hippolytus, vi. 20. There seems to have been an idea that a Samaritan 
Messiah ben Ioseph was slain.—Antiqua Mater, 257-9. That was the country of 
the Gnosis of Simon Magus ; and the ‘ crucifixion ’ under Pilate may have been sug¬ 
gested by something of the sort.—ibid. 257. Bunsen’s idea that Simon Magus did not 
say any thing about himself in relation to the Logos, but about Iesu, is not sustained 
by any evidence. The Christian dogma of the two natures in the Messiah is in the Tal¬ 
mud, Succa. fol. 51. Nork, Hebr.-Chald.-Rabbin. Worterbuch, p. 394. 

3 As long as people w T ere satisfied with mere personae, hypostases, as Philo was, 
there was no trouble ; at Antioch or Alexandria the gnostics adhered to the fleshless 
hypostases without a body. The Son of Dauid, however, must have been human, 
therefore had a body. The gnostics thought not. The whole difficulty arose at this 
point. There were Nikolaitan gnostics, Simon Magus, Menander, Saturninus. The 
gnostics suggested an apparent unreal body. Here, probably, came in (in connection 
with the lessaeans) the suggestion of Iesu as the founder of the sect. And from this 


764 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


p. 49 ; Clementine Recogn. I. 45. The authors of our four 
canonical evangels are as little known to us as those of the 
Apocryphal Evangels. The apostles cannot be identified with 
any known historical persons.—Ant. Mater, p. 34. Nor does 
the belief ascribed to Markion (about 148) regarding the 15th 
year of Tiberius, nor that in the anonymous and undated 
pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, furnish any additional evi¬ 
dence in the historic sense.—ibid. 49. Simon’s axiom that 
“ the little will be great as being a sign, but the great, unlim¬ 
ited,” applies to the amount of lying in this connection. The 
brahman calls the body a temple or house of the God, for in¬ 
corporation is the incarnation of the Spiritus : and this in the 
gnosis is the crucifixion of the Spirit. The Sohar regards the 
Spirit (Gen. i. 2) as the Messiah ; the Sohar, the Targums, the 
Talmud all speak of the Messiah. Why should not the Chris- 
tiani partake of the crumbs of the gnosis that fell from the 
table of the Law ? They did so. They got the Suffering Mes¬ 
siah and the human nature of the Messiah from Isaiah, Zach- 
ariah, Daniel, etc. 1 Why was Bethlehem made, in the Gos¬ 
pels of Matthew and Luke, the birthplace of Iesu ? Because 
Micah v. 2 said so ! Not because of the registration mentioned 
in Luke. Why was a place Nazareta selected for his abode. 
Not because a prophet said that “ he shall be called a Nazo- 
raios,” for (as S. Munk said) that prophecy is not in the Old 
Testament. But because Matthew, chapters v., vi., vii., x., de¬ 
scribes the morals and life of the Iessaian sect of Nazoraioi. 
There was no chance to tax or register the Jews as long as any 
Herod was on the throne of Judaea, for it was not yet a Roman 
province. But the Christians were never critical! Hosea, xi. 


standpoint the gospels were written, but in a Gnostic vein.—Matthew, i. 18, contra iii. 
16. The Son of Dauid is the Divine Nature in the Messiah, the shekinah, which is 
from eternity with God, but the Messiah ben Ioseph is subject to death, is the human 
nature in him; therefore the suffering Messiah. For the identity of the Messiah ben 
Dauid with the Messiah ben Ioseph see the Jerusalem Talmud ( Berachoth , fol. 5): I 
will raise up to Dauid a just branch.—Zachar. vi. 12 ; Jer. xxiii. 5. The Sohar to 1. 
Moses, fol. 85. col. 338 (to Daniel’s Son of man) says : This is the king Messiah. Zacha- 
riah, vi. 12 says : Lo, a man , Branch, his name; under him he (the Highpriest) will 
flourish and build the temple of Iahoh. The Gnostic would not believe in crucifixion 
of a Spiritual being; but there was scriptural warrant for two natures in the Mes¬ 
siah of Judaic writings. The Ebionite view that Iesu was son of Ioseph came at a 
somewhat later period. 

1 Nork, Worterbuch, p. 394-5. Rabbi Simeon ben Iochai, author of some of the 
oldest parts of the Sohar, lived in the beginning of the 2nd century. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 765 

1 says : Out of Egypt I have called my son. Therefore Iesu’s 
expedition to Egypt in Matthew, ii. 13, 14. Now the same 
attention which the Christian writers paid to the supposed 
prophecies Simon Magus paid to the kabalist tradition of the 
Spirit in Adam and its change into pater and mater in the mi¬ 
gration of the Logos proforikos into energy and action. The 
Ialkut Chadash, fol. 143. col. 2. number 54, under the title 
Massiach (to Exodus, xxi. 33) says: This ox is Messiah ben 
Iosepli, this ass Messiah ben Daud.—Eisenmenger, II. 721. 
Hence Matthew, xxi. 2, 5; Isaiah, liii. 5 (he was wounded for 
our transgressions) was applied by the Jews to the Messiah.— 
Eisenmenger, Entdeckt. Jud II. 54. Daniel, vii. 13, 14, speaks 
of One like a Son of Man: this, says It. Salomon Iarchi, is the 
Messiah.—Eisenm. II. 756. The Sohar to Dan. vii. 13 says : 
Da Malcha Massiacha, this is King Messiah.—col. 338 Sulzb. 
The Sohar to Daniel, ii. 44 says : In that time of the Messiah 
God will set up a Kingdom of the heaven. 1 The Midrash 
Thillim (to Ps. lxx. 1) says that the King Messiah is here 
meant, of whom Isaiah thought when he said: A rod shall 
arise from the stem of Iesi, and a germ (Isa. xi. 1). But Mat¬ 
thew goes yet further and reads the word germ (nzr) a Naza- 
rene, which is not the meaning of nezer. The doctrine of not 
the earliest targums was that where the name King occurs it 
is the Messiah that is meant; although the first two targums 
did not carry this out to the same extent that the later tar¬ 
gums have done. The Sohar, however, is full of the Messiah. 
Christian Messianism is only a misapplication of Jewish Mes- 
sianism. Rome in taking from Jewish gnosis caught the gno¬ 
sis. With clouds of (the) heavens One like Bar Ainos came, 
this is King Messiah.—The Sohar to 4th Moses, fol. 85, col. 
338. Sulzbach. The Sohar here comments on Daniel, vii. 13. 
Why does Irenaeus so often state that the Gnostics called the 
God “ Man ” and his Son “ Son of the Man ? ” And why does 
Matthew continually in the Messianic addresses (oracles) use 
the expression “ the Son of the Man ? ” Sympathy merely,— 
or science ? Where did he get his idea of a Suffering Messiah, 
except from the Messiah ben Ioseph of the Palestine literature 
that preceded the gospels ? The Messiah ben Ioseph will be 
killed.—Eisenmenger, II. 748-751. He will be killed in war. 


Nork, Hebraisch-Chaldaisch-Rabbin. Worterbuch, 394. 


766 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


—ibid. 750; Ialkut Chadasli, fol. 141. col. 4. num. 22 ; M4jene 
Ieshua, fol. 76. col. 1. 

The flaming sword of Divine Wisdom (Logou=Mind) ; for the Logos is a very 
quick-moving and heated thing, and especially the Logos of the Cause, because 
it passed by every thing first, and is perceived by the mind before all things, 
and is visible in all things.—Philo Judaeus, de Cherubim, 9. 

According to Simon, 1 the blessed and incorruptible principle is hidden in 
every one, so that it exists potentially but not efficiently ; this is he who has 
stood, stands and will stand, having stood on high in unbegotten power, 
standing below, having been begotten in image in the stream of waters,' 2 about 
to stand on high alongside the blessed Power without bounds 3 if he is made 
in the likeness.—Hippolytus, p. 248. ed. Duncker. 

Here the Magus tells of the “ Standing One ” who is the mo¬ 
nad from the Ain Soph, the monad from the One, the Adam 
that is extended and generates a duo. For the monad is there 
first, where the Paternal Monad subsists. 4 The Father pro¬ 
duced the Intelligible Sun, the Logos, who, in the Clialdaean 
philosophy, is Ia’holi, lad, Dionysus, the Intelligible Light 
and Spiritual Principle of life. 5 The Chaldaeans held that the 
Son is the Sun, Bel Mithra, the Seir-Anpin or Short-face, who 
is Sun and God of the resurrection of the souls, the Redeemer, 
Gallus, Luaios and Horus. The Genius of the Resurrection to 
heaven is represented with a sickel or moon-crescent. It is the 
KapTrLcrTrj^, the Horus of the Gnosis. 6 In Egyptian gnosis we 
have the logos under several names. 

This ever-existing Logos. —Herakleitus. 1 

The Logos is Osiris, 8 and Osiris is the Egyptian Saviour. 9 The 
pomegranate, which Adam (Adonis) in Hades offers to Proser- 
pina-Huah (Hue), is full of seeds, the symbol of resurrection 
and life of which Osiris is the mainspring, but Horus and Per¬ 
sephone the Saviours. Pythagoras held that One Mind (the 

1 Simon seems to have been a follower or philosopher of the Logos-doctrine. 

2 Those dark waters in Hades, where the Black Osiris subsists in mummy-form, 
with a phallus alive ! 

3 Ain Soph, the Father. 

4 ProcluB, in Euclid, 27. 

5 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History, 181, 182. 

6 Nork, Real-W. II. 98. 

7 Bishop Hippolytus, ed. Duncker et Selin, p. 442. Ammon is the Demiurgic Mind, 
proceeding forth to production ; the logos proforikos. 

8 Plutarch, de Iside, 49, 64. 

9 Menard, Hermes, pp. xcii. 199; Plutarch, 1. c. 59. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 767 


Logos) is diffused through all things, and that our minds were 
taken from the universal divine Mind. 1 Orion, the Conqueror 
of darkness, rose ; and the Scorpion over it, that had given the 
death-wound to Messiah in the Osirian mythos, was hurled 
into Hades by Orion, the Sahu} The resurrection of Osiris 
is mentioned in Plutarch, de Iside, 19 ; “ that his soul may rise 
to heaven in the disk of the moon.”—Records, iv. p. 121. 

The Hebrews had dualism as their religion,—Bal and 
Asherah, Adon (Chochmah) and Binah (the Yenah, Yena, 
Yenus, Aphrodite).—2 Kings, xxiii. 4, 11, 13; Gen. ii. 22, 23-25. 
Here we have what the Kabalah, at a later period, regarded as 
Father and Mother.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 68, 69, 72-77; Gen. iii. 
20; Aeschylus, Seven vs. Thebes, 140, 141. Here we have the 
original tradition of spirit and matter common to the Greeks 
of Athens, Anatolia, and all the Semites, Jews, Babylonians, 
Arabs, Hindus, etc. The advance from dualism to the philo¬ 
sophical position taken up in the Hermetic Writings, Genesis, 
i. and ii., is found in the abstract idea (to on, the ay in of the 
Kabalah, the “das Brahman” of the Hindus, the No Thing). 
The Life in the abstract is not manifested; it is simple ab¬ 
stract existence, the nothing, but to on, what is! From this 
absolute unit undeveloped, at rest, inactive, issues the Creat¬ 
ive Wisdom, Word, or Spirit, the Divine Will or Thought,—a 
mere philosophical abstraction, at first. This is Abelios, Bel, 
Apollo, Adam, Chochmah, Brahma, Logos, Mithra, Christos, 
—a power containing the sun and moon as his eyes. Subdi¬ 
vided, this manifestation becomes the two-fold Wisdom, whose 
feminine Spiritus is revealed as Mother of the Gods, Euah, 
Mother of all that live, Binah (Yenah) the Original Mother 
(Yenus) of our race, Astarta, Beltis, Sarasvati, etc. From this 
divided Essence the Ebionite started ; but, inclining more to 
the Persian view, he (like Bev. xx. 2, 3) develops the contrast 
of the Good Principle against the Evil Principle, Ahuramasda 
vs. Ahriman, Christos contra Satan.—Gen. iii. 14, 22; Ger¬ 
hard Ulilliorn, Homilien und Recogn., 185, 187, 199 ; Matthew, 
xxv. 41. There is then, according to Simon, the Blessed and 
Incorruptible 3 concealed in all force, not in energy (action) 
which is the Permanent, has stood, will stand, Standing on 


1 Cicero, de Senectute, 21; Dunlap, Spirit-Hist. 333, 338. 

2 Massey, the Natural Genesis, II. 437. 

3 immortal. 


768 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


high (avco) in the Unborn Force, has stood beneath, having 
been born in image in the flow of the waters, will stand on 
high alongside the Blessed Boundless Dynamis if it should 
have been made a perfect image. — Hippolytus, vi. 17. 
Duncker. This is the scripture of the Word and Name from 
Knowledge (Epinoia, Gnosis) of the Great Power, the Unlim¬ 
ited (here we have the Time without bounds, Ain Soph). 
Therefore it shall be sealed up, concealed, hidden, lying in its 
abode (Garden of Eden?) where the root of all things has been 
stablished. Then logically follows Simon’s Lord and Lady 
(Adam and Eua, the Mother of all life, the Kuria); for the 
Divine Pneuma contains the two genders, pater and mater. 
The Biver, then, going out from Edem is divided into 4 heads, 
4 canals, i.e. into 4 perceptions of the born, sight, hearing, 
smell, taste and touch.—Hippol. vi. 15. All things unborn 
are in us potentially, but not in energy,—like grammar and 
geometry.—Simon Magus, vi. 16. The Arsenothelus Dunamis 
(the Hermaphrodite Adam bisexed) in the prior-existent 
Boundless Power that has neither beginning nor end, be¬ 
ing alone ; for the Thought (Logos-Epinoia) in loneliness 
going forth from this (Solitary Limitless Dunamis) became 
Two ! For He was One Sole, having Her in himself.—ib. vi. 
18. The Clementine Homilies declare that Simon Magus held 
(besides a Highest God who is different from the Creator) two 
other Great Powers, the permanent Standing One, who is 
Male, and a Female Power, the Kuria, Mother, Sophia. From 
the Kuria, two angels were sent out, one to create the world, 
the other to give the Law (to Moses).—Uhlhorn, 282, 283 ; 
Homily, xviii. 11, 12. In the pseudo-Clementines, as regards 
doctrine, Simon merely represents the sect of Simonians.— 
Uhlhorn, 290. The celebrated statement by Simon Magus (in 
regard to the Powers of God) that he (Simon) was the Great 
Power of the God (Acts, viii. 9, 10) has certainly been followed 
by Justin Martyr, 1st Apology, p. 147, where he writes : “ The 
First Power (Prote Dunamis), after the Father of all and Lord 
God, is, too, Son the Logos.” If Justin did not copy, it was 
because the doctrine of “ the Great Archangel ” was well known 
to the Ebionites. “ The pneuma, then, and the Power which 
is from the God we ought to consider no other than the Logos 
who is Firstbegotten to the God.”—Justin, Apol. I. p. 148: 
dated about 156. Irenaeus puts the activity of Markion at 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 769 


Rome under Anicetus (154-166).—Diet. Chr. Biogr. Ill, 816. 
Justin, p. 158, mentions Markion as ‘now continuing to 
teach.’ 

The great error of Plato and all the gnostic philosophers 
was the use of the a priori method. We find it in Babylonian, 
Persian, Hindu, Jewish and Egyptian gnosis. The Babylo¬ 
nian and Jewish Powers and the doctrine of a primal Cause 
speaking its fiat by the Logos belonged to this gnosis. The 
Essenes could not keep free from it, nor could the Nazoria 
between the Jordan and Bassora. The Jewish Kabalah is full 
of it. Simon Magus appears to have recognised a succession 
of spiritual qualities as mind-perceived Intelligences, and, like 
the Babylonian System, 1 the theory of most ancient religions, 
and the Kabalah, resorted to the theory of a pater and a mater, 
a Male and a Pemale, united in a divine Adam, constant endur¬ 
ing power, the source of energy and action,—holding that from 
fire is the beginning of birth. Nature does present an order¬ 
ly succession of times and creations, but Simon (like others), 
recognising the phenomenon of succession, applies it to super- 
sensual phenomena in the sphere of primal causes. This is the 
Jewish Powers over again, but in another form. Plato’s theory 
of ideas and forms can be dimly recognised through the forms 
of Simon’s mind-perceived intelligences. For the Babylo¬ 
nian Unknown Darkness, the unit, the Kabalist no-thing, he 
substitutes the one root (unseen power in silence).—Gen. ii. 2, 
23. Whence proceed the Two Scions (germs) of all things, the 
Lord (the Mind of all things, the Logos) and the Kuria (the 
Great Mother, Wisdom, Intelligence). So far as regards the 
Two primal Germs, Simon follows the Apason and Taautlia, 
the Chochmah and Yenah, the Adonis and (Yenus, Original 
Mother of our race, says Aeschylus), the famous Adam and 
Eua of Genesis, and the Pater and Mater of Semitic Tradi¬ 
tion. This Male-female is the Wisdom celebrated in the 
Book of Wisdom. Responding one to the other, these Two 
constitute a yoke or conjugation, and manifest the middle in¬ 
terval, not to be comprehended Air having neither beginning 
nor end. And in this is the Father sustaining all things and 


i Dunlap, Sod, II. 88, 89. Simeon ben Iochai lived in the 2nd century, after Jerusa¬ 
lem was destroyed. Franck says, in the beginning of the 2nd century. This suits the 
period of the Gnostics. The Christian doctrine is taken from Jewish doctrine prior 
to a.d. 120, from their Messianic views. 

49 


770 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


taking care of the things that have beginning and termination. 
This is the Standing, Stood, Will Stand, being a hermaphro¬ 
dite Power in the fore existing unlimited power which has not 
beginning nor termination, being in solitariness; for the 
Thought in solitude proceeding out of this (Power) became 
Two. And he was One: 1 for having Her in himself he was 
solus (povos), not indeed first, although fore-existing, and mani¬ 
fested to himself from himself, he became second. 2 But he was 
not called father before she named him father. 3 Since there¬ 
fore, he by himself producing himself manifested to himself 
his own Intelligentia, so too the appearing Intelligentia did 
not do, but looking upon him hid the father in herself, that 
is, the Power, and (so) is Masculo-feminine Power and Intelli¬ 
gentia (epinoia, phronesis, Wisdom), therefore they face one 
another (for Power does not differ from Intelligence) being a 
unit. 4 Prom things on high is discovered power, but from 
what are below, wisdom is revealed. And thus, therefore, 
what appears from them, being one, is found Two, a male-fe¬ 
male having the female in himself. Thus Mind is in Epinoia 
(Wisdom, Intelligence), and when separated, being a unit, 5 two 
are discovered.—Hippolytus, vi. 18. But this is akin to Philo 
and the Kabalali, of which last Munk said that the New Testa¬ 
ment shows many traces, in the Evangels and Acts of the 
Apostles, 6 as do the Apokryphal books of the Old Testament 
and the Talmud. 

In the Ialkut Chadash fol. 142, col. 4, numb. 43 (under the 
title Mashiacli, aus dem Sohar) we find that the Messiah first 
reveals himself in Galilee. The Israelites will meet the Mes¬ 
siah ben Ioseph who will expect them there.—The Pesikta 
sotarta, fol. 58, col. 1, 2. Eisenmenger, II. 747. That Simon 
Magus the Samaritan was aware of the prophesy in Daniel, ix. 
26 that “the Messiah shall be cut off” is obvious. Matthew 
composed the discourses, —Supernatural Belig. I. 466 (quotes 
Papias; Presbyter John); and they are strongly, doctrinally, 

1 Compare the Adam before his rib was made into the Great Mother of all. 

2 The Logos proforikos. 

3 This is the Kabalali again.—Dunlap, Sod, II. xix. 21, 24, 25, 66, 68, 69, 72-79, 
105, 119. 

4 Adam was represented with two faces.—Sod, II. 70, 80. 

5 Simon called himself the Word.—Sod, II. 67, 69. These Gnostics were all based 
on the Jewish Kabalah. 

6 Munk’s Palestine, p. 520; see also Dunlap, Sod, II. 92, 93. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 


771 


Essene. But if our present text of Matthew had stopped at the 
Aoyia (the discourses) then there would have been no account of 
the crucifixion. Therefore we infer that the account of the 
crucifixion is a subsequent later addition to the Logia. All 
the while, Daniel’s account of the killed Messiah and the Mes¬ 
siah ben Ioseph had stood as a hint for the author of Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel to copy. But his work would become more 
exciting if instead of a “cut off” Messiah he described one 
crucified 1 under P. Pjlatos. This would claim a share of the 
interest still felt in the events of the year a.d. 70. This would 
involve the gradual construction of the Euangelion up to the 
time when ‘the Gospel according to the Hebrews’ (the first of 
the gospels) appeared. This is probable. If Zachariah, ix. 9 
suggested to the scribe the famous entry into Jerusalem, 1 2 why 
should not Daniel, ix. 26 and Rev. xi. 8 (among other imperative 
conditions) have suggested the Crucifixion, as the fall of the 
Tenq3le suggested the ideas in Matthew, xxvi. 61, xxvii. 40? At 
the time when the Temple was destroyed the Messiah was born. 3 
That is, in their necessity they then looked for him. The 
Messiah ben Ioseph will offer himself up and pour out his soul 
in death, and his blood will be an atonement for the People of 
God.—Eisenmenger, Entdektes Judenthum, part II. p. 721; 
Schene luchoth habberith, fol. 242. col. 1. So, too, the book 
Afkdtli rochel shows that there were to be two Messiahs; also 
the book Menor4th hammaor, fol. 81. col. 2. The Christian 
authors had only to go to the Jewish books to get the idea of 
a suffering Messiah. The old rabbins explained Isaiah liii. to 
refer to the Messiah.—Eisenmenger, II. 715. Nork (Art. Mes- 

1 Staurotheto sounds very strangely in a Jew’s mouth ; particularly as stoning was 
customary.—John, viii. 7 ; x. 31. 

2 Matth. xxi. 5 ; John, xii. 15. Nork finds the prototype of Judas’s 30 pieces of 
silver (—Matthew, xxvii. 3) in Zachariah, xi. 12. 

3 Bodenschatz, Kirchl. Verfass. d. Juden, III. 182, 183; the book Nezach Israel, 
fol. 57. col. 3. cap. 50. First, Rome shall be destroyed, and afterwards the Messiah 
shall come.—ibid. 188 ; the book Zeror hammov, fol. 144. col. 2. in der Parasha ki teze ; 
Abarbanel, Majene Jeshuah, fol. 49. col. 4. on Daniel, vii. 13. Rome shall be destroyed 
through the Ismaelites (Persians) according to Abarbanel, c. 1. fol. 59. col. 2. fol. 76. 
col. 2; fiber Jeremiam, fol. 147. col. 2. In the Jerusalem Targum, Parasha Bo, four 
remarkable nights are mentioned : In the 4th night when the appointed time has come 
for the world to be redeemed and the iron yoke shall be broken then Moses will come 
out from the Desert and the King, the Messiah, out of Rome.—Bodenschatz, III. 191. 
Abarbanel regarded the Romans and Christians, although having different names, as 
one people, having one language (Latin), and called them Beni Adoma.—Eisenmenger, 
I. p. 632. 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


772 

sias *) says that the Jewish Tradition was that the Messiah 
would first appear in Galilee as worker of miracles (—Sohar, 
I. fol. 74. col. 293; Isaiah, ix. 1, 2 ; xi. 1); therefore Iesu per¬ 
formed his first miracle in Cana of Galilee—Jolm, ii. 1; Mat¬ 
thew, iv. 18, 23. See Ialkut Chadash, fol. 142 col. 4. number 
43, under the title Massiach aus dem Sohar,—Bodenschatz, 
K. Yerf. d. Iuden, III. 197. The Sohar to Zachariah, xiii. 2 
says that sin will not depart from the world until the time 
when the Messiah shall reveal himself; 2 and Revelation, xx. 2, 
3, reveals the millennium in the Messiah’s time. Some said 
that Kerinthus was a Cliiliast. The sixth sign of the Mes¬ 
siahs coming will be the power of Rome over the whole world. 
Then the Messiah ben Ioseph (named Nehemia ben Cushiel) 
will reveal himself.—Bodenschatz, K. Y. d. Juden, III. 192. 
The Messiah ben Ioseph will be killed in the war of Gog and 
Magog (—Eisenmenger, II. 748, 749; Mashmia jesua, fol. 74. 
col. 1. number 56); and the wrath of God is kindled thereby. — 
ibid. fol. 74. col. 1. 

The original basis of the Clementine Homilies fights the 
Gnosis in its chief forms, as the author regarded them, Simon- 
ism, Paulinism, Markionism; and of this polemic scarcely a 
trace penetrates into the parts that belong to the rewritten 
work (the Clementine Homilies, the Ueberarbeitung); this last 
has its own field, it contends against the heathenism in all its 
forms, the learned (as Appion and the other companions of 
Simon), the popular (the discourses in Tripolis), the doctrine 
of fate, the astrology, etc. (Faustus), and this tendency is en¬ 
tirely foreign to the original writing (the Urschrift). Uhlhorn 
next (pp. 360, 361) holds that the ideas in the Clementine 
Homily III (at the end) concerning Church-government and the 
episcopal installation of Zacchaeus as bishop in Caesarea be¬ 
longed to the original writing, the primal document of the 
three. If the first writing already had the account of the in¬ 
stallation of Zacchaeus then to it belong the episcopal ideas 
which are especially prominent in that account. The person 
who rewrote the first work had less hierarchical tendency. In 
the other paragraphs (or sections) the episcopal tendencies are 
very much in the background.—Uhlhorn, p. 362. Uhlhorn, p. 
435, dates the first writing (the basis on which the two follow- 

1 Nork, Real-Wbrterbuch, III. p. 148. 

2 Nork, Hebrew-Chald.-Rabbin. Lexicon, p. 394. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 773 


ing were composed as successive layers) after a.d. 150; tlie 
Homilies after 160; the Recognitions after 170; but all three 
were probably in existence 201-210, since about 230 Origen has 
either the Recognitions or a work related to it. The funda¬ 
mental treatise, the Grundschrift, was directed against the 
llaeresies , Simonians, Paulinists, Markionites. Therefore it is 
dated after a.d. 150. The Simonian system was a form of the 
Gnosis that contained very strong heathen elements, and Uhl- 
liorn connects the Elkasaites with the Essaioi (Essenes). The 
Elkasaites held the Jewish Law (—Uhlhorn, p. 396), w r ere genu¬ 
ine Ebionites and Nazoria, had a book, were Gnostics; the book 
of Elxai (in Uhlhorn’s opinion) was the main authority and ba¬ 
sis of the Jewchristian Gnosis, was found by Epiphanius (—Uhl¬ 
horn, pp. 394, 395) among the Ebionites, Nazorenes, Nazarenes, 
‘ Ossenes ’ (the Asaia) or Sampsaioi, and Uhlhorn 392 says that 
one could almost identify the names Elxai and the Elkasaites 
with Gnostic Jewchristianism. The polemic against Simon 
culminates in the position (or proposition) that he wished to 
introduce a new heathenism. The natural elements in Elka- 
saitism exhibit themselves as Magic and Astrology, therefore 
Simon is fought as a Magician and Astrologer. In the polemic 
against Paul the expulsion-process and the acceptance-process 
went on side by side ; they did not (according to Uhlhorn) like 
Paul’s Vision of the Christos, and in opposition to it completed 
the clear, sober Revelation-theory whose central point is the 
doctrine of ‘the true prophet.’ Here to exclusion is added 
adoption (says Uhlhorn). Paul’s universalism is opposed 
by Jewchristianism, Peter becomes however Apostle to the 
Heathen, and the more Paul is fought (on the one side) the 
more decidedly (on the other side) Peter takes the place of 
Paul. The Grundschrift (the first of these three treatises) con¬ 
tends against Simon, Paul, and Markion.—Uhlhorn, 403, 404. 
Therefore the Grundschrift (the original) must be later than 
Markion: and in the attacks on the doctrines of Simon Magus 
he is charged with views known to be Markion’s.—Uhlhorn, 
283, 285. 

After raising the question whether the Essaeans did not 
have gnostic elements (of course they did; what is the whole 
doctrine of divinity and the theory of the Angels in heaven 
but gnosis), Uhlhorn recognises Persian elements in Western 
Asia, especially dualist .elements. These appear in the Pour 


774 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Gospels and the Apokalypse. The Elkasaites were evidently 
Gnostics and in relations with the Nazoria near Bassora, and 
with the Ebionites and Nazoria from the Dead Sea, Moab, the 
Transjordane, the Dekapolis, Basan, Iturea, to the Coelesyria 
the parts around Tyre, Sidon, Eastern and Northern Syria, 
Edessa, Nisibis, and finally at Antioch. The Elkasaites had 
the formula in baptism: In the name of the Great and Most 
High Theos and in the name of the Great King His Son. 
They held the Jewish Law.—Uhlliorn, 395, 396; Pliilosophu- 
mena, 293. 23; Matthew, x. 5, 6. They were the Ebionim to 
all intents, and the Nazoria. Elxai (if he ever existed) and the 
Ebionites held that the Christos was an Angel.—Uhlhorn, 397; 
quotes Epiphanius, xxx. 16. Among the Ebionites the Chris¬ 
tos appears as Lord of the Angels.—Uhlhorn, 397, 398 ; Epiph. 
ibidem. The lands on the Dead Sea were the ancient seats of 
Gnostic Jewchristianism.—Uhlhorn, 401. The New Testament 
and Josephus and Cyril of Jerusalem placed the Iessaian 
Nazoria beyond the Jordan, and if never before, certainly after 
Jerusalem was in her ruins (c. 70), it was no place for transjor- 
dan Nazoria the ‘ self-deniers ’ of the Deserts. The three 
Synoptic Gospels represent them as on the ‘Travels’ going 
from village to village in the Holy Land, avoiding the Samari- 
ans and Samaritan Gnosis. They called themselves the ‘ Broth¬ 
ers,’ healed the sick, and cast out devils. Their name itself 
shows their Essaean affinity, for as Esaias is Iesaiah, and Ie- 
remiah is * Eremeias,’ so Iessaean is Essaean. Considering, 
therefore, the affinity subsisting between the Essaians (Os- 
senes), Nazorians, Iessaians, Ebionites and the Elkasaites, it 
is important to observe that according to Eusebius, H. E. YI. 
38, the theory of the Elkasaites rejects the apostles altogether. 
Antiqua Mater, p. 101, says: ‘Into all the earth’ there went 
out from Jerusalem elect men (Eusebius calls them apostles) to 
denounce the godless Haeresis of the Cliristiani. The real 
founders, it may be inferred, were certain roving teachers 
called apostles.—Antiqua Mater, 43. The origin of the con¬ 
ception of the Kingdom is traced especially to the Malkuth 
Shemaim (or Elohim) of the Jews, especially the Essenes, 
whose whole life aimed at its realisation.—ibid. 71. Every 
apostle that comes to you shall remain but one day, but if need 
be another day.—ibid. 57; quotes the Didache or 4 Apostles’ 
Teaching,’ cap. 11. 3 ff. This gives an idea of the actual mis- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 775 


sionaries in the second century ; and may reflect light on the 
Travels of the Iessaians.—Matthew, x. 1-18. 

It is not remarkable that the Nazoria of the Codex at Bas- 
sora should claim John the Baptist as their Nazorine leader, 
should have the full Gnosis of the Angels and many things in 
common with the Elkasaites, Ebionites, Basileides, and not 
follow the Gospel writers in accepting Iesu as their Chris¬ 
tos. Menander claimed to be Saviour himself. Philo Judaeus 
knows no Jesus, does not mention him, and never heard of him. 
Saturninus had not heard of Iesu, as Irenaeus does not accuse 
him of having any opinions in regard to Iesu, but only about 
the Salvator and Christos. The Essaians go back to B.c. 145. 
Therefore Iesu could not have been their founder, nor that of 
the Nazorian Iessaeans. Perhaps in the time of Saturninus 
the notion of a founder of the Nazorine sect of Iessaeans had 
not yet been put forth ; perhaps the idea of any other founder 
than the Essene sect had not been yet brought forward. The 
Clementine Homily, I. 15, distinctly makes the Samaritan 
Simon (who in Irenaeus precedes Saturninus, separated from 
him only by the intervening Menander) its main object of at¬ 
tack. Irenaeus, too, points to him as the principal heretic, 
and so does Acts. Moreover Irenaeus, for a wonder, does not 
charge either of his first three heretics with a knowledge of or 
as even having formed an opinion concerning Iesu,—which he 
would not have hesitated to do if they had said anything 
about him ; so that we are left to our suspicion that these 
philosophers were before the time when a Founder of the sect 
of Iessaens (as worshippers of Iesu) was first named. Every 
city was presumed to have had a founder, why not a sect ? 
The Pythagoreans had their Pythagoras ; why should not the 
Iessaeans (in spite of their Essene origin and parentage) be 
provided, like the Pythagoreans, with a founder of their own 
name, Iesu ? It is true that Irenaeus (quoting expressly from 
a suspected book, the Acts of the Apostles, which he ascribes 
to Luke) does once charge Simon Magus with a knowledge of 
the name Iesus; but as he relies on a suspected authority his 
charge cannot well be sustained. Moreover Irenaeus claims 
for Simon Magus the distinction of being the first of the 
Gnostics, which cannot be true. When we place the Clemen¬ 
tines side by side with the Gospel of Matthew and John’s 1st 


776 


THE GHEBEES OF HEBRON. 


Epistle, familiar signs meet our view, tlie ‘ Brothers ’ 1 (dSeX^ot) 
the similarity of the doctrine (that Iesu is the Christos), and 
that any one who denies that ‘ Iesu is the Christos ’ is a liar ! 
Dating Kerinthus at about 115-125, Basileides at about 125- 
145, throwing out the story about Simon Magus in Acts, admit¬ 
ting that Irenaeus has changed the order of succession in the 
case of Basileides, whom he should have placed after Kerin¬ 
thus, then we get a tolerable position for the Primal work, near 
Justin Martyr (c. 155-167) followed by the Clementina. Thus 
we have a regular order of succession and some coincidences 
and resemblances between the Clementina of Eastern Syria 
and the Petrine substratum of our New Testament that give 
promise that we have struck a trail somewhere in the forest of 
conditions preceding our Four Gospels. Uhlliorn had already 
named Eastern Syria as the source of the Clementina, and we 
have leaned towards Antioch (Syria, practically) rather than 
Borne for the substratum and foundation on which from 150 
to 170 our three Synoptics may have been written. The word 

1 Paulus in 1 Cor. vi. 1, 6 requires the ‘ Brothers ’ to litigate only before the Saints. 
Does a ‘ brother ’ litigate with a 1 brother ’ and this before unbelievers ? In Homily 
ii. 33, Peter himself addresses the “Brothers.” In the Epistle (forged document, 
probably) from Peter to James (prefixed to Dressel’s edition of the Clementine Homi¬ 
lies) § 2, we find d8e\<f>oi s ’ meaning ‘Our Brothers; ’ in Matthew, xxviii. 10 we 

find ‘ rots aSeA^ocs’ meaning ‘the Brothers.’ When, therefore, Eusebius, ii. 23 ; iii. 
20 , speaks of James the ‘ Brother of the Lord ' (quoting Hegesippus) it is of little con¬ 
sequence what Eusebius meant (as his character for truth has often been impeached), 
but James, Peter and John were saints, apostles, and ‘ brothers ’ in Essenism ; Iessa- 
eans, or Healers, who it is assumed, preached the ‘ Healing ’ were Asaya (Healers, 
Physicians), themselves “ Ossenes.” The Iessene Monks performed cures. The term 
Brothers means “ Brothers in the order,” Iessaean “ Brothers ; ” not brothers in the 
flesh, as Eusebius has it. To make it mean that, it should at least have been written 
aSe\(f> 0 L<; /not). And this is really found in some manuscripts; but the oldest Ms., the 
Sinai tic, has no fiov but only rot? dSeA^ois. But the 16th verse of chap, xxviii. shows 
who are meant by the ‘ Brothers,’ “the Eleven disciples went into Galilee” as they 
were ordered. Then comes the doctrinal point: all power in heaven and on earth ! 
This the Iessaian missionary apostles were to teach among all nations ; but in Matthew 
x. 5, the twelve disciples were only to teach the house of Israel, not going near the 
Samaritans, nor the Nations. Some difference ! Antiqua Mater says that ‘ the King¬ 
dom of God ’ was an idea among the Jews. But the missionary enterprise of preaching 
to all nations looks like an addition to the preceding parts of Matthew, as time went 
on in the second century, and the sect of the Iessaeans extended itself ; eA.0dru> pacn\eia. 
<rov! —Matthew, vi. 10, Sinait. Ms. The origin of the conception of the Kingdom is 
traced especially to the Malkhut Shamajim (or Elohim) of the Jews, especially the Es- 
senes, whose whole life aimed at its realisation and the bringing in of the ‘ world to 
come’ Olam le-ba. — Antiqua Mater, 71. The Essenes were required to keep carefully 
the names of the Angels. The Angel-king and Saviour-angel among the rest. This 
was their Gnosis. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 777 


‘ apostles ’ points to Syria quite as well as to Palestine; 
but back of the ‘Apostles’ stood the Jordan Ebionim and 
transjordan Nazoria. The entire legend of Simon Magus and 
Peter seems to be mere legend no matter where we meet it, 
whether in Irenaeus, Hippolytus, or as given in Uhlhorn, p. 
55. Simon’s supposed statue in the island of the Tiber turned 
out to be the statue of Semo Sancus, not of Simon the Gittite. 
But that the Clementine Homilies are contending against the 
doctrines and influence of Simon Magus is as evident as that 
‘ Acts ’ is hostile to Simon. The Iessaeans could no more agree 
with the Simonians than with the Kerinthians or any other 
contemporaneous Gnostic sect. The ambition of the Eastern 
Iessaeans was fortified by the progress in the West of their es¬ 
pecial form of Christianism. All three (the writing Klemen- 
tia, Kedrenus, Glycas) claim to know not merely of a contest 
of Peter with Simon in Syria but also in Rome, and combine 
both accounts together.—Uhlhorn, pp. 55, 57. The Clemen¬ 
tina contain not the least trace of a Letter of Peter.—ibid. 57, 
105. The Clementina corresponded to the orthodoxy of their 
time.—ibid. 58. The Clementina did not attack Simon Magus 
for less than a motive, and they contain the remains of some 
great man! If the Apokalypse does not know the names of the 
12 apostles, cannot mention the name of one of them, then 
Peter and James (Gal. i. 18, 19) are hypothetical, fictitious im¬ 
personations of episcopacy and ambition. If Romans, vi. 15- 
23 indicates the passing over from the stage of the Homilies 
to the status of Grace in Christianism, has not the Recogni¬ 
tions already taken this step ? As the Gnostics were extrem¬ 
ists who gave up the world and flesh for the spirit, it was in 
keeping that they should teach the doctrine of the crucifixion 
of the flesh. The Apokalypse knows of angels sent to carry 
tidings ; and the word apostoloi means those ‘ sent out ’ for 
the purpose. The Homilies were composed with care (worked 
over) to remove what was heretical and to conform the pro¬ 
duction to orthodoxy. The section that Kedrenus preserves 
gives further explanation how that happened.—Uhlhorn, 58, 59. 
The Homilies quote from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.— 
ibid. 119-122. The Clementine Homilies maintain the battle 
against Simon Magus by disputation.—Uhlhorn, p. 344. This is 
the same position as that of Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epipha- 
nius towards Simon Magus and his successors, as they stand in 


778 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Irenaeus. The Disputation is from the beginning laid down 
as the main thing.—ibid. 347. Irenaeus, too, begins the suc¬ 
cession with Simon Magus. It is the fight of Episcopacy 
against the Gnostics.—Philipp, i. 1 ; 1 Timothy, iii. 1-7 ; iv. 
3 ; Titus, i. 7 ; 1 Peter, ii. 25. There was used in the Clementine 
Homilies an ‘original writing’ containing disputations with 
Simon Magus.—Uhlhorn, p. 357, 359. A battle against Simon 
and against the Gnosis implies a very different status from 
the preaching of a Crucified Christos. 

Daniel, i. shows that it was brought out in a Nazorene 
period; the Essenes existed in b.c. 145. After the Book of 
Daniel was written, the institutions ascribed to Moses (Mase, 
Masses) were common to the Pharisees and Asaia (Asaya, 
Essaioi, Essenes). Thus Mosaicism was the heritage of Phoe¬ 
nicians, Samaritans, Jews, Essenes, Iessaioi and Ebionites. 
The Pharisees and Ebionites did not agree. The Ebionites 
(baptised in Essenist theories) widened the breach, as the 
Gospel of Matthew xv. 1, 3, shows, in the second century. 
Philonism and Messianism caused Patripassionism. The Jew¬ 
ish speculation in the ‘ Psalms of Solomon,’ the Prophets (par¬ 
ticularly Micah, v. 2), Proverbs, viii. 30, Philo’s Logos and 
Angel-King had to terminate in the Malka Messiacha (the Mes- 
siah-King) of the Sohar, Matthew, xi. 22, xiii. 12, xvi. 16, xxi. 
5, xxv. 34, 40, and the incarnation of the Logos or Angel-King. 
The 4 Gospel according to the Hebrews ’ and the Gospel of 
Matthew expressed the views of a part of the Ebionites and 
Nazorenes, and an advance was made from Messianism to the 
idea (founded on the expectation of an Anointed Iessaian, the 
Son of Dauid) of a Iesu, as founder of the Iessaians and 
the Divine Teacher of the Ebionim and Nazoraians. Thus we 
have reached the idea of the Representative of Philo’s to on 
and the Kabalist Ain (Ayin) incarnated in a man the (mythic) 
founder of the “ Iessaeans ” or Ebionites. Hence we had to 
expect the Essenism of the 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, and 19th chap¬ 
ters of Matthew. The i, in Iessaian (Iessene), is recovered in 
Iasomai, Iesomai, Iaso,—to cure, to heal. Messianism is Ori¬ 
ental. The New Testament is Greek Christianity. Justinos, 
Apollos, Paulus are Greek names. 1 After the appearance of 
the Messiah the Heathen Powers will assemble for a last at- 

1 Greeks had been in the orient over 400 years. It was time for them to come out 
with what they had there acquired. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 779 

tack upon him. This expectation was also indicated in Old 
Testament passages, particularly in Daniel, xi. 6, 27. Most 
clearly is it spoken out in Orac. Sibyll. III. 663 sqq. and IY. 
Esra, xiii. 33 ff.; see Henoch xc. 16. It is often assumed that 
this last attack follows under the lead of a Chief Opponent of 
the Messiah, an Antichristos (the name in the N. T. epistles of 
John, I. ii. 18, 22 ; iv. 3; II. vii. see Apoc. Baruch, c. 40; 2 
Thess. ii.; Rev. xiii.).—Schurer, II. p. 448 ; Drummond, Jewish 
Messiah, pp. 296-308. In late Rabbinical sources he is called 
Armillus.—Schurer, p. 448; Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 192. 

Behold thy King comes to thee, jusfc and saved is he.—Zachariah, ix. 9; 
Matth. xxi. 5. 

Salvation is for Iaholi (to give).—Jonah, ii. 9. 

Here we distinctly have Christianism (i.e. Iessaian Messian- 
ism) among the Jews before a.d. 100. In the first part of the 
second century of our era, perhaps three men were called 
Messiah : Simon Magus, Dositheus the Samaritan Heresiarch, 
and Iudah the Galilean.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol., II. 39, 205; 
Origen, 25th Orat. on Luke. See Matthew, xxiv. 5, 6, 7. Gno¬ 
sis was in India and on the Jordan; but in Samaria also. 
The Samaritan Simon Magus could appeal to Deuteronomy, 
xxxiii. 16 as being a son of Ioseph the Nazer. The Christian 
party charge that he claimed to be the Primal Power of the 
God,—the Great Power, and to have been born of a virgin 
(compare Isaiah, vii. 14).—Nork, II. 65, 66, 205. The Sohar to 
Genesis, fol. 15, says that the Messiah will come at the end of the 
Sixth Day.—Nork, II. 168. The Hidden Wisdom was present 
in the Kabalah-Tradition to add to and explain Holy Writ. 
Daniel, Isaiah, the Targum of Jonathan to Isaiah, xi. 4, the 
Bereshith Rabba to Genesis, i. 4, the Sohar to Genesis, fol. 
291, the Pesikta Rabbathi fol. 23. d (Nork, II. 34, 42, 76) the 
Apokalypse of Baruch, iv. 43 and Deuteronomy xviii. 18 proph¬ 
esy the Coming of the Messiah, Prophet, Iesua (a Saviour). 
The reign of Mine Anointed shall endure forever. 1 —Baruch, 
iv. 43. 

Like Iudah the Galilean, Iesous Barabbas rebelled against 
the power of Rome. Matthew’s Iesoua was a Galilean. Mat- 

1 This was written after the destruction of Jerusalem in the last part of the first 
century. — Schurer, II. 644. In the last year of Trajan a.d. 117 according to Renan.— 
Drummond, p. 392. 


780 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


thew, xxviii. 13,15, 19 shows that his Gospel was written at a 
late Ebionite period. The Clementine Recognitions, I. 34, re¬ 
late that the Samaritans rightly expected One Prophet ac¬ 
cording to the predictions of Moses (Deut. xviii. 15,18 ; xxxiii. 
16) but were hindered by Dositheus from believing that Iesu 
was the one. In some way Samaria had her opinions or hae- 
resies ! Simon Magus was a Samaritan. What he is supposed 
to have said of himself about being virgin-born Matthew says 
of his Messiah. Simon called himself the Great Power of the 
God, who am eternal and without beginning.—Nork, II. 205 ; 
Clem. Recognitions, II. 9. But John viii. 58, xvii. 5, says of 
Iesu “ Before Abrahm was I am.” If there had been a Gospel 
written by an Apostle of Iesu, there would have been no call for 
any other gospel. Luke says there were many gospels of the 
Messiah. Gfrorer held that a Messiah ‘ born of a virgin ’ was 
exactly in accord with the Essene idea that marriage was de¬ 
filement of the spirit. So Philo’s Therapeutae held. And the 
Iessaean-Ebionite, according to Matthew, may have inclined 
to favor this opinion in the Messiah’s case. At any rate, the 
Septuagint Isaiah, vii. 14 favors this view of the Essene-Ebion- 
ite-Antipharisee-Nazoraian in the middle of the Second Cen¬ 
tury. Matthew, x. 5, xv. 24-26 is Ebionite; but in xxiv. 14, 
xxviii. 19, he broadens out to universalism, like “ Paulus; ” 
only he avoids the question of circumcision that “ Paulus ” 
boldly grasps. Consequently Matthew descends from the 
fence between the stricter Judaist Ebionite and the later 
Ebionites. In Matthew, xxv. 31, 34, we find the Angel-King of 
the Ebionites, the Messiah-King of psalm ii., and the full 
Philonian Logos of the Malka Massicha in Matth. xxviii. 19. 
The Ebionite-Christian had not forgotten the Jewish Kabalah. 
But Matthew, whether of his own accord or by the aid of the 
later Church, happily contrived to let alone the dangerous 
subject of circumcision. 

In India we find the logical symbolism of the Almighty Sun 
looking out from the triangle. In the Apokalypse the sun is the 
body of the Good Power.—Plutarch, de Iside, 51; psalm, xix. 
Arabic, Greek, and Vulgate versions. A The status of the 
Gnostic mystic theokrasia is in the / \ equilateral tri¬ 
angle. 1 —Plutarch, de Iside, 30, 76;/ _\ Rev.xi. 15; John, 


1 The Pyramid of Kneph, or Osiris. The Sphinx is the Divine Power, Heraltlefi, 
the emblem of the Sun. Orion belongs to Horus, but the Bear to Typhon! Then 



THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 781 


x. 30 ; v. 36. It expresses the conjunction of the “ Lord and 
the Lamb,” “ I and the Father are one,” “ the unit (ayin) and 
the Logos,” “ The First and Second God,” “ Bel-Saturn and 
his Anointed the Logos-Sun,” “ The Lord and the Word,” 
Saturn and the Sol in Aries. Hence, in Winter, the Lamb is 
Slain ; after the March equinox the Slain King that was dead 
is living again, for he has the keys of the death and the Hades. 
—Rev. i. 18. This gnosis in Revelation xi. 15 naturally pre¬ 
ceded the era of Matthew and the gospels (of all sorts), for, as 
we see, not yet has mention been made of the man Iesus. But 
after the narrative of the 4 Gospels was put forth it was only 
the work of a stroke of the pen to change the typology of 
Messianism into a connection with the Evangelical Narrative, 
the Christian hieros logos. Those who do not learn to hear 
correctly the names are easily deceived in the things! The 
hieros logos is the holy narrative. Since the theology of the 
Chaldaean Powers was abroad Simon Magus began with a con¬ 
ception of infinite fire, which so exactly squared with Glieber 
notions in Genesis (Ash and Ashah, Asar and Issa) as to arouse 
all the jealousy of which the Christian politicians were capable. 
If the Samaritans had a different idea of the Messiah from 
that entertained by the Jews the direction not to visit the 
Samaritans might perhaps be understood.—Matthew, x. 5. 
John, iv. 25; Epiphanius contra Ebion. Haer. xxx. 1. The 
Apokalypse had no Crucifixion to bring forward. Matthew, 
on the other hand had to prove a Crucifixion, therefore he 
brings forward an Elias in the shape of John the Baptist, who 
was already dead, and could not testify. The Gospels had to 
prove the Messiah's appearance , before they could testify to his 
parables, miracles, doctrine, and Crucifixion. Messianism ex¬ 
pected the Messiah in the Old Testament. Elchasai (Elxai) 
wrote about his expected Coming, in the reign of Trajan. The 
Revelation of John expected his Coming. Justin argues from 

Horus returns from Hades ; Osiris too from Hades joins Horus in fighting the Devil.— 
De Iside, 19. The use of the pyramid (the Great Triangle) for the sepulchre of the 
Sol Saturnus made it come into general use for the burial of the Great Priests or Kings 
of Memphis. There were many sepulchres of Osiris in Egypt, but the body lies in 
Bousiris, his native land.—De Iside, 21. Isis came out of Phoenicia, and with her the 
Osiris-religion, the worship of Asar, Asari, Asarel, and Israel. The emigrants into the 
Delta never forgot the Highplaces of Bal (Bol). Balam kept up the 7 altars of the 
Chaldaean Sabaoth.—2 Kings, xxiii. 5. How he would have enjoyed reading Rev. i. 
12, 16, v. 6. Balam’s name was probably written in the 2nd century B.c. under the 
Makkabees or their successors.—Numbers, xxiii. 1. 


782 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Old Testament that he had come, quotes from his addresses 
to the people. But the Ebionites joined to Elxai declared the 
Christos a manlike figure unseen by men , and ninety-six thou¬ 
sand paces in length.—Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 5, 17. This 
was Elxai’s view.—ib. xxx. 17. Now if in Trajan’s reign (98-117) 
the Christos was so very tall, and unseen by men, what becomes 
of St. Matthew’s particular account! How came the prophet 
Elxai to think the Christos of that particular height in a.d. 97- 
100, if Iesu in a.d. 30 taught in all the synagogues of Galilee ? 
—Matth. iv. 23. Notwithstanding the different opinions in re¬ 
gard to the date of such Apokalypses as the Third Sibyl, the 
Book of Henoch, 1 and the Fourth Esra, the earlier they are, 
the more they prove, and are so much the better for our pur- 
XDOse. Christianism may be late perhaps; but we find a line 
of Messianic 2 revelations (prophecies) extending from Ezekiel, 
xxxiv. 23, 24 (1 Sam. xvi. 13), Micah, v. 2, Daniel, vii. 13, 14, 26, 
down through the targums of Onkelos and Jonathan ben Usiel 
and to the Jewish dogmas in the earliest parts of the Sohar. 
The Soliar’s Messianism comes down from the beginning of 
the second century of the Christian era. The Apokalypses 3 
follow the prophet Daniel, and their doctrine regarding the 
Son of God, as the Anointed King, is confirmed by psalm ii., 
Philo Judaeus, 4 and the Sohar. So that the Christianism 
(apart from the Essaism) of a portion of the Ebionites sprung 
out of a genuine Persian and Jewish basis (in some degree 

1 The Oldest part of the Henoch-book dates b.C. 130-100.—Schiirer, II. 624. Parts 
were written by a later author posterior to B. C. 40-38, at the earliest, in the time of 
Herod. The idea of the Messiah there given is completely intelligible from Jewish ante¬ 
cedents (Pramissen). No Christian Anonymus would have avoided every allusion to the 
person Iesu. It is more probably pre-christian.—Schiirer, II. 625, 626. Matthew, xvi. 
13, 16, is much like Mark, viii. 27, Luke, ix. 18, and injects the Gnostic expression “ The 
Son of the Man.” See ibid. 626. The Assumptio Mosis was written soon after the 
Varus-War (b.C. 4), written in the first part of the reigns of Herod’s sons Philippus and 
Antipas.—Schiirer, II. 634, 635. “The reign of mine Anointed will last forever.”— 
The Apokalypse of Baruch, 38-40. This was written probably not long after A. d. 70. 
—Schiirer, II. 642, 644. The Apokalypse of Esra was written a.d. 81-96.—ib. II. 657. 

2 The psalms are Pharisee-Jewish ; in opposition to the unrighteous kingdom of the 
Hasmonians that Pompey has overthrown the author confidently hopes for Ihe Mes¬ 
sianic King of Dauid’s house.—Schiirer, II. 591; ps. xvii. 1, 5, 23-51; xviii. 6-10. See 
vii. 9 ; xi. Thy King comes to thee, just and saving, mild and riding on an ass.— 
Zachariah, ix. 9. 

3 Zachariah is apokalyptic; and the Sabian Sun with Seven Eyes appears as in Rev. 
i.— Zach. iii. 9; iv. 10; vi. 12, 13 ; ix. 9. So the Chaldean Deity stands on a lion, sur¬ 
rounded by Seven Stars.—Layard, Bab. and Nin., 154, 155. 

4 The Angel Lord, appears as Saviour Angel in Isaiah, lxiii. 9 ; Zachariah, i. 12. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 783 


related to a similar doctrine of tlie Son of God mentioned in 
the scripture of Hermes in Egypt), which, like a lost Messi¬ 
anic continent, lay between the Old World of the Jewish Gno¬ 
sis and the New World of Ebionite Christianism (Nazarene 
Gnosis). These prophetic Apokalypses may be regarded as 
ex parte continuations of the Jewish Prophetical Writings, and 
help to reveal the character of a lost period in Jewish historj^, 
partly filling up the space between the Old Testament and 
the New, in which the feeling of the Jews was so strong against 
the Greeks, 1 and the followers of Simon Magus became the 
active representatives of Samaritan * as contradistinguished 
from Jewish gnosis. He who holds fast to the preexistence of 
Christ cannot believe that the Son of God has first come into 
existence through the action of the Holy Pneuma in the virgin, 
and he who believes in this coming into being through the 
Holy Pneuma thereby gives up the preexistence in the reality. 
Where is the right so to defend the Dogma of the virginal 
birth as to omit to defend the preexistence ? With that 
miracle a historical fact is asserted, and it has got to be sub¬ 
mitted to historical criticism.—Harnack, Ant wort, 1892. p. 18. 
There were Ebionites that affirmed and those that denied the 
miraculous birth of Iesus.—Origen and Eusebius. 

Some gnostics supposed that the logos was enveloped in 
the man who has lived, but that only the man is born, has 
suffered and is dead, and not the Logos. The Hellenists (ac¬ 
cording to Clemens Al. I. 1, 5. Potter, p. 333) could not under¬ 
stand literally a Son of God clothing himself with flesh, born 
of a virgin, then dead and returned to life.—Havet, III. p. 434. 
Kerinthus resided at Antioch, followed Saturninus, and be¬ 
lieved in the Saviour Christos. Havet’s description seems to 
fit him perfectly ; only Irenaeus, I. xxv. charges that Kerinthus 
held that the Christos in the man announced the Unknown 
Father and performed miracles. But the 4 Unknown Father ’ 

1 Zachar. ix. 9, 13; xiv. 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, 16; Malachi, iii. 1; Rev. xxii. 15. 

2 Compare Amos, iii. 12 ; iv. 1. The city Samaria was Hellenist, having a colony 
of Macedonians.—SchUrer, ed. 1886, part II. pp. 10, 43. Justin Martyr was not Jew¬ 
ish ; but he came from near Sichem in Samaria. He argues against Moses and Judaism. 
He seems filled with the doctrine of a Crucified Messiah. The Messiah will die.— 
Daniel, ix. 26. The Messiah ben Joseph has partly a Samaritan aspect, since the Jews 
have the contrary expression Messiah ben Daud. If Philo had known that his Divine 
Logos was represented in a human form and crucified, he could not have avoided taking 
some notice of it. The inference is that Messianism had not yet got beyond belief in 
an expected Jewish Messiah in Philo’s time. 


TS4 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


belongs to the systems of Kerdon and Markion. This puts 
Kerinthus about the time of the liaeretical Ebionites. Since, 
however, Isaiah, liii. 8, 9, 10, was understood by the Jews to 
foretell the destruction and resurrection of the Messiah and 
Daniel, ix. 26 was interpreted in a similar way, Kerinthus, 
adhering to the Law in part, was probably informed of these 
interpretations. Of course, then, as neither Isaiah, liii. nor 
Daniel, ix. nor the Apokalypse mention the man Iesus, it was 
possible for Kerinthus not to have known about the Virginal 
Birth or the name Iesus; whether he lived about 125 or later. 
If Saturninus is dated about a.d. 130, Irenaeus first mentions 
Kerinthus three chapters later. So that we must place Kerin¬ 
thus not earlier than 135,—at least prior to the doctrinal birth 
from a virgin (in the Gospels). This lends a 'doubt as to the 
order and plan of Irenaeus. 

In the Book of Daniel the Jewish Messiah is killed, not 
crucified. He is later represented as a beggar sitting at the 
gates of Borne. The Jewish Messiah is neither Essene, nor 
Iessaian, nor born of a virgin, nor in the army of Judas the 
Galilean, nor in the band of Iesous Barabbas, nor tried before 
Pilate. Nor does he teach Essene dogmas, or deliver oracles 
or parables, or take the side of Caesar. This belongs to the 
story in the Christian Gospels. The Jewish Messiah was to be 
a Warrior, not a Healer. He was either a God or a man or a 
Savior Angel, or Philo’s Logos, according as people might 
happen to think. The Christian Messiah was both God and 
man. The Jewish Messiah appears in the Sohar and in psalm 
ii. as the King of the Angels. So he does in Matthew, iv. 11, 
xxv. 34; Luke, ix. 26. The Jewish Messiah is Son of Dauid. 
So is the Christian Messiah; Matthew and Luke are careful 
to give a genealogy showing him to be descended from Dauid. 
But Matthew gives him a father, mother, brothers, sisters and 
disciples. Further Matthew agrees with two little books the 
Apocryphal Evangel of the Infancy and the Protevangelium 
Jacobi. Matthew, iv. 15, like the Sohar, lets the Messiah 
appear in Galilee, starting with the Jewish theory; but he 
changes the whole character of the Jewish Messiah as he pro¬ 
ceeds with his narrative. Matthew, v., vi., vii., x. chapters, 
turns the Jewish Messiah at once into a Iessaian. 1 He is no 

1 Epiphanius, I. 120; Matthew, x. f>, 16-22; xxiii. 15, 23, 25, 27. They are the 
persecuted Nazorenes and Ebionites, in the tran^jordan districts, and perhaps at Pella. 
—Acts, xxii. 6. They were Nabatheans.— Jervis, 380; Dunlap, Sod, II. 12. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 785 


longer the Jewish Messiah but a Nazarene Healer, an entirely 
different creation,—notwithstanding the references to the Old 
Testament. When Jerusalem fell “ it seemed only a question 
of time when the priests should again be able to resume their 
service.”—Schiirer, I. 550, 555; so Acts, i. 6. Into the in¬ 
heritance of the Saddukees and Priests came the Pharisees and 
Rabbins.—Schiirer, I. 551. This explains the hostility of the 
lessaians towards the Pharisees. 1 —Matthew, iii. 7 ; v. 20,32,34, 

1 The Pharisees continued to be always the ruling power, having the masses on 
their side.—Schiirer, II. 336. But the lessaians were opposed to the sect. The scribes 
and Pharisees sat on the seat of Moses. Therefore everything that they may have told 
you (to do) do it; but do not according to their works, for they talk but don’t act.— 
Matthew, xxiii. 2-5. This speech belongs to a period posterior to A. D. 135, when the 
Pharisees had been cowed by Hadrian! If they had not been, it would not have been 
safe for a Iessaean or Nazorene to have said such things against them. And no one 
could have said them in a.ix 32. This rather raises the question, in the case of 
Matthew, xxiii. 1, who did say it. For what Matthew may have said after Barco- 
cheba was killed could hardly have been said a century earlier. The word sat im¬ 
plies that they did not continue to sit any longer in Moses’ seat in the time when 
Matthew wrote. At any rate, whether Barcocheba killed the Nazorenes or not, 
Matthew, xxiii. 15, 25, 27, is a bitter enemy of the Pharisees and Saddukees. So 
Origen, Com. On John, tom. VII. (II. 189). While Matthew connects the Pharisees 
and Saddukees together, Schiirer II. 345 asserts that the last agreed with the Pharisee 
tradition in several, perhaps in many, particulars. Hence the new sect from the Jordan, 
Transjordan, the district between Syria and Egypt and the lower Euphrates, the Ebi- 
onim, Nabatheans and Nazoria together with Sampsaioi and Elkesaites could furnish 
a party no further affiliated to the Pharisees and Saddukees than their assent to the 
Laws of Moses. Such a party is found in Matthew, x. 5, 6; xxiii. 1-11. One is your 
Master (the Messiah) and ye will be all brethren, as among the Essenes. The Greater 
of you will be steward.—Matthew, xxiii. 11; Jos. Wars, II. viii. (vii). The difference 
between superintendent and steward is not much ; for they obeyed the managers im¬ 
plicitly, according to Josephus. Now that this community constituted a party is 
expressly stated by Josephus; for he declares that these lessaians are “resident in 
every city.” But their usages differed from those of the Pharisees and Saddukees, 
although they believed in Moses. We can see why Matthew, x. 6, excludes the Samar¬ 
itans and foreigners; because the disciples were Messianist lessaians ( Israelites ) 
although separate from the Pharisees and Saddukees : and Matthew, x. 6 is not quite up 
to the Pauline standard of an Antioch Christian. That part of Matthew retains the 
old lessaian character. But, afterwards , Matthew comes up to the Antioch standard 
of Christianism. The break was from gnostic dualism and Essenism in the cities of 
Palestine into lessaian Messianism, subsequently followed by the abandonment of 
Moses and the Law together with circumcision,—especially among the Greeks of Asia. 
The word Iesu (Iesous) looks as if it were derived from the name lessaian (lessaioi,. 
Asia) itself, as leader of the lessaioi. Finally, Josephus, Wars, II. viii. 6, describes 
the Essaioi as Healers , just like the lessaioi, Iesu, and the Nazoraioi (Nazarenes). It is 
interesting to note that the polemic of Irenaeus is directed against Antiocheian, Ebio- 
nite, Nikolaitan and Samaritan alike; that of Justin Martyr, against the Samaritan 
Haeretics and Markion. Justin therefore is identified with one of the Christian- 
Iessaean conflicts with some of the Gnostics after the Barcocheba War. He is the first 
who tells us of the Crucifixion. But there was not likely to be any crucifixion story- 

50 


786 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


44; viii. 12 ; ix. 34. Matthew, x., is the work of Iessaeans not 
of the Pharisees. The continence of the Iessaean (Matth. v. 27, 
28) and the prohibition of oaths (v. 34) show that these opponents 
of the Pharisees are Iessaean Communists (Acts iv. 32, 35) with 
Essene doctrines. And to show that they were not Jews but 
Ebionite Nazoria we have Matthew, x. 9,10. The characteristic 
of the Essene ascetic is his care for his soul and his gnostic 
neglect of the body.—x. 28 ; xi. 11. His animus against the 
Pharisees and Sadukees is visible, Matth. xvi. 11, 12. What 
sect then did Matthew address ? There was only the third 
sect and its derivatives, 1 the Iessaians. Hadrian started the 

about the Messiah until the Jews proper got over their first expectation of his coming 
or before some one conceived the idea of a Iessaean Messiah ; and this last notion was 
not likely to have sprung up until the theory of a Jewish Messiah had been well preached 
by Simeon ben Iochai in the first part of the Second Century. In the nature of things 
the doctrine of a Jewish Messiah must have preceded the idea of a lessaian Messiah and 
did precede it. The expression “ the Great City which is called pneumatically Sodom 
and Egypt, where too the Lord was crucified” (Rev. xi. 8) just means Rome, not 
Jerusalem ; so that the persecution of the Saints is meant. Justin knows of a certain 
John the author of the Apokalypse ; which does not make out that it was written 
much before 135. In fact, the Apokalypse is a Sibylline performance, rather than a 
suggestion of any of the gospels; and while it has the names Iesua and Christos, these 
may have been put in at any late period (by interpolating a Messianic manuscript) as a 
Christian superstructure. But it has none of the Essene doctrine of Matthew, no 
genealogy of Davidical descent, although it refers to the root of David, and Rev. ii. 
26, iii. 9, 12, iv. 4, v. 5, vii. 4, xiv. 1, are Jewish or Ebionite enough to point to the 
Jewish Messiah before Matthew’s Gospel was written. How could the Christians pos¬ 
sibly succeed in preaching that the Messiah had already come, until after the Jews had 
ceased, under Barcocheba, to maintain his proximate coming ?—Rev. xxii. 20. As it 
was, they got help from Arabia.—Galat. i. 17. The Idumeans came to assist in defence 
of the Jerusalem Temple against Titus. 

1 The Nazoraioi were ascetics. As to Nazorenes in Nabathaea, we have “the 
Marshes of the Nabathaeans which are between Wasith and Basra” (—Jervis, Gen. p. 
379, who quotes Yakuti ap. Gol. and El-Jauhari, author of an Arabic Lexicon dated 
A. H. 390) and, further, we find the “Nazoria” of the Liber Adami called Naba- 
thaeans.—Norberg, Cod. Nasaraens, p. v. If, then, the Nazorenes of the New Testa¬ 
ment disliked the Pharisees, they were connected with the Elchasaites, Ebionites and 
Nabathaeans; and, being Iessaians, may not have liked the Jews as well as the Baptists 
of Mithra on the Jordan.—Matthew, iii. 1, 7, 13 ; Coloss. ii. 16, 18. The Nabathaeans 
occupied a tract of country near Galad or the Hauran or the parts of Syria bordering 
on Mt. Lebanon. The Jews and Nabathaeans were allied against the Syrian power of 
the Seleucidae.—Jervis, 382. In the ages of the Syrian kings and first Caesars the 
Nabathaeans were paramount from the Nile to the Euphrates and from Lebanon to 
Mount Zametas.—ibid. 383. Consequently the Nazoria at Basra and the Nazoraioi 
on the east of the Jordan were directly connected. Moreover, according to Strabo, 
760, the Nabathaeans are Idumeans and went over and joined the Jews and had the 
same usages that the Jews had. The Idumeans, then, were quasi Jews of more or less 
Nazorene ascetic views. Jordan was the beginning of the evangels ; but the Iessaians 
that Epiphanius in 367 mentions were not likely to have appeared in force until 
after the Jewish Messiah Barcocheba had perished in about a.d. 134. The chief abode 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 787 


building’ of Aelia Capitolina in a.d. 130.—Schtirer, 568. This 
was a deathblow to the Jewish hopes of the rebuilding of the 
Temple of Jerusalem under the leadership of the Jewish Mes¬ 
siah of the house of David.—Schtirer, I. 555, 556, 571. This 
was for the Jews another abomination standing in the holy 
spot (—Matthew, xxiv. 15 ) that the Romans had desolated. 
Considering that the Ebionites were at Pella in a.d. 135-145, and 
that the author of ‘ Supernatural Religion ’ has not considered 
the Gospel of Matthew earlier than a.d. 150, Matthew, xxiv. 15, 
16, may Avith greatest probability be connected Avith the 
Ebionim. See Matthew, x. 6. These Ebionites were Jews so 
far as adhering to the Law of Moses, and might perhaps be 
referred to as ‘ the house of Israel.’ Now Matthew, xxiv. 23- 
27 reads as if it had been preceded by a Messianic disappoint¬ 
ment, a false Messiah, like Barcocheba; for it speaks of false 
Messiahs, and recommends a retreat to the mountains (Pella, 
for instance).—ibid, 16, 24, 26. Yerse 24 speaks of signs and 
wonders to deceive the Chosen. According to the Christian 
tradition, Barcocheba fooled the people by deceptive miracles. 
—Schtirer, 571. There must have been a portion of the Ebio- 
nite country people beyond Jordan after a.d. 125 that were 
opposed to the Pharisee party; from these the Iessaeans of 
Epiphanius sprung. They were not Pharisees or Saddukees. 
Matthew shows that; but they accepted Moses as their legal 
instructor. 

“ This mystery that saves, that is, the suffering of the Messiah by which he 
saved them.”—Justin, 84. 

The writings proclaim the Christos suffered; that is evi¬ 
dent.—Tryplio, c. 89. To the Messiah, among other names, 
the name Khulia (the sick) or Khiora (the leprous) is given; 
and this rests on Isaiah liii. 4. According to the book Sifre , 
R. Jose the Galilean said : The king Messiah is lowered and 
been made little on account of the faithless, as is written: 
He is pierced on account of our iniquities.—Isaiah, liii. 5. 
How much more will he therefore make satisfaction for all 
sorts, as is Avritten : Iaholi has made the iniquity of us all to 
fall upon him.—Isa. liii. 6. The Jewish opponent of Justin 
Martyr applied verse 7 to the Messiah. D. E. Schtirer, II. 

of the Nabathaeans was Mesopotamia and Chaldaea.—Larsow, de Dialectorum Linguae 
Syriacae Reliquiis, p. 13. 


788 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


465-6, considers this idea of atonement by the Messiah as on 
the whole foreign to Judaism, although in the 2nd century in 
certain circles of Judaism the idea existed of a suffering Mes¬ 
siah expiating the sins of men. Isaiah, xi. 3, mentions the suf¬ 
ferings of the descendant of Iesi, according to the Talmud San¬ 
hedrin, 93 b , 98 a ; and this is confessed by Trypho the Jew in 
Justin’s Dialogue, c. 68. Justin says : When we mention the 
scripture-passages (the graphas) which plainly declare that 
the Messiah must suffer, and is to be adored and is God, they 
admit under compulsion 1 that the Messiah is there spoken of, 
but still they dare to assert that this is not the Messiah.—D. 
E. Schiirer, II. 465; Justin, ed. Lutetiae, 1551. p. 81. The 
Messiah, the Son of a Star, was expected in a.d. 132.—Volkmar, 
Mose Himmelfahrt, p. 71. Jordan and Jew alike awaited the 
X^romised Messiah. 

When the Temxde was destroyed, its priests slain, the pow¬ 
er of the Pharisee party was much reduced, especially in 135. 
It was a new x>lantation where the old forest had not yet dis¬ 
appeared. While the Pharisees prevailed the Essenes were 
out of power and subordinate ; but the control of the Pharisees 
and the government of Herod once removed, and no Jew al¬ 
lowed to enter Jerusalem after 135, the Jordan-Essaian-Nazo- 
raian element grew rax>idly. The rabbins had expounded the 
Laws of Moses, Jordan and Jew alike had called for the xu’opli- 
esied Messiah, Antioch Jews took a hand in the movement 
of mind, Simon’s followers theorised on the gnosis in the Bible, 
Saturninus lowered the grade of the God of the Jewish Temxde 
to correspond with the victoiy of the Eoman Eagle, what was 
left of the Pharisees winced under Homan sway and the re- 

1 Are compelled to agree that these graphas (scriptures) were spoken about (the) 
Messiah indeed, but dare to say that this is not the Christ.—Justin, ed. Lutetiae, 1551. 
p. 81. Justin’s Jews said that the prophecy of Isaiah referred to Hezekiah. They also 
(p. 80) complained (very justly) that the Septuagint translation was different from the 
scripture. There is no doubt that the two texts differ in Isaiah, ix. 6, xi. 3, and else¬ 
where. This is just one of the crucial points connected with the separation of the 
Messianist Christians from the Messianist Jews. Christianism and Rome joined 
forces.—Matthew, xxii. 21. But the earlier work, the Apokalypse, xvii. 16, wanted to 
see Rome burnt up. Consequently, Matthew approaches the status of the Clementine 
Homilies. 

The revisions of Hebrew historical-prophetical writings were such, probably, as to 
make it very uncertain who is meant by Isaiah, xi. 1. The passage may be late, or it 
may not refer to any one in particular. Any reference to a Son of Dauid may be re¬ 
garded as expression of patriotic hope. None but a scribe, a priest, was likely to 
have written at all. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 789 


mains of the party of the Great Galilean began to think again 
of insurrection. But the Messianic hope still burned in the 
Israelite breast. Where was the Messiah to come from ? From 
the letter of the scripture! From the interpretation of the 
rabbins. From the fire in the sect of Iudah the Galilean. 
From the land of Zebulon and Naphtali! Aye, even from the 
mouth-pi eces of the Kabalah. 

The Nazorenes were coming forth out of the forest of opin¬ 
ions. The poor always believed in communist theories, it is 
always agreeable, even in politics, to be supported out of the 
common store and to get bread without labor. 1 The Baptism 
of the Jordan continued, the sect of John was still there. The 
lion of Judah was expected to issue from the swellings of the 
Jordan,—perhaps from the midst of the followers of John,—a 
poor man, like all the rest,—a Nazori self-denying, and ac¬ 
quainted with the sorrows of his people. How could a book 
of earlier date than the Christian era prove that the Messiah 
had come ? In this way. He had to come, because something 
of the sort was interpreted out of its expressions by priests, 
earlier scribes, and rabbins. The prophesies had to fit the 
case. He had been foretold, doubtless. Certain Messianic 
passages, doubtless, foretold his coming. Then he had come ! 
But, even then, the Iessaian stood only on his Essene Gnosis 
and a hypothesis ! Christianism was not yet separated from Ju¬ 
daism. What separated it ? The fall of Betar. The Gospel 
Narrative, the Essaian doctrine, the evangelization of the 
poor, the Antiocheian and apostolic missions ! The Archangel 
Michael represented the Jews.—Bev. xii. 7; Dan. x. 21. Ga¬ 
briel represented the Nazoria and the Logos-Creator. East¬ 
ern gnosis was based on the unsound theory of 4 spirit and 
matter,’ and Saint Matthew’s gnosis was an Ebionite graft 
upon Jewish gnosis. Salvation was expected to come from 
the Jews and Jewish gnosis. 2 * Matthew’s Essene or Ebionite 

1 Lazarus is better than Dives. The rich man is lowered into hell. But even the 
Anarchists assent to the destruction of other people’s property. 

2 Markion was a gnostic Christian, and Justin, Apologia, I. p. 158, says that he was 

still teaching, vvv SiSaa-xei. Justin, p. 145 refers (Apol. I. 26) to Markion as a man 

“now living and teaching his disciples . . . and who has by the aid of demons caused 
many of all nations to utter blasphemies,” etc. Markion did not come to Rome, where 
Justin himself was, until A. D. 139-142 (this is not our own estimate, which is a later 
one) ; and it is apparent that the words of Justin indicate a period w’hen his doctrines 
had already become more widely diffused. In the Superscription of the Apology, An- 


790 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


gnosis was one thing; his Narrative, another. In crucifying 
the Jews, the Romans had crucified the Lord and the Messiah 
in spirit.—Rev. xi. 8, 15. The Narrative is a wrap for the doc¬ 
trine, and carries the gnosis. Justin (Trypho) p. 34 refers to 
the Gnosis of divine things. In a.d. 154-160, or later, Justin 
mentions the war with Bar Cocheba as ru> vvv yeytvrjfxevw IouScukw 
7roAe/xa), that is, the last war, the recent war.—Apologia, I. p. 
146. Justin, in the Dialogue, too, has a war going on. Mithra 
was the Logos ; the Messiah Christos was the Logos : and the 
Messiah was asarkos; how then was it possible (when the 
Jews held to psalm ii. 7, 12) to preach to a people, bent on the 
Coming of the expected Bon of Dauid, that the King had al¬ 
ready appeared a century earlier, until their last hope of a Son 
of Dauid was extinguished in the death of Bar Cocheba. After 

toninus is called Pius, a title that was first bestowed upon him in the year 139.—Super- 
nat. Rel. I. 285, 286 ; Justin’s first Apology dates about a.d. 147.—ibid. 285, 286 ; An- 
tiqua Mater, p. 32. This is about 12 years after the Jewish false Messiah Bar Cocheba 
was slain. But we date the first Apologia after 156, under pope Anicetus. The Mar- 
kionites were all called Christians, as acknowledging the Christos. — Justin, 145. 
Markion confessed the Christos as asarkos , pure spirit, without the flesh. Justin says 
that the Son became a man being in some manner made flesh.—Apologia, I. p. 147. 
This being the very point at issue, the Evangelist Matthew made the most of it. Justin 
knew the story of the crucifixion when he wrote his first Apology (this looks very late), 
and puts the birth of Iesu under Kurenios 150 years previously.—ibid. p. 153. But in 
reality the Logos was mainly regarded as in the sun, therefore in about the ninth cen¬ 
tury some Sabians worshipped the Christos in the sun, others, in lesu. Since the 
‘ Assumptio Mosis,’ his Ascension, is dated by Volkmar at 139 and Iesous (Joshua) suc¬ 
ceeds him as Prophet (Volkmar, p. 47, Himmelfahrt, p. xiii.) it fits in very well with 
the supposed date of Matthew’s Gospel (later than 140) and the assumption of a human 
being, lesu, in whom, as Baptist, Iessaian, or Nazori, the asarkos Messiah descended to 
earth as a man. That Matthew’s Gospel was meant, in part, as a reply to Markion is 
not wholly improbable. It is sufficient to that end. Trypho argues that Elias must 
first appear ! Matthew and Justin held that Elias had appeared. Justin, p. 64 quotes 
as follows : I indeed baptize you in water unto repentance ; and there will come One 
stronger than I; quoting the very words in Matthew, iii. 11. Consequently, the Gos¬ 
pel of Matthew or the Gospel according to the Hebrews was already in existence before 
Justin wrote ; for in Apologia 1. Justin quotes from a gospel which says the same things 
as the fifth chapter and some other parts of Matthew state. Therefore if Matthew (or 
Matthew’s source) be late, as late as a.d. 150-170, as the author of “ Supernatural Re¬ 
ligion ” seems to think, then Justin must be still later. Consequently, Justin is only a 
testimony to the existence of the Gospel at the time he wrote. We see that he writes 
also later than the writer of the Apokalypse, which has no Gospel Christianism to sup¬ 
port as the Paulinists had, and therefore mentions none of the Gospel scenery and 
make-up; says nothing about Elias, because it does not need to! Plainly, Justin 
writes as if he came after Markion ; just as Irenaeus writes as if he came after Kerin- 
thus. Justin, p. 38, uses the words u the wonderful precepts in what is called the 
evangel; ” this shows that, if the Evangel was late in the 2nd century, Justin must 
have written later yet: and he knows Markion’s views ; which were put forth with 
ability under the pontificate of Anikgtos (a.d. 154-166).—Irenaeus, III. iv. p. 251. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 791 


145-150 it was more likely that the preachers of Iesu would be 
listened to than before. In Bar Cocheba’s fall all hope per¬ 
ished.—Volkmar, Mose Himmelfahrt, p. 70-72. Finis Judaeae 
spes coeli, says Volkmar,—the End of Judaea, the hope of 
heaven. 

The Temple had disappeared, but the Jewish Diaspora, 
Essenism, Ebionism, and Messianism remained awaiting* the 
kingdom of the Lord. There was a preceding Mithraworship, 
a preceding Messianism, antecedent to the Christian Gospels. 
At last the Diaspora prays that the Kingdom of the Son of 
Dauid may soon come. The Oriental Messianism (with Baby¬ 
lon, the Euphrates and Jordan Iessaeans in its rear, and 
Edessa on its right) has come into Syria, to Antioch. The 
Messianist Apokalypse has spoken, but not yet said the final 
word, that must be spoken! The Jordan enfolds the Christos 
in the arms of the Chaldaean sun. Then from Moab, Beroia, 
Tiberias, Caesaraea or Galilee issues an Eastern hieros logos, 
the narrative of the life and death of the Christos appears, 
heralded from the Nazarenes along the Jordan. The Crucifix¬ 
ion is declared of the Manifestation that Elxai had dreamed, 
and the Christos is proclaimed incarnate. One now appears 
surrounded by 12 apostoloi. Greeks now preach the Crucified 
Christos, and argue for a world-religion of Messianism. The 
Diaspora is every where in touch with the Greeks and with the 
Jordan Nazarenes. The Saints have won the victory, through 
the triumph of the Good Tidings. Now we see why Matthew 
addresses the Israelites, it is the Ebionites and the Law of 
Moses beyond Jordan in the Desert or at Pella to whom x. 5, 6 
is addressed.—Matth. v. 17. He is careful not to disturb their 
Law; heaven and earth shall pass away first.—Matth. v. 18. 
But before Matthew writes come first the Hagioi who know 
only the Adon, the Lamb, the Logos-Messiah, not the man 
Iesus, nor the Gospels. The Didache (according to Antiqua 
Mater, 76) mentions no Iesus; the Apokalypse probably men¬ 
tioned none when it was first put out. Hermas mentions none ; 
but Barnabas, a late work, speaks of Iesus (Ant. Mater, 72, 96). 
Matthew is full of the name. How easy it would have been for 
any one, before Matthew wrote, to have considered the expres¬ 
sion Angel Iesoua to imply a manifestation at intervals upon 
earth, just as Elxai seems to have supposed. At any rate, the 
Apokalypse is gnostic and took cognizance originally only of 


792 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Logos and the Lamb, the Power of the Sun in Aries. The 
citations from the Synoptic Evangels by Justin show suffi¬ 
ciently that these Gospels in the year 150 had not yet received 
definitive final redaction (revision).—Loman, 100. The first 4 
Pauline Epistles were of right late origin, and indeed under 
the influence of universalist tendencies which about the same 
time ripened the antijewish gnosis of Markion. In the first 
half of the 2nd century the Christian communities in the Dias¬ 
pora sought to gradually introduce their Christianism in the 
Greek world by dropping off those national and patriotic 
colors that stood in the way of the general expansion of Chris¬ 
tianism and in stead of these local particularist Jewish tints 
substituting an atmosphere of the Greek-Roman universalism. 
—ib. 190. Thus we here have the Jewish Diaspora, after their 
Temple was destroyed, become a contributor to the rise of the 
sect of Christians, probably the author mainly of the new 
movement, until the Crucifixion, Essenism, Ebionism and the 
parables were added to the Messianism of the Apokalypse. 

Jordan was the beginning of the evangels, and there we 
found John and Banous. The book of Elcliasai referred to 
Baptism in the name of God and in the name of the Great 
King his Son, about a.d. 101. The book described the Chris¬ 
tos as a male figure of tremendous size, and it contains the 
first principles of the theology of the Magus. Since Simon 
Magus has been considered a false Messiah, we may consider 
that the Simonian Gnosis went through an entire succession of 
phases, and developed itself gradually first from a prechristian 
gnosis to the Christian gnosis. This occurs in a syncretist 
eclectic way, as in the whole sect from the start a syncretist 
trait has been marked and the system supports itself in its 
development on the. chief forms of the gnosis. The Great 
Power (a certain uppermost power) is incorporated in Simon, 
at times designated as Christos, and higher than the Creator of 
the world, and different from the Most Superlative (Protistos) 
God (—'Uhlhorn, 282, 292, 293, 397). He is different from the 
Unlimited Power, but is like Him only in power. Only when 
he enters into energy does he become fully like Him.—Uhlhorn, 
293, 294. According to Simon’s doctrine in the Homilies, 1 two 

1 The Clementine Homilies quote from a gospel different from ours.—Supemat. 
Relig. 33. p. 33. Matthew, v. 17, 18; xxiii. 2, 3, diplomatically adheres to Moses and 
circumcision. Not so in Romans, Galatians, the Clementine Homilies. These last are 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 793 


Angels liad gone forth, one the Creator of the world; 1 the 
other, the Lawgiver ; both went off and became independent.— 
ibid. 294. This is the main source of the opinions of Menan¬ 
der, Saturninus, Karpokrates and Kerintlms. Kerinthus was 
Ebionite Judaist and Messianist. 2 If Simon set Garizim in the 
place of Jerusalem, he had doubtless heard of the Messiah ben 
Joseph.—Daniel, ix. 26. The Samaritan Messiahship was be¬ 
fore his view. The Messiah was looked for after Jerusalem’s 
Temple fell. The Ebionites and Nazoria were expecting him. 
The time came, with the destruction of Bar Cocheba the false 
Messiah, to teach the Ebionim and Nazoria, that he had al¬ 
ready appeared in the days of Pilate’s regime. The Essenism 
of the Jordan was preached to the Ebionites and Nazorenes. 
The Christianism from the Transjordan country (the Heathen 
Christian ism) in the time of Hadrian (a.d. 134-5) established a 
Heathen-Christian (a non-judaist) community in Jerusalem, 
whose episkopos was Markus, uncircumcised. The (Ebionite- 
Nazorene) Heathen-Christianism had shoved aside the Jew- 
Christianism, the Holy City was in its possession.—Compare 
Uhlhorn, 389, 390. From this time forward the Iesua had 
come! It was no more the Samaritan Messiah nor the expected 
Jewish Messiah. The Saviour had appeared and been baptised 
as a Nazorene by John about 115 years previously. Some de¬ 
scription of the Son of Dauid was necessary; a genealogy was 
required, and a reasonable variety of gospels. When about 
a.d. 140-145 under Antoninus came, a Nazorene community was 
formed, 3 and must answer questions concerning its faith. Such 


easy on this point. Justin (Trypho, p. 37) throws it overboard. Matthew, v. 28-30 is 
in accord with Porphyry, de Abst., I. 31, on self-denial. 

1 According to the Clementine (Ebionite) Homilies, the Devil is king of this world. 
—Uhlhorn, 185,186. Horn. xx. 8. In this point also, Matthew, iv. 8, 9 is Ebionite, like 
the Homilies. Christ and the Devil are contrasted in the Homilies (—Uhlhorn, 185, 
186) ; so, likewise, Christ and the Devil (Echthros Diable) are contrasted in Matthew, 
xiii. 37-39. Yet, according to Uhlhorn, the Homilies cannot have appeared until after 
a.d. 160. All goes to show the complete identification of Matthew’s Gospel with the 
Ebionism of the Clem. Homilies. About this period 160-164 or later Justin uses the 
Gospel of the Hebrews and that of Peter which read in many things like Matthew’s 
Gospel. The inference is that the original gospel is from the Ebionites (who were in¬ 
fluenced by the Book of the Elchasites), and is later than Revelation, xii. 7; xx. 2. 
But the Ebionites were in Rome. 

2 Kerinthus and the Ebionites were gnostics, and believed in a Christos.—Hippoly- 
tus, vii. 34, 35. ed. Duncker. 

3 The Nazoria had heard of Mithra, had also heard of the Jewish expected Messiah. 
Their minds were full of Chaldaean, Arabian, and Jewish gnosis. The Roman wars 


794 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


must have been the origin of any Nazorene or Encratite gos¬ 
pel. In the meantime (about 138-145) the new phase had 
spread from Caesarea to beyond Antioch, from Idumaea and 
Nabathaea to the entire line of the Euphrates. Beyond the 
Jordan the party of John the Baptist and Essaians kept the 
old name Nazoria (Nazoraioi), the self-denying Nazers, into 
whose order Iesu is said to have been initiated by the rite of 
baptism. But the Nazorenes (in 135-145) had not yet given up 
the Law of Moses.—Matthew, v. 17,18, x. 5. Matthew, xi. 13 ff. 
puts a quietus on the Law and the Prophets at the appearance 
of the distinguished Baptist; showing that the Nazarene sect 
Matthew considers precursors of Christos the Saviour and the 
sect to which he belongs.—Matthew, iii. 13, 16. Then the 
Haeresis of the Nazorenes was before Christ, and knew not 
Christ; they being like Jews, adhering to the Law and Circum¬ 
cision.—Epiphanius, I. 120, 121. Now we have them as Es¬ 
saians, Iessaians, later Christians.—ibid. I. 117, 120, 121. Mat¬ 
thew does not mention circumcision any way. Homans, ii. 25 
makes it of no great importance ; the Clementine Becognitions 
attach no importance to it at all. Closely pressed from Jeru¬ 
salem to the East, Jew-Christianism was exposed to gnostic 
influences. Hence Matthew, i. 18, ii. 9 writes gnostically. He 
makes out that Iesu was born of a virgin, but he does not dis¬ 
close who was his informant} IJhlhorn considers the book of 
Elchasai to have been a work of influence in the transjordan 
country among the Ebionites, Nazoria, Asaians, Sampsaioi, etc., 
connected with Ebionite gnosis. Apparently Elchasi never 
preached a human body as the mortal envelope of a divine dis- 


for over a hundred years had set their minds in motion.—Matthew, xxiv. 6-11. Like 
the Ebionites, Saturninus held the contrast between the Good and Evil principles, 
namely, that there were two sorts of men made by the angels, one good, the other bad. 
—Hippolytus, vii. 28. Jacob contends against Asu (Esau) the Evil Spirit, Darkness.— 
Gen. xxxii. 22, 28. The Ebionites regarded the God as the source of evil as of good. 
Hence it is said of Jacob: “ thou hast power (thou dost govern) with Gods and with 
men; ” and Justin Martyr, p. 101, says : “For I showed that the Christos is called both 
Iakob and Israel.” Iakob is consequently the Akabar, Acbar (Cabar Zio), the Great 
Power (Gabariel, Gabriel) of Simon Magus and the Bassora Nazoria—the gabar (man) 
of El (God), the Gnostic Son of the Man. But the primal God is asomatos, without a 
body.—Porphyry, Abst. II. 37. 

1 That may have been a matter of previous notoriety in the gnosis ; like the birth 
of Seth from Eua. Saturninus believed in One Unknown Father who made the Arch¬ 
angels, Powers, etc., and in a Christos who came to overthrow the God of the Jews and 
to save those believing on himself. He also, like the Apokalypse and Babylon, recog¬ 
nised Seven Angels. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 795 


embodied, fleshless, immortal Power , the Son of the God, “ the 
asarkos idea.” John sat by the Jordan and said “ I am not the 
Christos.”—Justin, Dialogue, 38. The Christ-idea was the 
universally predominating one. From Babylonia to the Medi¬ 
terranean the Logos, the Light of light, adored in the sun was 
preached, even in the Kerugmata Philonos as well as in the 
Kerugmata Petrou.—Sup. Bel. II. 298 ; Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. 
5. § 39. 7. § 58. 

The Clementine Homilies (according to Uhlhorn, Horn, 
und Becog.) used the plan of another writing that preceded it, 
a work that attacked the gnosis in its chief forms, Simonism, 
Paulinism, Markionism. This first work, the Original Work 
on which the Clementine Homilies were superposed, cannot 
have been written before A.D. 150, and has been supposed by 
Uhlhorn to be subsequent to that date. The Homilies he 
dates after 160 ; the Becognitions after 170. The Original 
Work (the Grundschrift) contains disputations with Simon 
Magus, and attacks the Haeresies ; and the rewritten treatise 
(the Homilies) contains a reply to Basileides. The treatise 
Avritten over the Grundschrift is the Clementine Homilies; it 
attacks heathenism in all its forms, and this ^tendency is for¬ 
eign to the first Avork (the Grundschrift.—Uhlhorn, p. 360). 
The Grundschrift attacks Markionism. When the author of 
the Clementine Homilies went to work upon the Grundschrift 
to Avrite it over again he found already there the episcopal, 
monarchist, church-government.—Uhlhorn, 95, 360, 361, 362; 
Justin, Dial. p. 101. James is mentioned and Peter speaks to 
the Presbyters.—ibid. 362 ; Horn. xi. 35. So that the Original 
GroundAvork of the three treatises was a work written in Syria, 
(Uhlhorn says, in East Syria). The Kerugmata Petrou 1 is the 

1 Some spurious work of that sort may have existed ; it would not have been writ¬ 
ten if Peter’s name as leading apostle had not come up in the attempt to found a 
Church (in Syria) with a bishop, instead of the existing Church of the Presbyters. 
There were apostles enough, and saints in all the East. But if we date the Apokalypse 
at about 125, we will not find there the names of Peter or James, no names given. 
Since Peter and James were regarded as bishops, is it possible, or not, to trace them 
back to the order of the early Presbyters ? Peter is mentioned in Justin, Dialogue, p. 
101, unless this is an interpolation; but Justin writes after both and therefore his 
name was in the Gospel of the Hebrews and the Gospel of Matthew after 166. But 
a.d. 160 is 25 years after the Jews gave up fighting for the Messiah, at Betar in the 
neighborhood of Jerusalem. The Gospel of the Hebrews (which Justin calls the Evan- 
gelium) might have been written in the interval, Peter and the rest included. Justin 
Martyr (Trypho), p. 11, learns that the Greek philosophers were busied with questions 
about Monarchia (bishop’s rule) and Providence. Si vero quis velit nobis proferre ex 


790 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


assumed title of a work that Peter may have never written, an 
imaginary or assumed production, which, as a title is unsuited 
to the Grundselirift, the Groundwork on which the ‘ Homilies ’ 
was written. The expression points rather to the Preachings 
to the Heathen , of which the author of the Homilies (the re- 
writer of the foundation piece) was the first author. The Ke- 
rugmata were suppositious, feigned, assumed to exist, for the 
purpose of obtaining for the “Homilies” (which were then 
given out to be an extract) the support of their authority.— 
Uhlhorn, 364, 365. The author of the Homilies made over 
again the Groundwork (the earliest of the three writings) in 
such a way as to contain a number of speeches and addresses 
of (the assumed) Peter. In place of his direct authority, Cle¬ 
mens is inserted in between, so that through Clemens the 
original Peter is supposed to come down, verbally , to the reader. 
The Groundwork supplied the first actual basis for the author 
of the Homilies to go to work upon, and this Groundwork was 
written against Simon, Paulus and Markion—a very different 
purpose from the plan of the author of the Clementine Homi¬ 
lies. However, in analogy with the Grundselirift, which had 
one speech, the Kerugmata Petrou are assumed by the author of 

illo libello qui Petri doctrina appellatur, ubi Saluator videtur ad discipulos dicere, 
non sum daemonium incorporeum ; primo respondendum esse ei quoniam ille liber in¬ 
ter libros Ecclesiasticos non habetur : et ostendendum quia neque Petri est ipsa scrip- 
tura, neque alterius cuiusquam qui spiritu Dei fuerit inspiratus.—Origen, Preface to 
De Principiis, p. 421. If, then, the “Petri doctrina,” “Peter’s Doctrine,” was no 
writing of Peter , it follows that the whole use of Peter’s name may have been and 
probably was a pious fraud from beginning to end, in a fraudulent age in the East. It 
may have served the purpese for which it was written. The meaning of the words 
Kephas, Petra, a rock, may have suggested the preference of Peter (as a name) for the 
head of a Church with a bishop in Eastern Syria among the Nazoria : si non est verum, 
est bene invenitum. See Matthew, xvi. 18. Supposing that Clemens Alexandrinus 
(post 193) cited a spurious work (not inspired), according to Origen; those citations 
(—Supernat. Rel. I. 333, 458 note, 459) do not make the Iverugma Petrou an inspired 
work, and it is not received into the New Testament Canon. The author of the work 
‘ Supernatural Religion,’ indeed, tells us that the Clementine Homilies were produced 
'from it, and G. Uhlhorn admits that they were written over some work; but this so- 
called Kerugma Petrou is a work directed against Markion who lived in the time of 
Justin Martyr ; and, consequently, a reply to Markion could not have been written be¬ 
fore A.d. 160. According to “Supernatural Religion,” I. 232, 233, the “Doctrine of 
Peter,” akin to the “ Preaching of Peter,” was akin to all the rest of the orthodox and 
quasi orthodox writings of the time. Of course, after it was decided to make Peter 
the rock of Christianism pro bono publico and to stablish a “Church with a bishop,” 
Petrine writings would be all the rage in Syria,—and, soon after, in Rome. The Hom¬ 
ilies regard Peter as Apostle to the Heathen ; but Justin, p. 38, admits that the Jew 
charged the Christians with leading the life of the Gentiles, not keeping Saturday. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 797 


the Homilies to be epidemia kerugmata, local addresses made 
as he went from place to place ; and the new work is given out 
as an extract from it. The real Grundschrift (the earliest of 
the three literary efforts) was covered up by another work un¬ 
der an assumed title, and an authority obtained for the “ Hom¬ 
ilies ” as a work of Apostolic authority resting on the inter¬ 
mediation of Clemens. Compare Uhlhorn, pp. 364, 365. And 
the author of the Homilies (der Ueberarbeiter) added Peter’s 
letter to James ; and Peter addresses the Presbyters.—ibid., 
362, 364. Neither the character of Peter nor that of Simon in 
the Original Work can have been essentially changed.—ibid. 
357. The main result of all this is that the Original Work 
which Uhlhorn dates posterior to a.d. 150 has the monarchia 
(episcopal government), Peter and James, and that Matthew, 
xvi. 18 agrees with it. Leviticus, xix. 18 and Matthew, xix. 19, 
v. 28 f. have precisely the doctrines of love of others and chas¬ 
tity which Uhlhorn, 364, brings up as prominent doctrines of 
the Homilies. When, then, Delitzsch supposes that in the 
words “ Sifri ha Minim ” in the Talmud (Tract Sabbath, fol. 
116) he has found a reference to the Gospel of the Hebrews, 
traces of it prior to a.d. 130, it is hard to imagine what “ Hae- 
retical Books ” can be meant; but the Books of the Elchasites 
were as early as a.d. 101, and there is no reason to suppose 
that any form of the Christian evangels was in existence when 
the Apokalypse was written. At all events, Justin Martyr 
mentions but one in his time, although he speaks of memoirs. 
That Matthew’s Gospel long preceded the Syrian doctrine of 
episcopacy is hardly to be maintained ; but that the Ebionites 1 

1 The remarkable statement of Justin, p. 101, that the Christos was called Iaqab 
and Israel, shows that the Christ was regarded as the Great Archangel, and overpowers 
the Darkness.—Gen. xxx. ii. 24, 26, 28. The Diaspora knew this, else Justin would 
have never got at it. And this shows how very far this doctrine had advanced among 
the Diaspora, that even Philo held the theory that assumed the Great Archangel, the 
Logos. Justin does not remember Paul but only John of the Apokalypse. Both if 
they lived at all were contemporaneous, but as Justin remembers John it looks as if 
the Apokalypse was possibly near A.D. 130. Justin’s works look as unreliable as the 
date of Justin. 

As to the conception of the Christos, he was formerly Logos, once appearing in the 
idea of flame, and once without body, in image.—Justin, Apol. I. 160, 161. Here we 
have the original Saviour, the Christos asomatos. Since they are Gentiles, Christ will 
not help them Hippolytus, vii. 19 ; also Matthew, x. 6; xv. 26. The belief in a 
Christos is in psalm 2nd, in Saturninus, Menander, Simon Magus, Philo, Kerinthus, 
the Ebionites and Basileides. From the Jordan to the Euphrates the religion of 
Mithra was known. They worshipped (like the Essenes and Ebionites) the Christos 


793 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


held gnostic doctrines is undeniable. In the middle of the 
fourth century Epiphanius, xxx. 16 could say of his Ebionites : 
They do not say that he has been born from God the Father, 
but has been created, as one of the Archangels, but being 
greater than they, and that he is Lord of the angels and of all 
things made by the Almighty.—Uhlhorn, 397. That Matthew’s 
Gospel holds the doctrine “ conceived from the Holy Ghost ” 
shows the little difference two hundred years could make in 
the cardinal doctrines of Elchasite, Ebionite, and Nazorian 
gnosis in a.d. 367. In Tertullian’s time the Ebionites consid¬ 
ered Iesu a man ; and it is likely that their gnosis changed but 
little in 200 years. But the Ebionites such as Irenaeus men¬ 
tions (I. 26) used only the Gospel according to Matthew.— 
Irenaeus, I. xxvii. The characterisation, in Matthew, xxiv. of 
Hadrian’s temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in the ruins of Jeru¬ 
salem as the abomination of desolation and his warnings 
against false Messiahs seem to effectually settle the point that 
his evangel was written later than a.d. 136. The Essaian doc¬ 
trine had long been to save the soul by the sacrifice of the 

asarkos, the fleshless asomatos Christos, in the sun.—Matthew, xvii. 2, 5. This must 
be the Persian Mithra born in the sign Virgo (—See Justin Martyr, Dialogue, p. 87), 
airoSiSous to nvevna. —Justin, p. 105; John, XX. 22. 7ravTa fj.oi irapaSeSorcu inro tov irarpos .— 
Justin, p. 101. The Mithra Mysteries belong to the Babylonian gnosis, and Mithra 
was born Dec. 25th. So that when the Essenes, Therapeutae, and Egyptians adored 
the Sun, they praised the Logos, and Christos in the sun.—Porphyry, de Abst. iv. 8,12. 
We are hated because of the name of the Christos, says Justin Martyr, Apol. I. p. 144. 
Abu ’Hanifah (died in a.d. 767) regarded the Sabians as such as stood between Juda¬ 
ism and Christianism and read psalms ; his pupils on the contrary regarded them as 
Magians because they worshipped the Angels. Abu-l-’Hasan ’Obeidallah el-Karchi 
(died A.d. 955) says that there were two sorts of Sabians : the one sort confesses the 
Prophecy of Iesu Christos and reads psalms, consequently are a kind of Christians; 
the others reject the Prophecy and the revealed scriptures altogether, and revere the 
Sun.—D. Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 191, 192. In the eastern and south-eastern region 
from Palestine to Chaldaea there was a conflux of different peoples and religious com¬ 
munities which since ancient times were more or less exposed to the influence of Pars- 
ism.—ibid. 119. This means that they were used to Mithraism from at least as early 
as b.c. 200. The descendants of the Nazoria continued at Bassora until recently. The 
Logos of the God is His Son and is called Angel and Apostolos.—Justin, Apol. I. p. 
160, 161. His name is the Angel of the Lord in Genesis. Therefore from Jewish 
Messianism and Chaldaean-Jewish gnosis and the theory of Powers and Archangels 
the Ebionites (supported by the Philonian theory of the Angel Logos and Isaiah’s 
Angel Iesua) were persuaded to stand firm in the theory of a Christos asarkos as the 
King of the Angels. The logical inference is that the Christos asarkos was first recog¬ 
nized ; and the idea of a Christos incarnation was subsequently conceived suggested by 
the relations of Hermes (Sun, Logos) as Messiah in the sign Virgo and the Jewish 
notion of the Son of David as Messiah. 


THE GREAT ARGHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 799 


body. Hence, as the Jews had found that warlike Messiahs 
had not saved the country, some one seems to have thought 
the time had come to preach a Messiah with Iessene doctrines 
who by the sacrifice of his own flesh was to save the souls of 
others. This is the idea given in Rev. v. 9, vi. 9, vii. 14 and is 
the opposite of the Jewish Messiah apparently; but it was 
genuine Essene gnosis, so far as the idea of saving souls by 
self-sacrifice goes. Now the precise way in which this doctrine 
of sacrifice was to be carried out would depend not only upon 
the gnosis, the celestial rank of the victim, but also upon the 
narrative of the life of the victim and the mode of sacrifice. 
The idea of the prophets that the Messiah was to be a man of 
war was completely overturned in the minds of the Nazorians 
and Ebionites; some of them undoubtedly were convinced 
after the war of a.d. 134-5 that the transjordan mountains or 
the mountains of the East were the best places of refuge, and 
that meddling with Rome by warlike Messiahs or in any offen¬ 
sive manner would be a fatal error.—Matthew, xxii. 21; xxiv. 
16-26. At any rate they would not give up Moses and the 
Law, not even if the Scribes and Pharisees continued to sit in 
the seat of Moses. No adequate motive remained for the ap¬ 
pearance of the divine spiritus on earth in a human shape ex¬ 
cept the salvation of the human soul in the resurrection of the 
dead, and to counter Markion. Matthew’s doctrine of the 
supernatural birth is a complete reply to Markion’s view, for 
the flesh was the last thing Markion desired to see in the 
Christos. Hence Tertullian’s vigorous reply to Markion, sup¬ 
porting himself on the evangelical party, was a similar move. 

The reign of the Eastern Saints began as earlj- as the time 
of the Budhist monks. The Essene monasteries followed on 
the Jordan, and the Sect of John became the rage. The Essene 
Saints gave birth to the Nazoraians of the Jordan. These 
Saints became Apostles.—The Didache (Ant. Mater, 57, 59); 
Luke, x. 3-12. The Codex Nazoria has claimed that the Man¬ 
dates at Bassora were the Nazoria, Baptists of the sect of John 
on the Jordan in the first century. To this originally Mithra- 
baptist sect Matthew traces the Baptism of Iesu as a Nazo- 
rene. En Nedim names Elchasai as the founder of the Man¬ 
dates,—Chwolsohn, I. 112, 113-117. Chwolsohn, 114, dates 
him in the beginning of the reign of Trajan according to the 
Philosopliumena, and (p. 116) says that the Elchasaites were 


800 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


at least originally identical with the Mandaites or Babylonian 
Ssabians. As Elchasi was connected with the Ossenes (an 
Asayan Essenian sect) and the worshippers of Mithra (Sun and 
Logos) in Nabathaea, Petraea, Moabitis and Itnrea, and a 
founder of the Ebionites and Nazorenes (—ibid. 116, 117, 122, 
123), the Mandaites are brought home to the sect of John on 
the Jordan, to Matthew and the Ebionites, and to the Iesu 
that Matthew says joined the Nazoria in the Baptism of John. 
Essenes, Ossenes, Iessaians, Ebionites are all the ancient Na- 
zoria. 

Salve festa dies, toto venerabilis aevo 

Qua deus infenmm vicit et astra tenet.—Easter Hymn. 

In occursum Magni Regis 

Fer ardentes lampadas. 1 —Early Christian Hymn. Rambach, I. 

The Jews before Christ had an idea of a Messiah, and Jose¬ 
phus includes the Essaioi (Essenes, lessaioi) among the Jews. 
But the Essaioi were notorious for self-denial, consequently 
they were Nazarenes (for Zar and Nazar mean abstinence, to 
abstain). Epiphanius, I. 121, in the fourth century wrote 
that “ the Nazarenes were before Christ, and knew not 
Christ.” He might as well have said that psalm ii. or Daniel 
w'ere before Christ, or that the Jews and Essenes were before 
Christ and knew not the Jewish Messiah. When the Fathers 
wrote Iesu they meant Christ; and half the time when they 
wrote “ Christus ” they meant Iesus. All Christians at that 
time (in the time of the Kerinthians) were equally called Na- 
zoraioi (Nazorenes).—Epiphan. I. p. 117, Petavius. In the 
first century the Jordan population knew only the Jewish Mes¬ 
siah ; but after 135-145, when the Gospel had declared that Iesu 
was the Messiah, the Fathers in their writings used the word 
Christos for Iesus, assuming (with all the subtlety of a sophist) 
the very point at issue, i.e. whether Iesu was the Christ. That 
question had to be settled ; and the Fathers settled it by say¬ 
ing that he was the Christ: but the Jews did not agree with 
them. We have already seen, above, that the Logos (Word of 
the God), Messiah, Christos were understood by Saturninus, 
Iverinthus and the Ebionites to mean the “ asarkos idea,” 
Christ not in the flesh. Saturninus (in Irenaeus) mentions no 

1 The vigil was at midnight when at the 1st streak of light they bore torches to 
meet the Bridegroom Lord, Adon the Sun. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 801 


Iesu. Dating Saturninus, as most do, in about a.d. 130, this 
neglect or ignorance of Iesu becomes important from a his¬ 
torical point of view, for not to know anything about Iesu (and 
Philo was equally ignorant of his existence) in 130 looks as if 
he was not preached until after Bar Cocheba’s rebellion was 
put down (about 135). Justin Martyr, p. 42, tells the Jews that 
their lands are deserts, the cities burned, foreigners eat the 
fruits in your presence, and no Jew goes up to Jerusalem. 
Hadrian forbade any Jew to enter Aelia Capitolina (Jeru¬ 
salem). Now, as Justin knows one Evangelium (and that re¬ 
sembles Matthew’s), and that Evangel is the oldest known, the 
* Gospel according to the Hebrews,’ we have one more prob¬ 
ability that Matthew, xxiv. was written after the war with Bar 
Cocheba in 132-135. The Apokalypse knows no Evangel. 
Justin lays stress on the prohibition to enter Jerusalem. 
What is remarkable is that writing not far from a.d. 160 or 
later Justin mentions only one “the evangelium.” If but one, 
this apparently is not Matthew’s Gospel but very like it. 

We have seen that a divine revelation 1 is such only by vir¬ 
tue of communicating to us something which we could not 
know without it and which is in fact undiscoverable by human 
reason ; and that miraculous evidence is absolutely requisite to 
establish its reality. The supposed miraculous evidence is 
not only upon general grounds antecedently incredible, but 
the testimony by which its reality is supported is totally in¬ 
sufficient even to certify the actual occurrence of the events 
narrated. The history of miraculous pretension in the world, 
and the circumstances attending the special exhibition of it, 
suggest natural explanations of the reported facts which right¬ 
ly and infallibly removed them from the region of the super- 


1 “ Matthew, who first of the others is related to have delivered the Evangelium to 
the Hebrews who from (out of) the Circumcision had believed.”—Origen, II. Com. on 
John, tom. vii. p. 191. If Origen is correct here, what becomes of Delitzsch’s Siphri 
ha Minim and the “ Gospel of the Hebrews ? ” But it is probable that there was a 
“ Gospel of the Hebrews ” prior to our Matthew. When it appeared is not settled. It 
could not well have preceded the Apokalypse; and as Rev. xxi. 14 has the expression 
“twelve foundations, and on them the twelve names of the twelve angels or apostles of 
the Lamb,” it is plain that the author did not know the names of Matthew’s 12 apostles. 
In fact, the Sabian Lamb (in Aries) was as much connected with the number 12, as 
the Chaldaean Sabaoth was with the number 7. So that the date and precise contents 
of the so-called “ Gospel of the Hebrews” are very uncertain. The date is as likely 
to have been after 148 as before that time if Justin and Matthew are considered in 
connection with probabilities. See Julian, Orat. iv ; v. pp. 151, 172, 173. 

51 


802 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


natural. History clearly demonstrates that wherever igno¬ 
rance and superstition have prevailed every obscure occurrence 
has been attributed to supernatural agency, and it is freely ac¬ 
knowledged that, under their influence, inexplicable and mi¬ 
raculous are convertible terms. On the other hand, in propor¬ 
tion as knowledge of natural laws has increased, the theory of 
supernatural interference with the order of nature has been 
dispelled, and miracles have ceased. 1 

The great principle connected with this planet to which in 
life and in death our bodies are confined is evolution, the de¬ 
velopment of one status out of another. 2 This is absolutely 
true of mental development. Remote causation, like the be¬ 
lief in spirits, is unreliable and unfounded. All ideas are born 
of other preexisting phenomena of thought and sensation. 
There were in India, Babylon, Judea and Egypt two articles 
of belief: one was the theory of the Logos (the monad from 
the unit) ; the other was the seven-planets theory (that there 
was a Chief Angel, the King,, who held the Seven Planets 
under his control.—Rev. ii. 3, 16, 20; vi. 6; Exodus, xxxvii. 
23; Zachariali, iv. 2, 10; Rawlinson, Journal R. A. S. vol. xvii. 
30; the Chaldean Seven-Rayed God.—Julian, Orat. Y. p. 172 ; 
Movers, I. 550, 552 ; Lydus, de mens. IY. 38, 74). These be¬ 
came united with the doctrine of the King and Saviour, the 
presence Angel, the Son of Man (Dan. vii. 13, 14) and the 
Gnostic Son of the Man (Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. pp. 134-136, et 
passim). This is the Descent of Doctrine historically. But 
before combining such doctrines with the Messianic theory 
the adepts of the Kabalah would have done better to have 
made sure that these theories were sound, that they represented 
real truths,—which they did not. The number of planets is 
more than fifty ; and the Logos-doctrine like the angel-theory 
is mere speculation based on an ignorance of the doctrine of 
gravitation of bodies and of modern astronomical ideas. It 


1 Supernat. Rel. II. 477, 478. 

2 So the development of the Christian Messiah out of the Jewish.—Matth. i. 1 ; 
iii. 11 ; xi. 3; John, i. 20. Origen (II. p. 186) Com. on John, Tom. Sept., connects to¬ 
gether the names Theudas and Iudas Galileus with the expected advent of the Christos. 
—Acts, v. 36, 37. We are not informed that anybody except the Christian party saw 
this connection. Josephus, Ant. xx. 5. 1 supplied the information aboxxt Theudas 
and Iudas the Galilean, but does not connect them with John the Baptist or the Chris¬ 
tian Messiah, as Origen does. The Christians wanted to preach an Ebionite Iessaean 
Christian Revival. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 803 


was all important, in starting* a religion or a sect, that its funda¬ 
mental principles should not be based on erroneous theories. 
When the Nazorene Gnosis 1 speaks of the “ Nazoria who have 
not eaten the food of the Children of the world ” Eusebius 
founds his view that the Therapeutae were the Christians ex¬ 
pressly on the fact that Philo describes the Therapeutae as de¬ 
nying themselves (Matthew, xvi. 24; Mark, viii. 34). Philo 
when he wrote these statements had in view the first heralds of 
the gospel (the Mitlira worship, the King Sun in the third 
Sibyl) and the original practices handed down by the Apos¬ 
tles. ‘ Philo describes the same customs that are observed by 
us alone at the present day, particularly the Yigils of the Great 
Festival.’—Eusebius, H. E. II. xvii. The Christian writers 
from Matthew down deal with Christianism in the middle of 
the Second Century or later, not with Ebionism in a.d. 120. 
Origen stands on the ground made for him by our Four Gos¬ 
pels, the Pauline Epistles, the Book of Acts, and the Apoka- 
lypse. Which is as much as saying that they were the latest 
testimonies. If he became a eunuch, it was on the Essene or 
Iessaian principle of self-denial.—Matthew, xix. 12. If the 
Christian story in our Four Gospels had been the original one 
(conforming also to the gnosis) there would have been no 
Haeretical Gnostics (at least but one or two sects) if they had 
had to spring out of a settled orthodox Christianism. But be¬ 
fore 145-150 the only settled thing east of Caesarea and Alex¬ 
andria was the gnosis. If we want to see some of the Gnostics 
of Saturninus, Karpokrates, and Kerinthus inside of the early 
Christian or Ebionite Church, look at Colossians, ii. 18 and 
Acts, vii. 53. The gnosis of the Babylonian Mithra and self- 
denial (arising out of the contrast of spirit and matter) had to 
come first, before the idea could arise of applying the adjective 
Messiach or Christos to any human being. One main doctrine 
of the Ebionites was not to worship idols.—Praedicatio Petri; 2 
Rev. ii. 14, 20. 

It is generally recognised that the great gnostic 3 heads of 
parties with their completed systems sprung up under Ha¬ 
drian. Since a philosophical development will not at once 


1 Codex Nazoria (Norberg). 

2 Origen, vol. II. 215. 

3 Elchasai seems to have held the doctrine of a male and female principle in creation. 
—Chwolsohn, I. 117. So did Simon Magus and the Kabalah. 


804 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


produce its ripest fruits we may infer that the beginnings of a 
movement which reached its culminating point about a.d. 130 
must go back into the first century, perhaps even so far as the 
time of the apostles. 1 In fact, the presence of gnostic sects has 
been recognised as early as the middle of the first century.— 
Holtzmann, Kritik der Epheser- und Colosserbriefe, p. 292. 
Moreover Philo has the gnosis. To him it was something 
esoteric, a sort of mystery. Paul makes such a use of the gno¬ 
sis as presupposes its existence prior to his time ; and Lassen, 
Indische Alterthumskunde, III. 404, settles this point com¬ 
pletely by showing the existence of the gnosis in India before 
our era. We have elsewhere adverted to its existence in Bab¬ 
ylon before Christ. It is a great error to suppose that the 
Jews of that time remained indifferent to the ideas of that 
period. See Holtzmann, pp. 297, 298-301. The birth from im¬ 
maculate conception is seen in the earlier gnostic systems, 
even in the system of Simon Magus and in the Older Hermet¬ 
ic Books quoted by Iamblichus; see Cory, Anc. Fragments, 
p. 283 : “ From this one the self-originated God caused himself 
to shine forth. 5 ’ This immaculate conception was conceived 
of by the gnostics only in the case of spiritual essences, 
spiritual beings, not flesh. Of course they were shocked when 
the idea was put forth of a pure spirit born of a virgin. Mar- 
kion may not have heard of the Crucifixion ; for the Gnostics 
could not admit that the Christos had an earthly body, neither 
could they believe that he was crucified. Therefore Tertul- 
lian, III. xix. asserts that Markion denies that his own Christ 
had a nativity. If never born, he could not have been Cruci¬ 
fied. How then could Markion have made the Gospels a 
foundation for his argument, when the Crucifixion is the lead¬ 
ing point in all of them ? In Markion’s system, the Christos had 
no flesh to be crucified.—Tertull. III. viii. Markion did not 
find any birth from a daughter of Abrahm described in the 
Apokalypse, nor any Crucifixion there; because the Gospels 
were not written (according to our thinking) when the first 
edition of the Apokalypse appeared. But his reputation was 
that of a Great Man and a daring thinker among the Encra- 
tites. 

1 That depends on what is meant by this word. Write to the Angel of the Eccle- 
sia at Ephesus.—Rev. i. 1. Apostle like Angel, means emissary, messenger. The 
Jewish Sanhedrin had them. The DidacliS mentions them as travelling missionaries. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 805 


The Unrevealed Being (the Old Bel who is the Ancient of 
days) reproduces himself in the second Bel, who is the God of 
the Seven Planet rays, Son of his Father, Logos and Bel the 
Younger. He lifts up the souls to the Father.—Movers, I. 
267-9, 551-3. The soul passes three nights near the body.— 
Spiegel, Avesta, I. 16; III. lxxiv.; Euripides, Hecuba, 31, 32. 
Adonis, Osiris, and Dionysus die, and rise again the third day. 
But they tell the story that Simon Magus was buried but did 
not rise. According to Hieronymus, Simon Magus applied to 
himself these words : I am the Word of God, I am the Beauti¬ 
ful, I the Advocate, I the Omnipotent, I am all things that be¬ 
long to God.—Hieron. Comment, in Matth. xxiv. 5; Franck, 
Kabbala, 252. The Word or Wisdom includes in itself the 
other Sepliiroth.—ib. 252. When Simon Magus taught that 
he was himself the Highest Power he meant that he was the 
Divine Word, the Logos.—Hieron. Comm, in Matth., 6, 24, 5, 
vol. 7. ed. Venice. Simon also wished (as personification of 
the Word) to personify (in Helena) the Feminine Divine In¬ 
telligence, the Venah or Binah. This is complete Kabalah ; 
for Hermes also has the mind-perceived Sophia. Simon held 
the genuine Sohar doctrine that all that exists, all that the 
Ancient has formed, can only have existence by a reason of a 
Male and a Female. The Ancient has a form and no form. 
He assumed a form when He called the universe into being. 
He assumed the form Adam, which has in itself the qualities 
Father and Mother. Genesis, ii. 22, 23, has this very Kabalist 
tradition. So that Simon had got hold of the Egyptian doc¬ 
trine of the Concealed Ammon. 1 The Most Sacred Ancient is 
abscondite and occult (concealed) and the Supernal Wisdom 
hidden in that Cranium is found and again not found. Is he 
King, so is she Queen, the Virgin Matrona. The Light which 
is manifested is the garment, for the King is himself the inner¬ 
most Light of all lights. The Son of the God is then the 
Sliechinah or the Son of the Shechinah ; and Metatron is him¬ 
self the Shechinah. The Secret Wisdom (the Highest Crown) 
is the First Power (Bason Basion) whose existence no creature 

1 The ram-god Ammon (the Creative Mind, in Egypt) would in the Sign Aries be 
represented by the Lamb in Spring. I was with him Anion.—Proverbs, viii. 30, He¬ 
brew. Physicians have called Dionysus the Mind of Zeus because they said that the Sun 
was the Mind of the world.—Macrobius, p. 301. Horus (Apollo) is the power appointed 
over the sun’s circuit.—De Iside, 61. The Gnostics called Horus, the Cross, Re¬ 
deemer, and Freer. He is White in color.—De Iside, 22. 


S06 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


can conceive.—Meyer’s Jezirah, p. 1; Dunlap, Sod, II. 76 ff. 
In the Kabbalist trinity, the Beauty is the King, and the She- 
kinah is the Matron or Queen.—Franck, p. 145. Simon Magus 
having got himself into this prosperous line of business was 
naturally regarded by the managers of Christianism in the 
last part of the second century as a direct rival in religion to 
the theology of Matthew, and no end of libels were put forth 
against him. Irenaeus and Justin circulating some, and fol¬ 
lowing in the wake of Acts, viii. 9, 13. Helena, instead of 
being the inwoven feminine part of the Concealed Wisdom, 
was declared to be something worse than an abstraction by 
the managers of faith. Tantaene irae coelestibus animis! 
They went so far as to say that Simon even believed ! He had 
as much Kabalali as they! Why shouldn’t he believe ? In 
those days prophets or apostles came to Antioch contra Paul, 
and prophesied against him. But the name Paulos was Greek, 
and Saul is Jewish. The change of name from Jewish to 
Greek seems to subindicate the endosmosis and exosmosis, or 
interfiltration process, that was going on between the Jewish 
Diaspora and the Greek, from Edessa to Antioch. The ‘ born 
blind ’ began to see. 

If the story of the Samaritan Messiah or the doctrines of 
Elchasai and of Simon Magus preceded the Ebionites, these 
last may have borrowed from Babylonians, Sabians or Jews an 
idea of the Great Archangel. But the expression Magna Yir- 
tus Dei, the Great Potence of the God, has the same meaning as 
the Great Archangel. The Samaritans said that Simon Magus 
was God above every Beginning and Authority and Power. 1 
When we read that Simon Magus claimed (or was said to have 
claimed) to have appeared among the Jews as Son (the Great 
Power) this means the King, Metratron the Angel Iesua; but 
that Simon appeared as a man, not being one, and seemed to 
suffer in the Ioudaea, not having suffered, 2 and that he was 
auctor salutis (a Saviour) carries the crucifixion story back in 


1 Justin vs. Trypho, p. 115. These are three orders of Angel-Powers on high.—So 
Colossians, i. 16. In Clementine Homily II. 32, Simon is described as performing re¬ 
markable miracles. This description of him tells us the credulous character of those to 
whom Christianism was preached. 

2 Zachariah, xii. 10, speaks of mourning for some one that has been pierced. John, 
xix. 34 introduces this incident into his gospel in order to make out that the piercing of 
the Iesu had been exactly foretold by Zachariah. The prophets could be turned to 
account, in this way. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 807 


the direction of the time of Simon. See Hippolytus, vi. 19 
(ed. Duncker, p. 254). Antiqua Mater, pp. 258, 259, 1 seems to 
think that it was Iesus in Simon’s doctrine who appeared as 
Son in Judaea, and suffered the apparent death which alone 
the Gnostics admitted. In any case, there is no evidence which 
hinders our believing all the mythical statements regarding 
Simon Magus to have been made posterior to the destruction 
of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. Coupling the crucifixion with the 
name of Simon Magus does not go very far to show that the 
story about the crucifixion was published prior to 138 in the 
second century. So that even then Judaea’s Messianism must 
have had its influence upon those gnostic Apostles 2 that 
preached the King, the Son of the Man, the Christos, and the 
Angel Iesua in the Desert. And what was gnostic Apostle- 
ship ? The preaching of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit! 
These three doctrines are derived from the Jewish belief (or 
Scribal doctrine) contemporaneous with the Old Testament 
scriptures. The doctrines of the Kabalah are full of Father, 
Mother, Messiah, and Holy Pneuma. The basic principles of 
the Iessaian Nazorenes should have been tested before hand¬ 
ing them down as Supernatural Kevelation to modern times. 
In a dissertation on a monument of Mithra (who is born at 
Christmas) discovered at Oxford in 1747, Mr. Stukely de¬ 
scribes all the particulars which establish the connection be¬ 
tween the festivals at the birth of the Christos and those at 
the birth of Mithra. In the Persian Mysteries the body of a 
Young Man, apparently dead, was exhibited, which was fig¬ 
ured to be restored to life. By his sufferings he Avas believed 
to have worked their salvation, and on this account he was 
called their Saviour. His priests watched his tomb to mid¬ 
night of the vigil of the 25th of March with loud cries, and in 
darkness, when all at once the light burst forth from all parts, 
and the priest cried, “Bejoice, O sacred initiated ! your God is 
risen ! His death, his pains and sufferings, have worked your 

1 Bunsen, Hippolytus, 1852, I. 39, cited by B. Bauer, Christus etc., p. 311 ; Mil¬ 
ler’s Philosophumena, v. 14, ed. 1851. 

2 The expression, ‘Euaggelion kata tous Apostolous,’is a name of the‘Gospel 
according to the Hebrews.’—Supernat. Rel. I. 427. Which name tends to strengthen 
the idea of the author of Antiqua Mater that missionary Apostles preached the 
Gnostic Revelation, which from using the Gnostic expression ‘ the Son of the Man,’ 
developed stlil further into the New Testament gnosis coupled with a narrative of a 
life. 


808 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


salvation.” 1 The Young Sun 2 has returned to Aries. The 
Iessaioi (Essenians) and Therapeutae worshipped the Sun 
(Mithra); according to Philo and Josephus they paid regard 
to the Being in the Sun.—Numbers, xxv. 4. The initiated in 
the Mysteries of Mithra were baptized.—Dunlap, Sod II. p. 
120 ; Tertullian, Baptism, cap. v; de Corona Milit. c. ult; De 
Praescript. c. 40. The Initiated of Mithra were marked with 
the sign on the forehead.—Tert. de Corona, xv. 216, 217 ; Ham¬ 
mer, p. 168. The tau sign was, in the Old Testament, +, or T ; 
both forms were used in the orient. The Birth of Mithra oc¬ 
curred in a cave and the Magi from Arrhabia (says Justin vs. 
Trypho p. 87) found him in a cave. Eusebius, H. E. II. cap. 
17 p. 87 (ed. London. 1847 Bagster) says that it is highly prob¬ 
able that the ancient commentaries of the Therapeutae are the 
very gospels and writings of the apostles. Eusebius claims 
them as Nazarenes ! But they were evidently the worshippers 
of Mithra. “ Mithra was for the Persians what the Word or 
Logos was for the Christians.”—Mankind, p. 553. Platonism 
places the eternal model of all the visible creation in the Logos 
or Divine Wisdom ; and Plutarch says that Mithra was often 
called the Second Mind.—ibid. 579, 722. The Second Mind is 
Philo’s ‘ Second God.’ In Persia, Syria, Egypt, there was a 

1 Mankind, 481, 489. Compare the ceremony of the Holy Fire at the sepulchre at 
Jerusalem, ibid. 491. 

2 The Slain Lamb.—ib. 496. Mark, viii. 31, x. 34, xiv. 1, merely uses the word kill, 
which agrees with the Jewish doctrine in Daniel, ix. 26, regarding the Messiah ben 
Ioseph. Mark, xv. however, employs the word meaning crucifixion (and so does Mat¬ 
thew). The Baliol College author of “Mankind ” sees in this fact an evidence of the 
gradual formation of the Gospels and of their being worked up to their present status. 
The learned Christian bishop Faustus says: “ It is certain that the New Testament 
was not written by Christ himself or by his disciples, but a long while after them by 
some unknown persons, who, lest they should not be credited when they wrote of affairs 
they were little acquainted with, affixed to their works the names of apostles or of such 
as were supposed to have been their companions, asserting that what they had written 
themselves was written according to (Kata, “secundum”) the persons to whom they 
ascribed it.” He also says with increasing emphasis (xxxiii. chap, iii.) “For many 
things have been inserted by your ancestors in the speeches of our Lord, which, 
though put forth under his name agree not with his faith: especially since—as has 
already been proved by us—these things have not been written by Christ or his apostles, 
but a long while after their assumption, by I know not what sort of half Jews , not even 
agreeing with themselves, who made up their tale out of reports and opinions merely, 
and yet—fathering the whole upon the names of the apostles of the Lord, or on those 
who were supposed to have followed the apostles—they mendaciously pretended that 
they had written their lies and contradictions according to them.—Mankind, p. 366 
quotes the edict of Diocletian preserved in the Fragments of Hermogenes, that the 
Gentiles called the Christians Manichaeans ! 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 809 


spiritual Sun of which the visible sun was but the image. 
Plato calls him the King of the visible universe and Son of the 
Supreme Being.—ibid. 425; Plato, de Bepub. vii. ; Plutarch, 
Quaest. Plat. p. 1006. The tau sign, +, T, was by the Chris¬ 
tians connected with the Christos, and the crucifixion story 
may have originally been suggested by it in connection with 
the annual death of the Sun and Mithra’s birth Dec. 25th. At 
all events, we have the Pauline testimony that ‘ Christos Cru¬ 
cified was a stumbling block to the Jews; ’ and it must have 
been one to those Ebionites and others who in the time of 
Irenaeus and Tertullian persisted in thinking Iesu a mere 
man,—while they may have believed in the Messiah of the Old 
Testament and the Christos of the Book of Henoch. With the 
remarkable exception of the death of Iesua on the cross and of 
the doctrine of atonement by vicarious suffering, which is ab¬ 
solutely excluded by Budhism, the most ancient known records 
of the Budhists contain statements about the life and doctrines 
of Gautama Budha which correspond in a remarkable manner 
with the traditions recorded in the Gospels about the life and 
doctrines of Iesus Christ. It is still more strange that these 
Budhistic legends about Gautama as the Angel-Messiah refer 
to a doctrine which we find only in the Pauline Epistles and 
in the fourth Gospel (—Bunsen, Angel-Messiah, 50). The 
human character, which Philo denies, Matthew supplies. 

The first of Corinthians, xv. 1, 4, mentions the evangel, and 
says that the Christos died for our sins according to the Script¬ 
ures, but there is no reason to expect an Evangel so early as 
a.d. 64. The Jew recognised without difficulty that the Chris¬ 
tos must suffer and be condemned to death, and that the Script¬ 
ures announce it (Justin, Dial, cum Trypho, 80-90); and this 
testimony is confirmed by a Jewish book of undoubted author¬ 
ity, the Targum of Jonathan , which, as it appears, applied 
Isaiah, liii. 10 to the Messiah : “ Iahoh wished to crush him! ” 
And there is no room to suppose that this interpretation is 
later than Cliristianism and comes from the Christians, since 
the mere fact that the Christians applied this prophecy to 
their Christ would be enough to hinder the Jews from referring 
it to their Messiah, if this had not been already established 
among them.—Ernest Havet, le christianisme et ses origines, 
III. 375, 376. The idea of the Death of the Messiah once admit¬ 
ted, nothing was more natural than to find it in the words of 


810 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


Daniel, ix. 26: ppltfB rnr' 1 Messiah shall be cut off. He has 
carried the sin of many, and interceded for transgressors.— 
Isa. liii. 12. In Isaiah liii. 8, 9, he dies, but in verse 10 he ap¬ 
parently lives, so that one must presume that he is risen from 
the dead.—1 Cor. xv. 4. 

Basileides lived an active life down into the time of the Older 
Antoninus (138-145) and some said had for his teacher, “ as 
they claim,” Glaukias the interpreter of Peter.—Clemens Al. 
Strom, vii. p. 898. If Basileides wrote after a.d. 140, he very 
likely comes after a gospel had appeared. The story about 
Glaukias is wholly unreliable, since “ as they claim” disposes 
of the story. 1 Who are they ? Basileides invented a system 
containing the Unborn Father and Logos and a lot of first-hy¬ 
postases, powers, princes and angels. But those Angels who 
after them (posterius) hold heaven together, wfiio are seen 
by us, have governed all things that are in the world and 
made partes (divisions) for themselves of those nations that 
are on it; but of these the principal is that one who is thought 
to be the God of the Jews. And because he wished to subdue 
the other peoples to his own men, the Jews, all the other prin¬ 
cipal angels arose against him and went counter. For which 
reason also the other peoples opposed his people. But the 
Unknown and Unnamed Father seeing their destruction sent 
his firstborn Nous (Mind, Logos) who is called Christos to 
free those believing him from the power of those who made 
the world. 2 In their peoples, however, he appeared on earth a 
man and performed miracles. Wherefore he suffered not, but 
Simon a certain man of Cyrene.—Irenaeus, I. xxiii. From 

1 The teaching of the Lord about the Parousia (the Lord’s Coming) began from 
Augustus and Tiberius Kaisar, but is completed in the intervening times of Augustus : 
but that of the Apostles, as far as the public service of the Paulus, is finished under 
Nero; but later in the times of King Adrian were those who invented the haeresies, 
and their periods of activity continued as far at least as Antoninus the Elder, such as 
Basileides even if he should claim Glaukias as teacher as they say (cbs auxoOo-iv auroi), 
Peter’s interpreter. For Markion, being of the same age as they, conversed, as older, 
with younger (men) : after him Simon for a little while heard the preaching of Peter. 
—Clemens Al. Strom. VII. xvii. This whole story is entirely unauthenticated, except 
possibly the date of Basileides, 130-145. The idea of Simon hearing Peter preach is 
borrowed from Acts, viii. 24-28. What Simon got out of Peter has not yet come down 
to us. But Clemens does not put Basileides as early as a.d. 130. He was neoteros 
(younger) than Markion, that is, later. As to what Clemens heard said relating to 
Augustus, Tiberius, Paulus and Nero, some wise man, very likely, put the cart before 
the horse. 

2 Gen. xi. 7. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 811 


this we learn not only the extent of the Jewish gnosis, but 
also that there had been considerable discussion about the 
Christos before the time of Basileides, otherwise he would not 
have gotten the idea of the crucifixion-story. Supposing 
Basileides never said this. Now, if the Matthew-euangelium 
was late, still there was the Gospel of the Hebrews from which 
persons could have got the story, as Justin Martyr did. The 
art of Irenaeus probably consisted in confusing the evidences; 
so that he possibly mismated writers by not following the 
order of succession according to time. If the Christian story 
of the crucifixion was not put into any manuscript until after 
A.D. 135-140, not until after Bar Cocheba’s rebellion failed, no 
one could have tucked in his own account of it before this time. 
It is at least remarkable that Irenaeus, beginning with Simon, 
Menander and Saturninus should make public a knowledge of 
the crucifixion-narrative first through the name of Basileides. 
One would have supposed that he would have let in Matthew 
or Luke before Basileides if he could. But evidently Irenaeus 
preferred to plead his cause his own way. Still, if Simon, 
Menander and Saturninus knew nothing about the Crucifixion, 
the mere fact of Irenaeus making Basileides his mouthpiece 
to introduce the subject rather suggests that the date of the 
Crucifixion story was almost as late as the Ebionite Matthew, 
and that Irenaeus himself may have been aware of it. There 
were two Basileidian systems given out, an older and a later 
one. Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Tlieodoret exhibit the last— Ulil- 
horn, Horn, und Becogn. 287. Consequently, the crucifixion 
reference very likely appears in a late , mutilated exhibition of 
tiie Basileidian system. The Romish Church was in a posi¬ 
tion where it could make it uncertain what Basileides said or 
wrote, if it chose, by destroying the evidences. An author 
writes: Soil doch schon Clemens Alexandrinus, ungeachtet 
seiner tiefer eindringenden Kenntniss von der Lehre des Basi- 
lides in demjenigen was sich schlechterdings niclit mit den 
Philosopliumena vereinigen lasst, auf den Uebergang in die 
spatere Form des Basilidianischen Systems hinweisen. Und 
diejenige Form desselben in welcher wir es aus Irenaeus, 
Epiphanius und andern Schriftstellern kennen hat Uhlhorn, 
wie ilim Baur nachruhmt, sehr richtig fur eine Verstummelung 
des urspriinglichen erklart.—-p. 289. 

There might have been an account of the death of a Naza- 


812 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


rene leader published without the charge of interference with the 
Roman government of the country. What difference would it 
make to Pilate how many devils he cast out, as long as he did 
not join the party of Judas the Galilean against Rome. But 
the writer was forced by his very plan to dispose of his hero 
in some way (in order to show that the Messiah had already 
come, and disappeared from the scene); and how was he to 
account for his disappearance except at the hands of the hated 
Pharisees and Romans ? Besides, there were all the traditions 
of the rebellions against Rome in Judea floating in the public 
mind,—and no one beyond the Jordan more than half in¬ 
formed, and by hearsay at that. Further the coincidence be¬ 
tween Iesous the Nazarene and Iesous of Galilee was calculated 
to awaken national interest in his narration,—coupled as it 
was with the name of Messiah which had been in the popular 
mouth for a large part of a century. What had a Nazarene 
Messiah to do with Pilate and the Romans ? Why about half 
a dozen or more pretenders to be king of the Jews had already 
been destroyed, if the author of ‘ Matthew ’ wrote in the 2nd 
century, as the writer of * Supernatural Religion ’ supposes. 
Judas the Galilean is conspicuously mentioned in arms. Was 
the name of a Galilean Messiah, then, of no consequence to 
his story! See Isaiah, ix. 1, and all the Sohar passages. What 
was the use of bringing in Herod and Archelaus, except to date 
the affair away back long before the second century ? Why was 
the fifteenth year of Tiberius given ? Why was he described 
as a Nazarene , except that the Nazarenes were in and the Phar¬ 
isees out! Monastic institutions, 1 self-denial, asceticism 2 were 
all the rage, fashionable even, when Matthew wrote, and gnosis 
was everywhere. The Essenes attached great importance to 
the names of the Angels, and they had particular doctrines of 
which they made a mystery 3 and which could only be com- 

1 ‘ Sowing into the soul mind-perceived rays of the Father ’ is a genuine gnostic ex¬ 
pression found in the ‘ De Vita Contemplativa.’ It is not primarily Christian. 

2 Like the Brahman hermits, the Therapeutae seem to have withdrawn from the 
world into Mons Nitria, as a protest of the spirit against matter. That they were 
quasi Judaic may be inferred from Moses being the leader of the men and Miriam 
leading the women. Philo himself preached ascetic doctrine.—Philo, Quaest. et Solut. 
II. 49. The Iessaioi went about curing, like the Hindu Iatrikoi. The two sects are 
alike. 

3 Great is the mystery of that piety (or righteousness) or divinity.—1 Tim. iii. 16. 
The Book of Daniel wears a late aspect; and Nazarenism pervades the Old Testament 
from Nazirs to Daniel. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 813 


municated to members of their sect. Nothing has transpired 
of their mystekies in the writings of Josephus and Philo ; but 
it is more than probable that the books, more recent, of the 
Kabbalists retrace, in great part, the mystical and metaphysi¬ 
cal doctrines of the Essenes. 1 D. Emil Schiirer, 2 says that the 
derivation of Asaioi from (Asaia, physician) does not 

come near enough to the peculiarity of the order and has no 
support in the Greek therapeutai since the Essenes are nowhere 
named physicians, but only therapeutai tlieou (Servants of 
God). To this, Schiirer quotes Philo, Quod omnis probus 
liber. § 12 (Mang. II. 457). It would have been better as far as 
possible to have given due attention to the Greek passage in 
Philo, de Yita Contemplativa, § 1, where Philo (or some one) 
says that the thereapeutai “ give tidings of a better Iatrike 
(healing) than that in cities ; ” and Josephus (Wars, II. cap. vii. 
p. 786. ed. Coloniae 1691) says that the Essenes “searched 
roots and prophylactics and the properties of stones to cure 
sufferings (71706$ Sepaireiav 7raJo>j/, to cure complaints).” Now the 
words patlie, iatrike and therapeuo, all three have a double 
meaning, according as diseases of body or soul are referred 
to; and, on the testimony of Josephus, the Essaioi attempted 
to cure both. Mr. Schiirer might as well have told us that the 
English word cure did not mean cure of bodies, but cure of 
souls instead. Some one plays on this double entendre in 
the treatise on a theoretical life. 3 But Josephus states that 

1 Munk, Palestine, p. 519. See Jouffroy’s Lecture, Mysticism. Am. ed. I. 124, 
125 IT. 

2 Gesch. d. Jud. Volkes, 2nd New Edition, 2nd Theil, p. 469. 11 nous semble plus 

probable que ce 110 m (Essaioi) vient du syriaque Asaya (les medecins).—S. Munk, Pal¬ 
estine, p. 515. Josephus says that they used vegetable and mineral remedies for the 
cure of suffering. Therefore they would naturally be regarded as Asaya, Healers. 

3 Schiirer (like P. E. Lucius) imagines this treatise to be a Christian product of the 
third century. It is a gnostic production. A Christian writer at so late a period would 
hardly need to employ such Alexandrine expressions as t 'o ov o *ai aya6ov Kpeirrov eart *ai 
ev6? ei\tKpi.ve<TTepov Kal jaovaSo? apxeyov(H>repoi'. Philo was the very one to use the Babylo¬ 
nian gnosis, and to preach self-denial. Moreover Eusebius ascribes the treatise to 
Philo.—Eusebius, H. E. book II. 16, 17. Eusebius tries to show that these Contem¬ 
plative votaries of ‘spirit and matter philosophy ’ were the N. T. Christians, who, 
according to the latest researches, were a later form of Nazorene gnosis. Philo de¬ 
scribes the life of our ascetics in the most accurate manner.—Eusebius, H. E. II. 17. 
Lucius says that Philo was not the author of the treatise De Vita Contemplativa. 
Eusebius says that he was ! 

Lucius contends that the author of De Vita Contemplativa does not mention the fes¬ 
tival on the 7th day and the next day (the Sabbath and the Sunday following it) but 
the seven x seven (the 49th day) and the following day ; and does this, because the 


814 


THE GHEBEES OF HEBRON. 


the Essaioi studied medicines to cure complaints. Whatever 
was the subject to which the Essenes devoted themselves 

author could not have set back the Christian Sabbath-festival (as it existed in his time 
in Egypt) into the time before Christ without at once betraying himself and his object 
(to write a Tendenzschrift); that he could not mention the Sacred Supper (eines heili- 
gen Mahles) without immediately letting it be seen that they were Christians. In 
reply to this may be said that Acts, ii. 1 and Leviticus, xxiii. 15, 16, mention the Jew¬ 
ish festival Pentecost; consequently, a festival kept probably by the Jews in Egypt. 
But, as to the author’s attempt at concealment of his object, the location on Mons 
Nitria was well known, and if there was a Christian settlement there of the sort de¬ 
scribed in De Vita Contemplativa the name itself would betray the writer’s sect. 
Moses is mentioned and Miriam, as leading the two choruses. The treatise mentions 
the Red Sea (so does Exodus). And not a word appears in the treatise about Christ 
or the Apostles ! Philo never mentions them. How could he until after the Destruc¬ 
tion of Jerusalem in a.d. 70 ? Eusebius wanted to make the Christians appear as early 
as possible, and therefore could not deny that Philo wrote the account about the Ther- 
apeutae. Lucius takes just the opposite course. He denies that these Egyptians were 
Jew's, although Alexandria (on Lake Marea) was a Jewish settlement. When the 
writer finds that into their monasteria the Therapeutae carried only “laws and oracles 
delivered through prophets, and hymns and to. aWa (the rest) which will increase and 
perfect science and piety ” Lucius, p. 169, assumes that the et caetera (ra a\\a) means 
books, and Christian books at that. In their laws he sees the Jewish Law, in the 
“ oracles through prophets ” he sees the Hebrew Prophets, in their hymns the Psalms, 
and in their 11 et caetera’ the New Testament writings ! It is not absolutely certain 
whether this SEEing people ever saw so much ! At all events, the to. a\\ a (the et caet¬ 
era) might refer perhaps to the following expression “ o-uyypaja^ara na\atu>v dvSpwv ” a few 
lines further on: which means “writings of ancient men.” If these people near 
Philo’s city and just in its rear were provided with “ Laws, oracles of prophets, hymns ” 
(of their own making) and “the writings of the ancients” besides verbal addresses to 
the congregation, what more could they ask ? They could not get the New Testament 
in the first century ! And if the article was written in the third century sub rosa by a 
Christian (Lucius, 187) he certainly lifted his veil when he located his people in Mons 
Nitria ; for these Nitrian monks in the third century w T ere known to be Christians.— 
Larsow, Festbriefe, p. 4. Lucius denies that the so-called Therapeutae were Jews. 
Perhaps they were of the Diaspora. They danced and sang, like Moses and Miriam 
(—Exodus, xv.) not more than ten miles away from Alexandria, the most Jewish city 
in Egypt. If Moses, Elijah, the Essene monoa and the Baptist sought the desert, why 
not Jewish ascetics in Egypt ? But if the Therapeutae differ from true followers of 
Moses, cannot the same be said of Philo and his allegorical method? What is this 
method but a mode of interpreting writings in a sense different from their original 
meaning ? Lucius has collected Christian parallels to the usages in De Vita Cont. 
with diligence and vigor; but there were so many sects and phases of askesis in the 
first two centuries of our era that mere parallels between Christian usages and those 
described in De Vita Cont. are insufficient to overcome the opposing presumptions. 
Before all else we have the testimony of Eusebius. Then the gnosis, which swallows 
up Judaism, Christianism and all contemporaneous Egyptian sects (including the wor¬ 
ship of Sarapis) as its own children. Tradition is sometimes as safe as criticism. 
Lucius attaches no great importance to the Essene influences from b.c. 145 nor to the 
ancient doctrine of “spirit adverse to matter” as affecting asceticism in Egypt. Men 
stayed for ten years in the cells of the Great Serapeum. It did not require one to be 
a Christian to infer, from the doctrine of spirit and matter, that the claims of the 
spirit are higher than those of the body. The Gnosis arrived at so much, before the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 815 


most, common sense would remind ns that the vulgar would 
name these monoa after the peculiarity in them that was of 
most benefit to the country people, namely their art of curing 
the sick. “ Curing the sick, curing the sick,” says the Codex 
Nazoria; “ curing the sick, yet taking no pay.” Does not this 
touch the peculiarity of the order of Healers ? What does St. 
Matthew say of Iesua the Essene ? Did the Iessaios ever take 
pay ?—Matth. x. 8. 

Ye received a free gift, Give one !—Matthew, x. 8. 

In reference to Essenism in Christianism Matthew speaks of 
42 generations from Abrahm to Iesu (including both names). 
A German writer (Leipsic 1850) states that the camps of the 
Israelites (Numb, xxxiii.) in the March out of Egypt through 
the Desert were 42, which Origen thought significant inasmuch 
as the March through the Desert has been spun out by the 
Essaioi to a great allegory which they in their sacred suppers 
celebrated festally. In 42 degrees (or stations) the soul puri¬ 
fying itself wanders out from the dark ways of the flesh (of 
which Egypt was the symbol) over to the happy fields of 
virtue, and celebrates in the Passover his liberation from the 
bonds of the senses. This primitive allegory has exerted great 
influence on the New Testament, for now it could be shown 
how the carpenter’s son is still Son of God. When the 
soul of the mystic illuminates itself and rises from the senses 
up to the light of heaven, nothing is more natural than that 
vice versa the heavenly spirit should descend through 42 de¬ 
grees or generations into the flesh. The Jews knew the theory 
of the descent of spirits by emanation and the story of the fall 
of the angels. The number forty-two is divided into three 
parts of 14 each (Matthew, i. 17). Dod (Dauid), read as figures 
(4, 6, 4) = 14 ; and three times 14 is 42. This is Icabalist reason¬ 
ing ; but in those days it passed muster. 

Epiphanius says that Kerinthus and Karpokrates, who used 
the Gospel of the Ebionites, argued that Iesu was the son of 

Christian era. Tradition which hands down the tract De Vita Cont. as one of Philo’s 
writings passes for something, and Eusebius attests the tradition. The testimony pro¬ 
duced by Lucius is not primary, direct to the point (like the evidence of Eusebius) but 
ancillary, such as does not absolutely prevent the traditionary status being received 
as true. Powerful as the parallel suggestions of Lucius appear, they may be consistent 
with the existence of Separatists in the Mons Nitria. 


816 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON, 


Ioseph and Mary. This is clearly said in Matthew, i. 16. But 
Matth. i. 18,19, contradicts the statement in verse 17, by stating 
that Ioseph was not the father of Iesu. The inference then is 
that our Matthew is an alteration of the original Gnostic Gos¬ 
pel by later hands, and that, if the genealogy be genuine, the 
account of the miraculous conception of Iesu must have been 
wanting in the Biblia of Kerinthus and Karpokrates as well as 
in those of the Ebionites. Matthew, x. 5, 6 ; viii. 4 ; xv. 25, was 
Ebionite and quasi Jewish, for it sends out the 12 Iessaians 
not to the Gentiles nor to the Samarians, but to the Israelites 
alone. The starting point was the Messianism of the Old 
Testament and the Sohar. 

Simeon ben Iochai taught verbally in the beginning of the 
2nd century. His ideas were later collected and with numer¬ 
ous additions published in the book Sohar, in which almost 
the entire Christian Dogmatik and the whole Christology of 
the New Testament, namely the doctrine of the trinity, the in¬ 
carnation, the redemption by his self-offering, the fall of man, 
the idea of the Paradise-Serpent as Hell-Serpent, the designa¬ 
tion of the Messiah as Tree of Life, Paschal Lamb, Heavenly 
Bread, are contained. The antiquity of the doctrines in the 
Sohar is evident because its author and authors were not 
Christians, but Jews. He uses the pure Aramean, not found 
in the Talmud and later writings. If he were become a Chris¬ 
tian secretly how can those doctrines of the Sohar be explained 
which are directly opposed to the principles of the New Tes¬ 
tament? For instance: “ Only the people Israel, which car¬ 
ries on itself the mark of circumcision, is from God, all other 
peoples come from the side of impurity. One cannot connect 
himself with them, nor converse with them concerning God’s 
Law, nor generally communicate to them anything of the 
Law.” There is nothing Christian here; except what the 
Christians took out of Judaism. Only Jews could read the 
Sohar. The high antiquity of the Sohar is seen in its utter 
ignorance of Christianism. It comes from the time when 
Christianism had not separated from Judaism. Its age is to 
be gathered from the period of those rabbins (like B. Akiba) 
who are introduced as speaking. The apostles and evangelists 
of the N. T. agree with the rabbins because they have drawn 
upon the Jewish pre-christian tradition for Messianist explana¬ 
tion of Old Testament passages. The King Messiah comes 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 817 


from the midst of Roma.—Jon. b. Usiel, targum to Exodns, 
xiii. In Daniel, ix. the destruction of City and Temple are 
foretold. At the End of the days Gaug and Magaug and his 
host will come against Jerusalem; but by the hand of the King 
Messiah they will fall.—Jon. ben Usiel, to Numbers, xi. The 
4tli night when the End of the Age will be accomplished.— 
Jon. b. Usiel, to Exodus, xiii. The End, for which King Mes¬ 
siah is to come.—ibid. A King shall arise out of Iaqab and 
the Messiah be anointed from Israel.—Onkelos, to Numbers, 
xxv. Consequently, we have the entire Messianism in Judaism 
before and after a.d. 70—before Christianism appeared in the 
2nd century. 

R. Simon ben Iochai (a.d. 130-160) is mentioned in the 
Mishna 325 times.—Schiirer, Gesch. d. Jud. Yolkes, I. 94. The 
Sohar to Genesis, fol. 53, column 212, mentions the King Mes¬ 
siah. In the Sohar, Part II., fol. 4, col. 14, the Malka Mashi’ha 
(King Messiah) is mentioned four times; in one instance of 
these four he is called Zabaoth. In the Sohar, I. fol. 63, col. 
249. Malka Mashi’ha is called by the name of the Holy Blessed 
God (Malka Mashicha dathkara beshema di Kodesh baruch 
lioa). The author emphasises the point that he has personally 
examined these passages in the Sohar, because the “King 
Messiah ” being found there in the sense of psalm, ii. 7, no 
break can be found from the Old Testament Messianism (run¬ 
ning through later Jewish books) down to Matthew, xxv. 34. 
The Sohar I. fol. 85, col. 338 mentions Malka Mashi’ha twice 
and applies to the Messiah the words in Dan. ii. 44: A king¬ 
dom that shall never be destroyed. As a specimen of the way 
the original investigators of ‘Messianism as applied to the 
Christian Euangelium ’ set about their work (having Jewish 
Messianism very abundant in the Hebrew Bible, 1 the Targums, 
the doctrines of Simeon ben Iochai 2 and many other sources) 

1 Our synoptic Gospels have assumed their present form only after repeated modi¬ 
fications by various editors of earlier evangelical works.—Supernat. Rel. 1. 459. 

2 The name of Simeon ben Iochai we find in our copy of the Bereshith Rabbah, 
dated 1856, printed at Lemberg. The Bereshith Rabbah, fol. 69 b mentions Simeon ben 
Iochai. His name also appears in the Aidra Rabba, I. §§ 1, 7, 8, 28. The Midrash 
Rabboth (explanations of the Pentateuch) is the chief work of the Midrashim. The first 
part of this Midrash is the Bereshith Rabba (Genesis Magna). Its age can be inferred 
from this that an imitation, whose title Bereshith Suta (Genesis parva) betrays it as 
such, was known to the Churchfathers in a Greek translation.—101 Frage, p. xvii. 
The Midrashim were described by v. Ammon, “biblischen Theologie,” II. 329, 1 as the 
bridge that leads from the Writings of the Old Covenant to those of the New.’ These 

52 


SIS 


THE G1IEBERS OF HEBRON. 


we extract out of Hundert und ein Frage, Leipsic, 1850, p. 13 
the following suggestions : Psalm, ii. 7 compelled the authors 
of the Gospel of Matthew to assume a divine procreation of 
the Messiah. The Samaritans looked for him out of the tribe 
of Ephraim, who was to appear first in Galilee and be pierced 
by the sword (Zachariah, xii. 10). He was called Son of Io- 
seph because Ephraim was a son of Iosepli. Deuteronomy, 
xxxiii. 17, speaks of Ioseph’s first-born bull, and this was con¬ 
strued to mean the Messiah ben Ioseph. But Genesis, xlix. 
10, 11, was explained to mean the Messiah ben Daud (David). 
Since in the Messiah ben Ioseph a political leader was ex¬ 
pected (and the Iessaian Saints could not find anything of the 
sort in the case of a non-resistant preacher of Essenism, and 
a Healer) they laid stress on Ioseph being the father of Iesu. 
So they, in the * Son of David ’ genealogy, drew the line of de¬ 
scent from David through Ioseph. But as Ioseph passed for 
only his foster-father the descent from David was made sure of 

works are almost without exception drawn from older works now lost and at all 
events from the immovable Tradition —101 Frage, p. xviii. Jonathan ben Usiel was a 
pupil of Hillel. This last lived about 30 before our era. The Chaldee translators of 
the Bible frequently mingle Messianic hopes with their translation of the Hebrew text. 
Jonathan wrote in Herod’s time before the Romans were the worst foes of the Jews. 
He translated Bible passages as prophecies relating to the events of his time.—101 
Frage, p. xiii. xiv.—This quotes Gfrorer to the view that Jon. ben Usiel lived a long 
time before Jerusalem’s destruction in 70. Onkelos lived not later ; he bears testimony 
to the continued existence of the Temple on the mount and the continued pilgrimage to 
the Festivals and the offerings by the priests early and at evening.—ibid. xv. Both 
Meuschen and Lightfoot testify to the remarkable resemblance in the form of the 
evangelical parables and expositions to the Talmudic. 

Matthew’s latest author revised preceding accounts.—Luke, i. 1. The evangelist 
might perhaps have written the verse i. 17, but he contradicts the genealogy in verse 
18, and after saying that there were 14 names from the Babylonian captivity to the 
Christos, he gives only 13, Iesu included. The one who was the author of the genealogy 
evidently regarded Ioseph as the father of Iesu, on which account he calls him Son of 
Daueid.—Hundert und ein Frage, p. 4. Whether an Ebionite wrote that genealogy is 
uncertain because the doctrine in the period before A.D. 100 was possibly not that of 
psalm, ii. 7. For the Ebionite believed the Great Archangel to have been created. The 
original plan was to start a Gospel on Essene principles. , in which Essaian doctrines 
should be taught. The personae (at least the Messianic theory was ready to hand) were 
in mente; but how to make a Messiah or Christos on paper without doing so in full 
accord with the public expectation (such as it appears in psalm ii. 6, 7, 12 and in the 
Sohar passages) is a puzzle. Moreover the blaze in the Jordan at the Baptism described 
in the ‘ Gospel of the Hebrews ’points to the conception of a superhuman being at least 
as early as 125. Acts, xiii. 46, points rather to the origin of Christianism outside of 
Judea among the JeAvs of Asia (Perga, Pamphylia, Tarsus, Antioch, Galilee and 
Arabia). But these had the benefit of all the Jewish Messianist scriptures and litera¬ 
ture ; and (in the case of the Synoptic Evangels) of the Messianist doctrines in the 
Sohar. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 819 


by deriving Iesu from David through the mother’s side as a 
shoot or branch out of Iesi (Isaiah, xi. 1). According to the 
Evangelium of the Nativity of Mary, cap. viii. Ioseph was of 
David’s line. The protevangelium Iacobi, x. says that Mary 
was of the line (<£uAr)s) of Dauid. The derivation from Dauid’s 
line would seem in any case assured whether the Son of Dauid 
was son of Ioseph (as the Ebionites, Kerinthus and Karpo- 
krafces thought) or not. The psalm, ii. 7 was the controlling 
element, however, and those who held that the language of the 
Father to the Logos and the King (“ This day have I be¬ 
gotten thee ; ” a supposed conversation between the two high¬ 
est spiritual beings that the oriental gnosis could think of) re¬ 
quired the Son of the Man to be born of a woman, had to be¬ 
lieve Matthew, i. 18 and Luke, i. 31, 35. At all events, Isaiah, 
xi. 1, 10, was quoted by the Jews, for perhaps two centuries 
previous, that these verses prophesied the Messiah. So that 
as long as steeples point to things on high the Christians are 
nailed to the Jewish mast, as exponents of Jewish gnosis and 
Messianic hope. 

Dillmann placed the origin of the Little Genesis (Book of 
Jubilees) written in Hebrew or Aramean in the first century of 
our era ; A. Treuenfels, in the beginning or first half of the 
second Christian century, a Hebrew work written by a Jew, 
containing nothing Christian, not even a reference to anything 
Messianic. Dillmann regarded it as older than the Testament 
of the 12 Patriarchs, which last is at any rate not prior to a.d. 
70.—Ronsch, pp. 464, 465. The Little Genesis was translated 
into Greek and known to the Christian Church.—ib. p. 465. A. 
Jellinek thought it was written at a time when the Jewish 
Kalendar was not fixed, but fluctuated. Ewald placed its ori¬ 
gin in the first century. Dr. Langen in a.d. 30-60. The Little 
Genesis was written before a.d. 70, at a time when the Old Tes¬ 
tament contained but 22 books (i.e., in the time of Josephus) 
and while the Temple was still standing at Jerusalem (—“ and 
the King on the Mt. Zion from eternity to eternity.”—Book of 
Jubilees, cap. 1).—Ronsch, p. 528. Ronsch dates the book 
about a.d. 50-60, its author a very learned Scribe who wrote a 
contemporaneous Deuterosis of the Law.—pp. 529, 530. We 
read “ Malka Mesiha ” in the Sulzbach copy of the Soliar, of 
which the doctrines of Simeon ben Iochai in the first half of 
the Second Century are the foundation. It is clear that the 


820 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


epithet King- applied to the Messiah in the Targums, the 
Sohar, and in Matthew, xxv. 31, 34, 40, belongs to a period in 
Judaic history when Christianism and Judaism were still un¬ 
divided and inseparate, holding the Messianic prospects in 
common. Hellenists and Jews are mentioned together in 
Acts, vi. 1. They may have been together in a.d. 37-50 in 
Jerusalem. Hellenists in Jerusalem, before B.c. 145, are 
found. 

In a passage of the Talmud the fathers of the Synagogue 
expressly acknowledge that their forefathers introduced out 
of the land of the Exile (Babylonia) the names of the angels, 
months, and letters of the alphabet.—Franck, 261. At Borne, 
the Judaisers entered into the most of the sentiments of the 
Sons of Israel, expecting with them the Kingdom of the Lord. 
—Havet, Christianisme, III. 484; Bev. vii. 6, xviii. 21, xx. 4. 
Come Saviour Christ!—Bev. xxii. 20. The body was con¬ 
sidered as rendering the spirit impure, preventing its union 
with the Deity ; it must be punished, on account of its sins, 
by mortifications and mutilations, the spirit must be elevated 
over matter and led to Deity through castration, virgin purity, 
celibacy. If one, however, knows not how to unite this passing 
over to the Deity through the Moloch-fire with the religious 
standpoint of Semiticism, let him keep in mind that the Mo¬ 
loch-worship in general, in its origin and significance, cer¬ 
tainly belongs to Upper Asia, where in Clialdaea the raising 
the souls up through fire lustration and self-torturings in the 
Mithraworship, in India the union with the Deity, took place 
through suicide by burning (as in the time of Alexander, in 
the case of Calanus).—Movers, I. 331, 332. As representative 
of Ahura Mazda, Bel in the Chaldaean Mithriaca taught the 
bringing up of souls (of the dead) through fire-lustrations, 
waterbaptisms (according to Lucian, Menippus cap. 7, at sun¬ 
rise in the Tigris, at midnight in the Euphrates) and other 
customs which since the time of the Boman Caesars have 
become known in the West through the wandering Babylonian 
Chaldaeans, whose native place was Babel as seat of the Mi¬ 
thraworship and the Mithriac consecrations (Weilien ; prob¬ 
ably Mysteries are here meant).—Movers, I. 391. The Babylo¬ 
nian Bel-Mithra was Bel, and also Saturn (Kronos) and Sol.— 
ibid. 180, 181, 189. Mithra, Babylon’s Sun.—Nonnus, XL. 400. 
Secretaque Beli et vaga testatur volventem sidera Mithram— 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 821 


Claudian, de land. Stilicon I. 59. Mithra, Unconquered Snn! 
—Spannheim, ad Juliani Caesaris, p. 144. But, further, Movers, 
I. 300-392 (comp. 234) says that the Israelites adored Mithra. 
The God standing* on a lion (the emblem of Mithra) and sur¬ 
rounded by seven &tars is the Mithra vaga volvens sidera. As 
Bel-Herakles, Mithra is the Lion of Judah, the lion being the 
emblem of fire (the sign Leo) and destructive force.—Bev. v. 
5 ; i. 12, 16, 18, xix. 11-18. Mithra is the Mind-perceived Sun, 
the Helios Noetos and Logos.—Movers, I. 552-554, 390-393. 
Rev. xix. 11, 13 gives the Sun’s White Horse, and his rider 
Mithra the Logos. Mithra is then Iesua the Saviour of the 
good. These are they who follow the Lamb!—Rev. xiv. 4. 
The Lamb, then, is Mithra. 

Rejoice over (Rome) thou heaven, and ye saints, apostles, and prophets, for 
the God has judged your judgment upon her. Babylon shall be found no more ! 
Smite the Gentiles with a sharp sword.—Rev. xviii. 20, 21; xix. 15. 

Mithra, especially in the later time, was regarded as a God 
full of love.—Lassen, Ind. Alterthumskunde, 2nd ed. II. 834. 
He was also called the Mediator. It was probably Mithra 
himself who was obliged to raise the faithful from the dead.— 
Havet, Christianisme, III. 349. In the Persian religion, which 
in later times, according to Spiegel and the Apokalypse, was 
influential towards the Western Asia, the Jesht Mithra informs 
us that Ahura Mazda has ordained Mithra to be Chief Watcher 
over all souls. The Saviour Angel Iesua, called also Mettron 
(Mithra), has been set by God over the Heath angel and brings 
every night the souls of the rabbins into the heaven.—Bodens- 
chatz, K. Y. d. Juden, II. 192. Here we have Mithra, Meta- 
tron, and the Angel Iesua identified as Watcher over and Sa¬ 
viour of souls ; besides, Iesua is Chief of the angels, the King 
of all angels.—ibid. II. 192; the Sohar to Deuteronomy, fol. 
137. col. 4. To this we add Matthew xxiv. 31, xxv. 34 (where he 
is expressly named the King), and iv. 11, where the angels ap¬ 
proach him as their Superior and serve him as the Ebionite 
Great Archangel. The Apokalypse declares the Vernal Sun 
(of Righteousness) to be the Slain Lamb, and that the Lamb 
had been slain from the foundation of the world.—Rev. xiii. 8. 
Whether this is an allusion to the alternations of Darkness and 
Light (from Dec. 22nd to March and Easter), as it undoubtedly 
was originally, is not to be examined here. The paschal lamb 


822 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


was a Jewish institution, known on both sides of the Jordan. 
The lamb was annually sacrificed. To connect the Saviour 
Angel Avith this annual sacrifice, or rather consider him fore¬ 
ordained as Slain from the beginning of the world Avould per¬ 
haps require quotations (Exodus, xii. 5, 7, 21, 23 ; Levit. ix. 7) 
from the Old Testament. But neither St. Matthew nor the 
author of ‘ the Gospel according to the Hebrews’ could have 
carried the doctrine of BeA r . xiii. 8 the way they wanted to 
into the minds of their Eastern contemporaries otherwise than 
by the illustration which is offered in Matthew, iii. 16, 17 and 
chapter xxvii. where human flesh suffers (since the Saviour 
Angel Iesua, as the Gnostics said, could not be crucified, being 
bodiless spiritual nature). Hence to the author of the earliest 
gospel the incarnation, the union of the divine Iesua Avith the 
man Iesous became an absolute necessity,—the composition 
of the Two natures in one!—Matthew, i. 20, 21. Hence the 
Essene doctrines, the parables, and the whole story had to be 
Avritten. The name Iesoua was doubtless used by many Gnos¬ 
tic authors, but as the name of the Saviour, not of a human 
being. They used it as the JeAvs used it, as the name of Meta- 
tron the King of the Angels, as Saturninus used it for the 
Salvator Christos. So Valentinus used it as the name of the 
Saviour of all spiritual life. So, probably, Markion used it in 
his dualist system to denote the Son of the Good but Unknown 
God. We may call it Gnosticism, but was not all the ancient 
oriental theology and Angelology a pure piece of imaginative 
gnosis? What is the difference between Homer’s tlieos and 
any other Eastern man’s theism ? It is all gnosis from India 
to Kronos, Herakles, and the Byblian Adon. And while 
Markion’s antitheses could not stand, the difference between 
the Angelology of the Nazoria and the theory of Markion Avas 
a difference in gnosis, not in truth. AVhat is the first chapter 
of Ezekiel but a form of the gnosis ? Very similar to the gno¬ 
sis mentioned in the 34th chapter of the first book of Irenaeus 
(Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1675. Billius, Ducaeus, Feu-Ardentius). 
Tt? io-TLv aXr/Oeia ? What is truth ! Josephus tells about Herod 
and his time. He died in about 103. He does not say any¬ 
thing about the questions asked by Herod of the Arabian 
Magoi. Before his writings were interpolated, they, being in 
Greek, could have been used by the writers of the first and 
third gospels for certain historical references. Consequently 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 823 


the story of the Crucifixion may have been written after Barco- 
cheba’s death in a.d. 135. Even as late as 900-955 el-Karchi 
speaks of two kinds of Ssabians, one sort accept Iesu Christi 
as a prophet, read psalms, and are therefore a sort of Chris¬ 
tians, but the others deny the prophesying* and the revealed 
writings and testify towards the Sun divine worship.—Chwol- 
sohn, I. 192. We cannot fail to see that Christianism was near 
to Sunworsliip. Compare Numbers, xxv. 4; Job, xxxi. 27 ; 2 
Kings, xxiii. 5 ; Matthew, xvii. 2 ; Kev. i. 13, 16; Ps. xix. Sep- 
tuagint. The Mendaites celebrated the Tammuz-festival.— 
Cliwolsohn, I. 199. Where else than in the sun could the Arch¬ 
angel Metatron-Iesua, Abel Ziua, Abelios the King, Zeus-Bel 
be located ? See Matthew, iv. 11 ; xxv. 34, quasi Ebionite. If 
the Mendaites kept the festival of the Dying Sun (Tammuz.— 
Ezekiel, viii. 14) the author of Matthew’s Gospel must have 
known of it; moreover he preaches Mendaite doctrine. The 
Essene views were taught two centuries or more before a.d. 
100. The Ebionites, Nazoraioi, and Elkasaites as well as the 
Iessaians knew the fact. But the Gospel of Matthew may not 
have been written before 160, certainly not until Matthew was 
ready to write in Greek. 

In Egypt, the cross was connected with the sun as the sym¬ 
bol of the Divinity.—Ernst von Bunsen, Symbol des Kreuz, 
14, 15. The Egyptians regarded the Sun as the Mighty Crea¬ 
tive Force.—Mankind, 425 ; Euseb. Pr. Ev. III. cap. 3. But 
Plutarch de Iside, 52, says that Osiris is concealed in the arms 
of the Sun. The light of the sun is one, although dispersed 
on a thousand different objects. There is but one sort of mat¬ 
ter although divided into thousands of separate bodies. There 
is but one Soul, though it is divided into an infinite number 
of organised bodies. There is one intelligent Soul (it is the 
sun) though it seems to divide itself. There is but one Mind 
the Mind of the Universe, but one Wisdom, one Spirit of life 
in all. The soul of each of us is a god who has emanated from 
the Supreme Being in the sun. The Essenes attributed the 
same origin to our souls, which they regarded as emanations 
from the aetherial fire, from the bundle of life in the Lord. 
The Logos was the Fire, Light, and Wisdom of the universe. 
The Spiritus is the Breath of Divine Life. The Breath of Life 
is distributed through the seven spheres of the universe. The 
principle of Fire comprehended the Spiritus and the Logos 


824 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(—Matthew, iii. 11). Zoroaster taught that when God organ¬ 
ised the Matter of the universe he sent his AVill in the shape 
of dazzling light; it appeared in the shape of a man, and was 
attended by 70 of his most distinguished angels. The Phoe¬ 
nicians also placed the intellectual portion of the universe 
and that of our souls, which is an emanation from it, in the 
substance of Light. Its irradiation is looked upon as the 
action of the pure Soul, and its substance as a being as incor¬ 
poreal as Wisdom (—Julian, Oratio iv.). Kedrenus tells us 
that the Chaldaeans also worshipped Light that only mind can 
perceive, which they designated by A and O, the beginning and 
end of the Greek alphabet, representing the extreme terms of 
the diffusion of light in the seven planetary bodies, the first of 
which, the moon, corresponded to A while the last or Saturn 
corresponded to O (mega), and the sun was expressed by I. 
These three vowels form the deity-name Iao of the Phoenician 
and Clialdaean Gnostics, the Panaugeia or universal Light 
distributed through the 7 planets, the principal of which is 
the Sun. This Panaugeia is exhibited in Rev. i. in the midst 
of the seven golden candlesticks, and under the emblem of the 
7 Stars that the Christ holds in his hand.—Mankind, 574-579. 
If we take up the notion which (Irenaeus says) Kerinthus en¬ 
tertained concerning the Messiah, that the Messiah was not 
the man Iesu, we arrive at the old Jewisli-Sabian view ex¬ 
pressed in psalm, ii. The Saviour Iesoua is the Panaugeia. 
Matthew, xxv. holds on to this very conception when it calls 
the Messiah by the name King. It was the prevailing doc¬ 
trine in the time of Philo and Simeon ben Iochai and the So- 
har retains the same. The Light of Light went out from the 
King in the Beginning, says the Book of Splendor. It was 
Light of power said the Sohar and St. John. Christos is God 
and not man, so said they all. Kerinthus, an Old Ebionite in 
some respects, knew that the Sun’s ray issued from the Good, 
that the Saviour held the 7 Sabaoth in his hand, and Kerin¬ 
thus also knew the Adonimaoidos, the death and resurrection 
of the Syrian Sun or Lord ; very likely he had read the Apok- 
alypse (some think that he wrote it), but he was not obliged 
to believe in the crucifixion and resurrection of this Lord (as 
Irenaeus assumes that he did). He (released from the sus¬ 
picions of Irenaeus) had the same views as most of the Ebion- 
ites would have had about the Iesua. “ The Christus never 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 825 


suffered ” ; then was Kerin thus likely to fancy that a certain 
man named Iesua suffered ? And if he did not suffer, then he 
could not have risen. Kerinthus had seen the image of the 
dead Adonis stretched out on a bier at the proconsuPs office 
(as described in Theokritus), and knew that he was expected 
to return to life. He had heard the cry, chi Adon, as well as 
the dirge Hoi Adon ! The Christians of the first centuries re¬ 
garded the Messiah through the symbol of the sun ! Wir wer- 
den beweisen dass der Messias oder Heiland von den Christen 
der ersten Jahrhunderte durch das Symbol der Sonne darge- 
stellt wurde.—Ernst von Bunsen, Symbol des Kreuzes, 14. 
With this compare Micah, v. 2, Henoch, 48. 5; psalm, ii. 2 , 6 , 
7, 12 . Then from the sun God shall send a King.—Sibylline 
Books, iii. v. 590. The Messias appears as a Divine person in 
the clouds.—Dan. vii. 13; 1 Thess. iv. 17. The Gnostics from 
Menander to Kerinthus believed in the Unknown or Unborn 
Father, not the God of the Jews. But the Saviour, the Chris¬ 
tos, they usually acknowledged. But the Messiah was sup¬ 
posed closely connected with the sun. The Mourning for 
Adonis the Syrian Sun was kept all through the East, even in 
Jerusalem. The dead Adon’s body was exhibited with the 
boar’s wounds upon him like a modern crucifix. What hin¬ 
dered the Sons of the Jordan at Antioch from telling a similar 
story of the death of the Christos, not slain by a boar, but 
crucified by the Romans f 

Basileides, who lived in Egypt about a.d. 136-138-150 un¬ 
der the Older Antoninus and Hadrian, had a peculiar gnosis 
in reference to the vior 77 s or Sonship. The doctrine of the 
Logos and of the Son of the God was already in Babylon and 
Egypt. Therefore a treatise upon the nature and position of 
the Son (as regarded from the standpoint of Philo and the 
Hermetic Books) might have been expected; and when the 
followers of Basileides (in the time of Hippolytus, in the third 
century) declared the evangelium to be the gnosis of things 
above this world 1 we have to connect the Sonship wholly with 
the Logos-gnosis, that is, with supercelestial things that are 

1 If this is what constituted an evangelium, then every gnostic system regarding 
the supermundane world (the Kingdom of the heavens! is an evangel, whether in Baby¬ 
lonia, Persia, Arabia, Syria or Egypt, whether Philonian, Biblical, Satornelian, 
Iessaean, Kerinthian, Nabathean, Ebionite, Nazorian, or Nikolaitan. All are forms of 
the gnosis—the Great evangel. Clemens Al. puts Basileides under the Older Antoni¬ 
nus^—Clem. Al. Str5m. VII. p. 898) and under Adrian. 


826 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


asomatoi, spirits, and incorporeal. This is in agreement with 
the original doctrine of the Sibyl and 4th Esdras. The further 
back we go in the 2nd century the more clearly the Sonship 
is separated from anything like human flesh, whether in 
Kerinthus or in 4th Esdras. Philo’s Logos is pure gnosis, and 
without body. Christos-Mithra then is the Sabian Sun. The 
Sun’s day and Christmas are sacred to the Sun, the Christos. 
The 4th Esdras, in the first half of the 2nd century, chap. xiii. 
52, says: No one on the earth will have been able to see my 
Son or those who are with him except in the daytime (nisi in 
tempore diei). Those with him may perhaps be regarded as 
powers or angels connected with the sun.—Compare Matthew, 
iv. 11; xi. 27 ; xvi. 27 ; xvii. 2 ; Julian iv. 138. The sun is 
the emblem of the Logos, according to Philo, de Somn. 15,16. 
The followers of Basileides seem to have had a theory that was 
known to the Ebionites, the primitive state of confusion ! The 
Logos was the Creator out of this confusion. Now the fol¬ 
lowers of Basileides had an idea that the Son w T as the first 
fruits of the classification of the things in this mixed up, cha¬ 
otic confusion that they called amorphia. This division into 
genera and species they held had got to be done through the 
division of the Saviour (the Logos). His corporeal part which 
was unformed suffered, and returned into amorphia ; but his 
psychical part, which belonged to the Hebdomad, rose up and 
was restored to the Hebdomad; and this which was peculiar 
to the sublimity of the Great Archon rose up, and remained 
with the Great Archon.—Hippolytus, vii. 27. Now that this 
idea is not borrowed from the Gospel of Matthew appears 
certain; for psalm, ii. 2, 6, 7 says nothing at all about cruci¬ 
fixion. The Logos, Creator, Saviour-Angel and King could 
not be crucified; the idea of a crucifixion is more likely to 
have been promulgated by the authors of the earliest Iessaian- 
Nazorine works and supported by reference to the Roman 
cruelties in Palestine. Neither Daniel nor psalm, ii. say any¬ 
thing about crucifixion, nor, probably, did Basileides. 1 And 

1 Works in Manuscript were easily altered. Iesua could be made to read Iesu or 
Iesus. For Christos or Saviour, Iesus could be substituted. For Missionary Saints, 
apostles could be substituted, and for Saints of the Nazoria as many men named Ke- 
phas, Iochan, Iacobos (Peter, John, James) could be named in the years A.D. 125-145 as 
would puzzle the Mithrabaptists of the Transjordan to see any error in a description of 
the events of ninety years before. How easy in that age to write about the Messiah and 
his disciples ! For what belongs to Logos is of two natures, and not wide of the mark. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 827 


it is a question (in spite of any statement in Irenaeus) whether 
the Angel Metatron, Michael, or the Angel Iesua was thought 
by Saturninus to have appeared seeming to be in human 
form,—except in the cases mentioned in the Old Testament 
(Genesis and Judges). If, however, the body of the slain Adon 
(the Light of the world, the Creator of Life, the Saviour of the 
souls) was exhibited publicly in Syria, Jerusalem, and Alex¬ 
andria, what was to prevent the Jordan and Transjordan peo¬ 
ple, the Nazoria and Ebionites, exhibiting a new version of 
the death of their Adon at the hands of Pilate (the Evil Prin¬ 
ciple). Such a story of the death of the Lord, the King 
Anointed, Messiah, once started, might, in time be considered 
a true story. Mithra lifted up the souls to the Father. Then 
he was regarded as the Saviour of souls. The Presence-Angel 
saved them. The frank Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, in Phryg¬ 
ia, if he knew any of our Gospels, attached little or no value 
to them, but said that he preferred the living voice of tradi¬ 
tion. Modern Christianism rests on the four Gospels and Paul 
exclusively. Papias is said to have used the Gospel according 
to the Hebrews.—Supernat. Pel. II. 321. If Papias preferred 
what he could learn through his ears to what was written , what 
then was he doing with the Gospel according to the Hebrews ? 

The Mohammedan religion holds that there is but one God, 
that the Old and New Testaments were revealed by God; the 
Jews and Christians have corrupted them. Mohamed is his 
Prophet, the envoy of God. There are prophets. Iesou 
Christos is a prophet, and not the Son of God. Our souls are 
a part of the divine essence. Mohammed was predicted by 

For the logos is twofold in the universe and in the nature of man. In the Universe, 
in the incorporeal and exemplar ideas from which the Intelligible World was made; 
and in visible things which are the copies and representations of those ideas, of which 
this world is composed: and in man the Word is a conception, and then again it is 
uttered (goes into action ; proforikos).—Philo, Quis Heres, p. 458. The logos of Si¬ 
mon Magus is the blessed and incorruptible hidden in every power, not in action 
(ivepye ia), which is the Standing, Stood, Will Stand, standing on high in the Ungene¬ 
rated Power, stood below, in the stream of waters having been in image generated, 
about to stand on high alongside the blessed unlimited Power, if it shall be freed 
from effigy.—Hippolitus, vi. 17. This Standing One is two-fold, male-female, like 
Alohim-Adam Kadmon.—ibid. vi. 18. The logos is, of necessity, arsenothSlus in Ema¬ 
nation-systems, and from fire is the beginning of the generation of those that have been 
generated.—Hippolytus, vi. 18, Duncker. Thus, in this one point, the Hindu logos 
comes very near to the view of Simon Magus and John the Baptist.—Matthew, iii. 11 ; 
xxiv. 27. The unity of electricity and fire in the thunder-cloud (—Exodus, xix. 16, 18 ; 
ix. 24) was the life of Shining Zeus and the Fireangel Gabariel.—Luke, i. 19. 35. 


828 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Scriptures. Iesou Christos did not die upon the cross; 
another was substituted for him ! Universal Judgment! How 
closely this all conforms to the Doketic views.—Tide Irenaeus, 
I. xxiii. Hence the Mussulman Religion is derived from one 
of the forms of gnostic Messianism. The Turk inhabiting the 
Chaldaean, Sabian and Jewish regions is a fatalist, like John, 
iii. 27. Fatalism is the result of deriving all life, all power, all 
destiny from One Source. The Turk’s 4 Doketism ’ has de¬ 
scended from the 2nd century, from the time of Basileides Ke- 
rinthus and Markion.—Exodus, iii. 4, 6, 14; Irenaeus, I. xxv. 
(xxvi). The present Chaldaeans of Mosul are descendants of 
the Old Assyrians. “ The Chaldean community considers it¬ 
self, and rightly so, the most ancient as to nationality and 
Christianity. As regards nationality, they hold that they are 
descended from the Chaldeans, or Assyrians, mentioned in 
Holy Writ; and with reference to their Christianity, the list of 
the names which composed the heads of the Church shows that 
their forefathers professed Christianity as early as the first 
century.”—Mr. Hormuzd Rassam of Mosul; Grattan Geary, 
“Though Asiatic Turkey,” p. 67, Harper, New York. The 
Chaldeans speak the same language as the Sabeans or Chris¬ 
tians of St. John. The present Chaldeans speak, with a few 
variations, the same dialect as that used in the Targuins, and v 
in some parts of Ezra and Daniel, which is called Chaldee.— 
ibid. p. 67. The Chaldean language is Syriac, but the Chal¬ 
deans call it Chaldean. Formerly the Syrians wrote and pro¬ 
nounced as the Chaldeans do now.—p. 67. The old Chaldaean 
character is said to have existed three hundred years before 
the Christian era. There were Nazorigi on the Euphrates and 
Tigris, Baptists; there were Christians at Babylon (—1 Peter, v. 
13); Christians at Edessa ; and Chaldean Christians long set¬ 
tled at Mosul on the Tigris. Nearly 10,000 Christians reside 
at Mosul, mostly Chaldaeans; for three centuries they have 
acknowledged the Pope. The situation of Edessa is not so re¬ 
mote as to prevent intercourse with Antioch and Asia Minor. 
If, then, we notice the Chaldaean-Persian White Horse in 
Rev. xix. 11-16, the reference to the Babylonian-Jewish Seven- 
rayed God (—Rev. i. 12-16 ; ii. 1; iii. 1 ; iv. 5 ; v. 6), the hope 
of aid from the Euphrates (Rev. ix. 14, 15, xvi. 12), we cannot 
fail to connect the Apokalypse closely with the Dispersion be¬ 
tween Antioch and Mosul (in spite of Rev. i. 9-11; ii.; iii.) and 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 829 


with Second Century Messianists. Moreover the Apokalypse 
is Judaeo-nazarene (Rev. ii. 6, 14, 15, 20) and almost as encra- 
tite as Markion.—Rev. xiv. 4; 1 Cor. vii. 1, 8, 9. 

According to Assemani, the Chaldaeans, or Assyrians, re¬ 
ceived Christianism in the time of the 12 Apostles. This alone 
shows the lateness of his sources; for the 12 Apostles were 
probably not named until near the time when the first gospel 
appeared (140-155). Adi, one of the disciples, was martyred 
at Edessa, so says the tradition, and Mark, his disciple, 
preached the Gospel in Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia. This 
looks as late for Mark, as the * Gospel kata Markon ’ seems to 
be. If he resided at Ctesiphon and Seleukia, we can conceive 
of a Chosen Church at Babylon in the 2nd century.—1 Peter, 
v. 12, 13. According to Assemani, the Chaldeans constituted 
a large Christian community separate from others. Their 
Church extends through all Asia, existing partly in the Per¬ 
sian, partly in the Turkish, and partly in the Mogul Empires. 
The Patriarch resides in a monastery not far from Mosul, and 
has many bishops under him.—Hormuzd Rassam ; ibid. p. 67. 
Layard, Babylon and Nin. p. 154, found an Assyrian seal (with 
the impression ‘a king, attended by a priest, in act of adora¬ 
tion before a deity standing on a lion and surrounded by seven 
stars ’). As the king always worshipped the supreme divinity 
(Sol, Bel) we have here the Assyrian worship of Bel surrounded 
by the Sabaoth, the Seven Planets, the Seven-rayed God.— 
Compare Numbers, xxv. 4, xxiii. 1, 14, 29; Rev. i. 16; 2 Kings, 
xxiii. 5. The Messianists of the Apokalypse were, then, Judaeo- 
Assyrian-Chaldaeans. Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, was one of the 
greatest defenders of Nestorius. Mosheim says of the Nes- 
torians called also Chaldeans: Of all the Christians resident 
in the East they have preserved themselves the most free from 
I the numberless superstitions which have found their way into 
the Greek and Latin Churches.—Mr. Rassam ; Grattan Geary, 
p. 68 . There is a tradition in the mountains that the Nesto- 
rians were originally Jews, and the Moravian Jew (Benjamin 
II.) who visited the Kurdish mountains in 1855 regarded the 
Jews whom he found there and the Nestorians as one race, 
having many things in common.—Grattan Geary, p. 68. If this 
is so, it certainly was not difficult for an Eastern Syrian or 
Chaldaean to go from Edessa to Antioch, and thence to ‘ pre¬ 
pare the way of the Lord ’ among the seven churches of Rev. i. 




830 THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 

11 . But as the Syrians of East Syria might not have held such 
views as suited the Roman Church, possibly this might in 
some degree account for the preparation of writings bearing 
the name of Paul. The circumstance that the Apokalypse and 
the Gospel of Matthew were both written in Greek shows that 
the Diaspora of the Tigris and the Ebionism of Matthew had 
in view the extension of the Messianist Church towards the 
West.—Matthew, xxviii. 18, 19. 

Matthew, iv. 25, paints the scene of the Ebionite back¬ 
ground to his picture: Galilee, the Decapolis, Judaea, and be¬ 
yond the Jordan. Epiphanius extends the Ebionite sphere to 
Bashan, Caesarea Philippi, Antioch, Cyprus. The Phoenician 
names of Herakles were Archal, Azar-el, Israel, Sandan, Dor- 
sanes, Zohar, and many others. As Mithra, he was also to be 
considered the Great Archangel of many names. The Sun-god 
Habol (compare the names Apellon and Apollon) was adored 
with Sol. Bal, too, like Herakles, was also Saturn.—Movers, I. 
185, 290, 425-7. When, therefore, the Codex Nazoria, I. 22, 
24, calls Abel Ziua Gabrail the Messenger, and says that Gab- 
rail bore up and spread out the heaven and put together and 
13 repared the circle of the earth, we are reminded of the close 
relations of Bal (Mithra, Zeus Belus) to the Life-god Iahoh in 
1 Kings, xviii. 21, 22, 24, and of Gabriel’s relation to Iahoh, in 
Luke, i. 26, 28, 30. But the Codex Nazoria does not continue 
in the style of Luke’s Gospel. These transjordan Gnostic 
Nazoria, probably some centuries before they got down to 
Bassora, set up Abel Ziua as their Archangel and Logos, in 
opposition to the Messiah Iesu and the Aeon Anos (Anush). 
So that the Eastern theologians, like modern politicians, were 
not all of one mind.—Codex, I. 56. Was there not a kinship 
or some Sabian relationship between those troublesome 
Ebionites beyond Jordan, who considered Iesu the son of 
Iosepli and Maria, and the Nazoria of the Codex who called 
him a false messiah ? Things equal to about the same thing 
are about equal to one another. Remember how the Nazoria 
and Ebionites in the Desert worried Irenaeus and Tertullian. 
The Ebionites and Nazoria dwelt for a long time together in 
the desert region between Egypt and Syria, and in the place 
of religion they substituted Baptism.—Norberg, Cod. Nazor. 
pref. p. v.; Epiphan. Haer. xxx. They were of the nation of 
the Nabathaeans, Norberg, p. v. They had their doctrine of 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 831 


tlie Aeons, which Simon Magus the Samarian prophet shared. 
They once recognised Bol and Ashera, burning incense to the 
Bal, and to the Sun, moon, and five planets. Now between the 
Jordan and the lower Euphrates the Baptist Sabians covered 
the whole country under the Name of Nabathaeans, and the 
names Nazoraioi, Ebion, Banous and John the Baptist trans¬ 
port us directly beyond the Jordan among the Sabians and the 
Beni Kadm, — to the Moabites, Ammonites, Syrians, and 
Clialdaeans.—2 Kings, xxiv. 2, 7, 15. The Phoenicians, Numid- 
ians, and Egyptians regarded Saturn as Baal or Herakles as 
the God regulating and preserving the order of nature.— 
Movers, I. 290; Proverbs, viii. 27, 30. 

Mithra was born at Christmas, Dec. 25th, in a cave. Belus 
Minor qui et Methres. Helios Mithra aniketos. He is the Sun, 
Dionysus, Bel-Mithra. Herakles (the Mythic Manifestation of 
the Highest God) dies a death of torture and his resurrection 
is called Wake (Egersis, from dyeipw to wake up). Herakles, 
according to Movers, I. 388, 389, is the “Angel Iaholi,” the 
visible appearance of the Supreme God, the Angel, therefore, 
of Life. The Ebionites regarded the Christos as the Great 
Archangel, and as Angel of Life, Salvation, and the Resurrec¬ 
tion ; the word salu is in the myth connected with Herakles; 
salu meaning a quail, but saluatio meaning safety, salvus. 
Menander speaks of the festival of the Wake of Herakles. He 
is the dying and reviving year’s Sun, the Adon, the Angel 
King or Son.—Movers, I. 389. The Manicheans in the 3d cen¬ 
tury (like the rest) held the Sun, who is Mithra, to be Christ. 1 
The Angel Metatron is Mithra, the Babylonian Bel-Mithra; 2 
and Metrodorus, who lived about the beginning of our era, 
states that God is the sun and full-moon. When the Young 
Bam 3 passed through the vernal equinox, the Sabians “ ate the 
flesh of the lamb ” (compare Rev. xiii. 8 where the Lamb Slain 
appears as the Saviour Angel and intercessor or mediator) and 
on the 28th of every lunar month they burned a male lamb to 
Hermes, But the Dionysus worshippers ate the raw flesh of 
the Dionysus Bull, the symbol of the Life-god in Taurus. On 
the first day of the new-moon the Jews dressed in white 4 like 


1 Hammer; Augustinus, cap. 8. Abhandl. 34. p. 534; Seel, 437, 457. 

2 Movers, Phoenizier, I. 290. 

3 The Egyptians adored Jupiter in Aries.—Origen, I. 42. The Lamb. 

4 Bodenschatz, Kirkl. Verf. d. Juden, II. 168. 


832 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the other Sabians. Sabaism is the Religion of Hermes. 1 
Hermes plays on the lyre of the seven planets. Hence he was 
the Log-os and was called Sabaoth, “ seven planets ”; for 
planetae and Sabaoth are both feminine gender. He is called 
also Sada and Zadus; and the Bible names Ia’holi el Sadi; 2 
thus identifying Hermes as the Supreme God,—the source of 
the soul, and the Supreme God, according to Herodotus. 
Hermes raises the dead, according to Homer ; we find him so 
occupied (Mercure evoquant une ombre 3 ). This identifies him 
with the Chaldaean Mithra-Bel, the Seven-rayed god of the 
Resurrection of souls, the Logos and Liberator 4 of souls from 
Darkness, 5 the Saviour in Hades or Sheol. 

What in thee hears and sees is the Logos of the God.—Hermes, I. 6. 

Above every Power I invoke this which is named Light and Good Spirit and 
Life ; for thou hast reigned in the body.—Irenaeus, I. xviii. Gnostic Haeresis. 

The true light was that which lights every man that comes into the world.— 
John, i. 9, 10. 

The Mendaites are called Nasaria (Nazoria) by Norberg, 
preface to Codex Nazoria, pp. 1, 3. They are descended from 
the Christiani or Baptists of John. “For the Haeresis of the 
Nasaraioi was before Christ and knew not Christos.”—Epipha- 
nius, Haer. xxix. 6. But they knew Mithra and His Baptism. 
Thus this author puts these Baptists in the beginning of our 
era, as the Essaioi are placed by Josephus before our era. It 
is plain enough here that Epiphanius tries to keep them sepa¬ 
rate from the Christian Nazoraioi; only the use of the Bap¬ 
tist’s name in the Four Gospels and the Liber Adami (Codex 
Nasaraeus) interferes with the purpose of Epiphanius. 

En de tais hemerais ekeinais paraginetai ioannes 6 Baptistes kerusson en 
te eremo. 

Tote paraginetai 6 iesous apo tes galilaias epi ton iordanen ton baptisthenai. 
—Mt. iii. 

1 Chwolsohn, I. 39, 637, 641. 

2 Exodus, vi. 3. In Sole tabernaculum suum posuit.—Vulgate psalm, xix. 4. 

3 La Chau et Le Blond, Description des principalles Pierres Gravees du Cabinet du 
Due d’Orleans, tom. III. plate 23. 

4 Liber, Gallus, Adonis. 

5 Tamas, or Tamuz. Thou dost fly afar, O Adonis, and comest unto Acheron.—Bion, 
I.—We can follow in the Vedic hymns, step by step, the development which changes 
the sun from a mere luminary into a creator, preserver, ruler and re warder of the world, 
—in fact into a divine or supreme Being. ... He who wakes us in the morning, who 
recalls the whole of nature to new life is soon called ‘ the Giver of life.’—Max Muller, 
Cont. Review, Nov. 1878. p. 710. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 833 


Mani (born c. 240) was brought up among the Mogtasilah 
(Baptists of Babylonia) in the Manclaite religion.—Chwolsohn, 
I. 124, 125, 129, 132. Sobiai and Ssabians are manifestly iden¬ 
tical ; the last are still called by many travellers Sobis and 
Subis. The Elkesaites are, after what has been said above 
concerning them, identical with them both. The Sampsaioi 
must likewise be. identical with the Sobiai or Ssabians; for 
they have one common founder; the first Epiphanius distin¬ 
guishes as such who are neither Christians, nor Jews, nor 
Heathen, but an intermediate of these three; so too the Ssa¬ 
bians of the Koran, the Mendaites, are constantly described as 
between Judaism, Christianism and Magianism, who have 
adopted something from every religion. Moreover there are 
special points in which the Sampsaioi and the Koran Ssabians 
(Sabaioi in Greek) agree, as e.g. the rejection of the prophets 
and apostles, the Washings and Purifications, etc.—Chwol¬ 
sohn, I. 121. The description of the Ebionites in Epipha¬ 
nius, Haer. xxx. 1, is like that of the Mendaite Sabis. From 
what has been said we can see how closely Elchasai and his 
followers were connected with that religious-philosophical 
circle of formation of the second and third centuries called 
Gnosis.—Chwolsohn, I. 123. The Mendaites are traced back 
to the time of the father of Mani.—Chwolsohn, I. 124. This 
carries them back to a.d. 250, quite sixty years perhaps after 
the Evangel according to Matthew was published. The first 
accounts from the first followers of Mohammed down to the 
contemporaries of El Mamun (a.d. 830-31) under Ssabism rec¬ 
ognised only the doctrine of the Mendaites the so-called John- 
Christians (that is, a compound of Christianism and Magism, or 
of Judaism and Magism, or of Christianism, Judaism and 
Magism united.—D. Chwolsohn, I. 19. Since the Mendaites 
were remarkable for their frequent washings (ibid. I. 112) they 
come very near the Ebionites of Epiphanius and the Essenes 
of Josephus, Wars, II. viii. 10, 13. The Mendai language re¬ 
sembled the Chaldee more than the Syriac. The Angel Gabriel 
was the Jewish Fireangel, and the Chief Angel among the 
Mendaites. Elchasai (90-100) claimed to be the founder of the 
Ebionites, Nazorenes, Ossenes and Mendaites (Nasaraioi).— 
Chwolsohn, I. 117. 

Like the Jews, Simon Magus, the Gettite, held the intelli¬ 
gible and visible nature of fire. Justin Martyr and the 
53 


834 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


“Evangel according to the Hebrews” state that fire flamed 
in the Jordan when Iesns was baptised. In the Old Testa¬ 
ment psalm, ii., the Christos was no human being. Among 
the Ebionites, he was the Great Archangel, the Son of the God. 
Justin Martyr calls him Logos and Angel. A part of the 
Gnostics divided (separated) Iesu from the Christos (solventes 
Iesum). 1 From Irenaeus, 207 [Harvey, ii. 89], we learn: “ Al¬ 
teram quidem Jesum intelligunt, alteram autem Christum 
(they think Iesus one, but Christus different).—Peter Holmes, 
Tertul, agst. Marcion, p. 454, note; Ante-Nicene Chr. Li¬ 
brary, vol. vii. Now the 1st epistle of John, iv. 3, expressly 
anathematises this view, saying : “ Every spiritus not confess¬ 
ing that Iesous Lord has come in flesh is not from the God, 
but belongs to the Antichristos ” (is that of the Antichrist), 
“ which we have heard that it comes, and is now in the kos- 
mos at this very time.” This passage in 1 John, iv. 3, shows 
that the Gnostics severed the Christos from the man Jesu as soon 
as the other Gnostics united the two; just as Hippolytus, vii. 
33 shows that the doctrine in Matthew, iii. 13, 16,17 is in some 
things like that of Kerinthus. If the Apokalypse does not 
know the Gospels, why should Kerinthus be supposed to have 
known them ? How was the story of the Yirginal Birth kept 
secret for 30 years, and how did it get noised abroad so that 
Irenaeus should conclude that Kerinthus knew anything about 
it ? Palestine was full of Sun worship of one sort or another, 
and if the story had been known to the public at any time 
there would have been no occasion for any further miracle. 
But Irenaeus tells us that Kerinthus did not believe it, he 
couldn’t believe it. He does not tell us how Kerinthus could 
have learned the story any way; and assumes that Kerinthus 
knew the contents of the Gospels before they were published, 
perhaps. He writes as if Kerinthus knew the entire story that 
Irenaeus had read in Matthew and Luke! Now if the author 
of Supernatural Beligion is correct in his published opinion 

1 Kerinthus separated the Christos from the man Iesus. So did a large body of the 
Ebionites. The Gospel treats the Ebionites as Nazarenes. According to Epiphanius. 
ed. Petav. I. 117, and in accord with the previous gnostic view of the Messiah, one 
would surmise that Kerinthus preceded the period when the Christos was held to have 
been made flesh ; in other words, the Christian Church brought out the gospels subse¬ 
quent to his time.—Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. xiii. xiv. The treatise of Irenaeus seems cal¬ 
culated to teach converts in Gaul enough to keep them partisans and give them no fur¬ 
ther information. See Iren., I. xxv.-xxvii. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 835 


that none of the Gospels was published until later than a.d. 
150, then Kerinthus could probably never have seen one of 
them if he was born in the year a.d. 90 and was a philosopher 
in 120. If Kerinthus believed as much as Irenaeus says he 
believed, how could he have avoided believing the rest of the 
same story ? The only wonder is if Kerinthus believed as 
much as Irenaeus and Hippolytus say, that he did not also be¬ 
lieve the remaining miracle, the Virginal Birth. So that one 
is tempted to suspect a little manoeuvre here to help St. Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel and carry back the idea of the Virginal Birth to 
a time nearer the first part of the Second Century. The Vir¬ 
ginal Birth and the Crucifixion belong together as critical 
parts of the Gospel plan, and Irenaeus on paper apparently 
makes out that Kerinthus knew these chief points. But when 
the Apokalypse knows neither the Virginal Birth nor the Cru¬ 
cifixion, nor any gospel, nor the name of a single apostle, nor 
the trial before Pilate, nor Ioseph, nor Maria, nor the Baptist 
John, nor the Dove-story, nor the Kesurrection of Iesus from 
the dead (unless Bev. i. 18, ii. 8 mean this, for these verses, 
like Rev. xii. 17, xxii. 16, 20, 21, could be easily added later), it 
looks as if the Apokalypse had nothing to do with Gospel 
Christianism, but, like psalm, ii. knew originally no Jesus and 
was addressed to the earlier stage of Jewish Messianism. The 
Apokalypse, vii. 4-9, 11, 12, viii. 3, 4, ix. 11-15, x. 6, 7, xi. 1, 
2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 15-19, xii. 10, 11, xiii. 7, 8, xiv. 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 
is full of Jewish, Ebionite, or Diaspora Messianism and 
the Judgment in favor of the Saints and against Rome. Rev. 
xiv. 12, the words “ and the faith of Iesous,” look very much 
like one of the later additions to the original work. Rev. xv. 
3 is Jewish again, calls the Messiah the Lamb, but not Iesous 
Christos ; Rev. xvi. 19 judges Rome again, so does xvii. 1-6; 
here seems to be another interpolation of the name “ iesou ” : can 
this be an alteration of the Jewish name of the Saviour Angel 
who is the Presence-Angel, and therefore the Christos ? Or 
would a Jew or an Ebionite have mentioned the name Iesous 
in a book written in Adrian’s time ? The Apokalypse hated 
Rome ; but Adrian allowed only Christians to enter Jerusalem 
after Bettar. The book looks as if it had been originally Mes¬ 
sianic, but at a later period made by insertions or additions to 
bear testimony to the name Iesous, whereas previously it had 
once borne testimony to Jewish, Ebionite, Syrian or Grecian 


836 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBBON. 


Messianism alone, the words Iesou Christos having been put 
in as additions to the first chapter. The second and third 
chapters have a Grecian-Jewish aspect, as if connected with 
the Jewish Diaspora. The book is written in Greek ; but the 
Jewish Diaspora knew Greek, and the author of the Gospel 
according to St. Matthew quotes the Greek Septuagint. Jus¬ 
tin Martyr wrote his first Apology (if he was the author) after 
he had read the Evangel. His works are suspicious in look 
and in their apparent date. It is possible that his first Apol¬ 
ogy is as late as a.d. 155. Justin’s pseudochristoi and pseud- 
apostoloi wear a late aspect, like the Four Gospels. It is a lit¬ 
tle strange that neither Matthew nor Luke tell who gave them 
the story of the Virginal Birth. 

Clemens Alexandrinus (Strom, vii. p. 898) puts Basileides 
under the Older Antonine and under Hadrian. The older An- 
tonine began his reign in a.d. 138-139. Now allowing three 
years of adult life to Basileides under Hadrian and the re¬ 
mainder of the life to Basileides under Antoninus Pius 1 after 
138, there is reason to presume that Basileides wrote as late as 
145-150. He has the doctrine of the Hebdomad, which Satur- 
ninus also had, perhaps Kerinthus too. Now, as there is no 
reason to think that Basileides himself (whatever his school 
may have done at a later period) ever mentioned the Crucifixion 
of Iesu, the statement of Irenaeus, I. xxiii. (ed. Lutetiae, 1675) 
to that effect is simply incredible. Irenaeus altered the order 
in which the names Basileides and Satornil (Saturnimis) stood 
in the Syntagma of Justin Martyr and the list of Hegesippus, 
according to Adolf Harnack, pp. 48, 52, 56; Diet. Chr. Biogr. 
vol. III. p. 261 : Irenaeus advanced Basileides from number 
six to number four: and Saturninus to number three from 
no. 7. If he had not told a story about Basileides making 
him appear to be aware of the Crucifixion of Iesus, the effect 
would not have been so serious. We possess two different 
systems given out as Basilidian, an older one which the Phi- 
losopliumena and Clemens Alexandrinus exhibit, a later one 
which Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Theodoret set forth. The last 
gives the first only mutilated, seeing that the whole as it were 


1 Tertullian adv. Markion, I. 19. Markion could perhaps have heard of the Cru¬ 
cifixion which may have been known as early as a.d. 140-146 through “ the Gospel ac¬ 
cording to the Hebrews.” Nothing in Justin proves the time when the story was 
known except that some gospel must have mentioned it. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 837 


upper part of the system up to the Megas Arclion of the Og- 
doad is cut away, and this was raised to the highest God, a 
mutilation which then made the including of dualist elements 
necessary because otherwise the mixing of light with the hule 
could not be explained. The older Basilidian system lets the 
light out of the Hebdomas shine down at first upon Iesous.— 
Uhlliorn, Horn. 287, 288. But the native Syrian word is lesoua, 
with tbe meaning Saviour (like the Soter of Valentinus). It 
is not necessarily Matthew’s idea of the man Jesus, but may 
be Saturninus’s Salvator, Christos. It was no difficult thing, 
in pushing the views contained in the Gospel of Matthew, to 
confuse two different ideas connected with the Syrian name 
lesoua; one, the Saviour without a body (asarkos); the other, 
the man Iesous Ben Dauid. In this way, using the usual 
credulity of mankind, Irenaeus might perhaps succeed in ap¬ 
parently carrying back an important part of Matthew’s narra¬ 
tion to an earlier period than the real Gospel according to 
Matthew. That this was the aim of some is evidenced by the 
claim that so early as the reign of Claudius there was a rumor 
to the effect that Iesu was risen from the dead. Hippolytus 
shows that the “ Sonship ” in Basileides’ doctrine was in no¬ 
wise connected with mortal flesh, and it was easy for any one 
(follower of Basileides or not) out of the Logos (the Sonship),, 
the Creator from Confusion (or Chaos), to infer from the di¬ 
vision of the Saviour into genera and species that “ his corpo¬ 
real part which was unformed suffered and returned into amor- 
phia.” But there is nothing here like the account of a Roman 
Crucifixion of the Saviour, as given in the Gospel of Matthew ! 
If, however, any one wished to manufacture out of Basileides 
evidence pointing to the historical truth of Matthew’s account 
of the Crucifixion the way was to make Basileides appear ear¬ 
lier than 125-130 and then let him appear to know the story of 
the Crucifixion. That would be one way of bolstering Matthew. 
Kerinthus and Karpokrates (in Irenaeus, I. xxiv. xxv.) indicate 
a knowledge of Matthew, i. 18-21, while Irenaeus, I. xxvi. refers 
to Matthew’s Gospel as the sole authority of the Ebionites! 
Evidently Irenaeus wanted to advertise the Gnosis of the 
Apostles. In the midst of Syrian Gnosis it was the proper 
thing to do, as well as to attack Simon Magus and Markion and 
Valentinus. Now, in the list that Harnack got from Hegesip- 
pus, Markion comes third on the list, Valentinus fifth, and 


838 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Basileides sixth ; so that the succession, “ Simon, Menander, 
Markion ” would tend to place Markion about 150-159, consid¬ 
ering that Justin (between 157 and 165) mentions his followers, 
the Markionites, in his latest work (the Dialogue with Trypho), 
and Markion in perhaps an earlier work. 

Mapiclova 8e nva TlovriKbu, ts Ka\ vvv %ti ’< ttI tiidaffKut/. —Justin, Apol. I. p. 145. 

This would put Markion at about a.d. 151-159, and Justin at 
about 151-160 ? with no Jcnoivledge yet of the Gospel of Matthew 
and quoting only from ‘ the Gospel according to the Hebrews,’ 
which must have contained the Crucifixion-account, as it did 
the ‘ Baptism in the Jordan.’ This last shows the intimate 
connection between ‘ the Gospel according to the Hebrews ’ 
and the Baptist Nazorenes and Ebionites beyond the Jordan.— 
Matthew, iii. 1-7, 9, 11, 13, 14; iv. 1; xxviii. 19; Mark, i. 4-6 ; 
John, i. 28. As the Apokalypse mentions no Apostle by name ; 
but only e the One in the midst of the Seven,’ the Logos on the 
Sun’s White Horse, and as we distinguish between the Naz- 
orene Angel-King (—Rev. v. 5, 6 ; Julian, Orat. v. p. 173) and 
Gospel Christianity, and, as we have already dated the Apok¬ 
alypse about a.d. 130-4, it therefore seems probable that ‘ the 
Gospel according to the Hebrews ’ was written about a.d. 140- 
150. The only reference to the Desert is in Rev. xii. 1, 6,14, 
where the Woman clothed with the Sun (the Moon under Her 
feet) is Eua, Isis, the Mighty Mother in Virgo! So slight a 
notice shows that John, the author, was no Nazoria, nor 
Ebionite, nor Jordan Baptist, but an antegospelite Christian 
of the Antioch Diaspora. This the groundwork of the book! 
It may have received some later touches. But, at first, it 
shows nothing of the love for the Desert and the Great Bap¬ 
tist that the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Evangel 
of Matthew display. Consequently the Apokalypse preceded 
the Four Gospels, these last sprung from the Nazoria and the 
Jordan, and maybe dated after a.d. 150. The ‘Gospel ac¬ 
cording to the Hebrews ’ was somewhat earlier than' Matthew’s 
Gospel. Early in the second century the Gnostics shared the 
name of Christiani as Justin testifies. The Gnosis of Simon 
could be parodied by allegorising it. The ennoia, or intuition, 
or soul could be allegorised as a woman with whom Simon 
associated. 1 But he evidently argued about the Powers of the 

1 Antiqua Mater, 214, 215. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 839 

Supreme Being, an idea which the Hebrew Testament or the 
Jewish Tradition or Babylonian Precosmical Powers, or the 
doctrines of Philo might have suggested, for they were (like 
the Sohar) all gnostic publications. “ And it still remains a 
moot question whether the forms of Christian dogma at the 
end of the second century owed more to the Gnosis of imagi¬ 
native Greeks, or to the Midrash of imaginative Hebrews.” 1 
The cultus, on the other hand, seems to have been of Trans¬ 
jordan character derived from the Mithraworship, at least in 
part. In the Gnostic teaching, which aimed above all at as¬ 
ceticism and a pure life, the governing thought is that of the 
opposition of the pneumatic or higher life in man to the lower, 
the liulic or material and the psychic life. 2 This, however, was 
substantially the Essene view, according to Josephus. Like 
the Essene, the Ebionite poverty was voluntary. 3 Whether as 
Nazorenes or Ebionites they became the Christians,—a name 
applicable to any gnostic believers in the King Messiah, even 
when there were differences among them. No matter how 
many gnostic superstitions of the times we find embodied in 
them, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and the evangelia of Mat¬ 
thew, Mark, Luke, John, as well as the clear statement of 
Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem, point explicitly to the Jordan and 
to the Nazoria, Ebionim, Essaioi (Essenes) and Epiphanius’s 
Iessaeans beyond the Jordan. Such and the Jewish Messian- 
ism and the Kabalali were the sources of Christianism,—a re¬ 
sult of the Second Century Gnosis in the land of the Sethim. 
Antiqua Mater, 282, says: “From the first the charge of 
Magic 4 was brought against the Christiani, and association 
with the Mysteries of Mithras.” The Mighty Mother, the 
Bena, Yena, Yenus, had her Intelligence in the moon on which 
she stands ; elsewhere She stands as the Original Mother of 
the race, whom Ovid finds (in the Desert) near the Euphrates, 
fleeing with the little Eros. Compare with this Rev. xii. 1, 5, 
6, 13, 14. There was as much gnosis by 4 the Palestine water * 
as there was in the cities of Mesopotamia. As to Mithra, the 
worshippers were signed on the forehead, as in Rev. xiv. 1; 
xxii. 4.—Tertullian, de Corona, xv. 216, 217. 

i ibid. 216, 282, 283. 

a ib. 220. 

3 Credner, Beitrage, I. 370, 371; Acts, iv. 36, 37. 

* So with Simon Magus, etc. 


840 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The Destruction of tlie Temple struck home to the East. 
Clementine Homily, ii. 17, says : First a false evangel 1 must 
come by some deceiver and afterwards so, after destruction of 
the holy place, a true ‘ Glad Tidings ’ be secretly sent for cor¬ 
rection of the Haeresies that shall be ; 2 and subsequently, 
towards the End, first Antichrist must come, and then our 
Christ Iesou reappear, after whom Eternal Light having 
risen, all the things of Darkness become invisible ! The man 
who wrote this in the last part of the 2nd century knew how 
to revive the sinking faith of the ignorant and credulous. 
Believe, and you will be saved. Erchomai tachu, “ I come 
quickly! ” Now, when Messianist Christianism was coming 
forward, such words as those retained in Homily, ii. 17, may 
have inspired the coming sect and led to the Gospels being 
written. For erchomai tachu implies a widespread belief in 
the Saviour Archangel and his coming as the Lamb of “ Aries.” 
But the Lamb is represented slain.—Bev. v. 6. And the Tem¬ 
ple destroyed.—Kev. vi. 10; xvii. 6, 9, 18 ; xviii. 10, 18 ; xi. 1, 
2; xxi. 10. Another peculiarity is that the Apokalypse is 
Jewish.—Bev. iii. 9, 12; vii. 5-8. ix. 14; xi. 16 ; xiv. 1; xvi. 
12 ; xvii. 6, 9; xviii. 17 ; xxi. 10; xxii. 15, 20. And not the 
name of an Apostle, not a word about Christians, nor Phari¬ 
sees ; and the Slain Lamb has been slain from the foundation 
of the world (—Bev. xiii. 8), power is given over the Gentiles 
(—Bev. ii. 26,27), the slain (—vi. 9, 10 ; vii. 14) are to be reveng¬ 
ed on Borne (—Bev. ix. 14; xvi. 12), and the Gentiles shall'bread 
under foot the Holy City (Jerusalem) and the dead shall lie in 
the square of the Great City which is spiritually called Sodo- 
ma and Aegyptus, where, too, the Lord was crucified.—Bev. 
xi. 1, 2, 8. The author of the Apokalypse may have been a 
saint and Jew, a Jewish Messianist , a hater of Borne, Gentiles, 3 

1 Good tidings. 

2 Rev. xiv. 4, is as Markionist as Luke, xx. 34, 35. It is Markion’s very idea. 

3 It has not a spark of Matthew’s Essenism in it, except the one passage that we 
have thought to resemble Markion’s view. 

Daniel Volter in Theol. Tijdschrift, 1891. pp. 279, 281. 282, holds that there were 
three stages in the composition of the Apokalypse and that it is probable (Irenaeus, I. 
xxvi; Euseb. H. E. iii. 28) that Rev. xii. 1-10, xix. 11-21, 8 are of Kerinthian origin(?). 
The Christos is to be distinguished from Iesus.—Rev. xi. 15; xii. 1, 2, 5, 8, 10. xix. 11- 
15. xxi. 9, 10, 22, 23, xiii. 8; v. 5-8, x. iii. 10. That there is Ebionism in Rev. vii. 
3-10, xxi. 12, 14, or something very Jewish among the “ Dispersion ” we infer from xi. 8, 
15, xii. 10, xvi. 6, 7, xvii. 5, 6, 9, 12, xviii. 4, 5, 10, 17-22, xix. 15. Rev. xx. 6 may be 
Kerinthian (?) for Eusebius says that Kerinthus, being an enemy of Scripture, said 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 841 


and Nikolaitans, but there is nothing- in common between the 
Apokatypse and Matthew’s Gospel except Matthew, xxv. 34,40, 
where, as in the Jewish Sibylline Book, the King- (the Lord) 
gives Judgment, and Bev. xix. 11, 13 ; xxii. 12, 20. Bev. xxii. 
15, is the stiff-necked Jew : Outside are the Dogs ! 

Bel is Mithra and is the Chaldaean Creator (the Demiurgus). 
—Movers, I. 276, 553. The Christos is the Creator.—Colos- 
sians, i. 16. As the beginning of the later gnosis, the Chal¬ 
daean 12 precosmogonial Powers are to be regarded as coming 
into being at the time of the Chaos before the formation of 
the world ; for the Great Mother Taauta is called the Mother 
of the Gods, therefore of the subsequently produced beings 
born from Her. According to Berosus and Oannes the Dei¬ 
ties were already in creative action, with Bel, even before the 
Creator (Demiourgos) had made the 7 Planets, and, as Abyde- 
nus says, appointed to everything its place.—Movers, I. 277 ; 
see Gen. i. 26 ; iii. 22. The better and more divine nature con¬ 
sists of Three, the mind-perceived Source, Matter, and what 
proceeds from these two, which the Greeks call kosmos. Plato 

there would be a space of a thousand years for celebrating nuptial festivals. Rev. xx. 
9 goes back to the time of the Saints, the beloved City, and apostles prior to the 
Gospels. The ‘camp of the Saints and the beloved City.’ ‘Parembole’ means an 
army drawn up in battle array,—the army of the Saints. After all, the expressions of 
the saints and prophets should not be required to conform too strictly to historical ac¬ 
curacy,—else what shall we say of the destruction of Rome (Rev. ii. 26, xi. 8, xii. 10, 
xvii. 1, 6, 9, xviii. 2, 6,10, 18, 19, 21, 24), except that it did not take place, although 
prophesied ! The authority of Caius may be questioned in reference to Kerinthus on 
two grounds; first, prejudice against Kerinthus, and second, his own date, c. 229.— 
Epiphanios, Haer. li. 2, 3 ; Iren. I. xxvi; Eusebius, H. E. v. 28; vi. 85; ii. 25. Caius 
was born about the time of Zephyrinus Bishop of Rome, and Dionysius was made Bish¬ 
op at Alexandria about 247, so that it is not probable that he could have quoted from 
Caius before 250. Now as neither Irenaeus nor Hippolytus make the charges found in 
Caius and Dionysius, and as the suspicion of the taste for the pleasures of a worldly 
life may have arisen from his theory that Iesu was the son of Ioseph, it is hardly safe 
to attribute much importance to what Irenaeus did not say against Kerinthus. There 
is no doubt that some parts of the Apokalypse do distinguish between the Christos and 
Iesus, and that Kerinthians (—Epiphanius, Haer. xxviii. 6) said that the last has not 
risen, but will rise when the universal resurrection of the dead shall happen. 

When Joh. Fr. Bleek (Berlin 1862), p. 273, finds in Matthew, xxvii. 8, the expression 
“ unto this day,” it means that a long time had elapsed until the time when Matthew’s 
Gospel was produced.—Matthew, xxviii. 15. But it was necessary to represent the 
Messiah’s Coming as instanter (Rev. xxii. 20; Matthew, xxiv. 23-30, 31) else the effect 
of the prophesy and the Gospel would be soon lost. Matthew’s xxiv. 31 appears to 
hang directly upon the words of Rev. xix. 11-21, xx. 1-4, xxii. 20. Matthew, xxiv. 15, 
would seem (in the style of prophetic writing) to apply even better to the review of 
Hadrian’s troops on the esplanade of the ruined Temple than to the condition of things 
after Titus had marched his legions away from the wrecks of the holt place. 


S42 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


indeed calls the mentally-perceived both idea and pattern and 
father; but the Matter he calls Mother and Nurse and Foun¬ 
dation and region of production ; and the result of the Two he 
is wont to name Offspring and Birth. Osiris is the Beginning 
(the Spirit, the Fire), Isis (Issa) is the Receiver, Horus the 
Result.—De Iside, 56. Here we have something that is founded 
on the doctrine of * spirit and matter,’ in the first century. 
Simon Magus comes along with his quasi-babylonian Powers ; 
and while Philo on Fugitives, 9, knows the Sophia’s two gen¬ 
ders the Samarian propounds Fire the Original Beginning and 
Primal Source (the Chaldaean having propounded the con¬ 
cealed God as First Source of all) ; he produces from Fire (as 
Moses does in Gen. ii. 23) two Paraphuads (produced Suckers 
or Germs) which have neither beginning nor end, but are the 
source from which the Aeons all sprung. One of these two 
primal fiery Emanations out of Boundless Fire is the Great 
Male Power of the duad on high ; he is the Nous (Adam, Lo¬ 
gos) : the other Paraphuad is the Everlasting Female, the 
Mother of all that live, producing all the things ; Simon calls 
Her the Great Epinoia, the Great Intelligence. Proverbs, viii. 
1, calls Her the Benah, or Yenah. This Primal Great Male is, 
later, the Adam-Christos of the Clementine Homilies and his 
original fire is attested by His Name As (Ash) in Hebrew 
Genesis ii. 23, as well as by the Baptism of Fire which Matthew, 
iii. 11 says is within the power of the Saviour Christ. Here we 
are, with Simon Magus and the Sibyl, on the threshold of the 
Gnosis! This is Antepetrine, before the Gospels, before Ro¬ 
manism. Christianity in its primitive form was a separated 
tendency of Judaism over the Jordan among the Nazoria, 
Iessaeans and Ebionites.—Dunlap, Sod, II. pp. xvi, 62 ; Jost, 
I. 393, 411. 

Among some of the followers of Valentinus the Angel Ga¬ 
briel was considered to take the place of the Logos. The 
Archangel of the Nazoria was the Angel Gabriel, the Jewish 
Archangel is Michael. Applying this test we may perhaps 
discover that the original form of the Apokalypse was Jewish. 
Compare Rev. xii. 7, xx. 1. Liber Adami, I. 164, 282. Mithra 
was the Light of Light, born at Christmas in a cave. Christos 
the Iesoua was born in a grotto at Christmas. What are the 
relations of the Apokalypse to the Mithraworship ? First, in 
the catacombs at Rome there is a representation of three 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 843 

Magi adoring the newborn Mithra; second Matthew represents 
the same three adoring the Infant Christos ; Mithra, who has 
the appellation 4 Mediator ’ (Mesites. —Plutarch, Iside, 46).— 
Nork, Persische Mythen, p. 83. He makes reconciliation be¬ 
tween the Light and the Darkness, he brings happiness upon 
the new-created Earth (Nork, p. 86 ; Colossians, i. 13-17), and 
fights against Ahriman-Angromainyus, as in Rev. xii. 7-10, 
xix. 19, 20, xx. 2, 3, ii. 13, v. 6. The Adon dies through Dark¬ 
ness (—Rev. i. 18) and rises again.—Rev. i. 13, 16, 18, v. 6, 9. 
Adon (Mithra) dies, Adon lives again !—Lucian, Dea Syria, 6. 
The Eschatology (doctrine of the final End of the world) of the 
later Jews has the most striking resemblance to that of the 
Persians. Both let hard trials precede the time of the Messias, 
but God will know how to create salvation for the just and to 
preserve them. The Christians will be the rulers, the Jews 
will be persecuted, their number much reduced, and they look 
round for a Saviour. Then will Messias ben Joseph appear, 
his name is Nehemiah ben Chosiel, all Israel will hear that the 
Messias has appeared and will flock around him. He will 
conquer the king of Edom (a Christian), he will bring back the 
holy vessels of the Temple to Jerusalem. Then an Adversary 
will arise, Armillus or Antichristus. He will say to those that 
are not Israelites that he is the Messias. 

For many will come in my name, saying, I am the Christos.—Matthew, 
xxiv. 6. 

These will make war against the Lamb.—Rev. xvii. 14. 

They' will gather round him, and he will take all cities. Armil¬ 
lus will require the Israelites to adore him. A conflict will 
take place, Nehemiah ben Chosiel will be slain, the angels will 
carry his soul into the heaven. Michael then will blow the 
trumpet, and with the first blast Elias and the Messias ben 
Dauid will appear and the Jews assemble about him. Armil¬ 
lus will gather his forces and be overcome, some say that he 
will fight with Elias. Michael then blows again the trump and 
the dead that lie buried at Jerusalem return to life, Elias and 
Messiah ben Dauid live in Jerusalem. After a reign lasting a 
thousand years comes the Second Resurrection and the Last 
Judgment.—Spiegel, Avesta, I. 35-37. Elias was to come.— 
Malachi, iv. 5 ; Matthew, xi. 14; Rev. xx. 4, 6,11,12,13. Mithra 
is the Primal God (Urgott), through whom all creation begins 


844 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and ends, the Judge and Equaliser of the strife between Aura- 
masda and Angromainyus, in him at last both become dis¬ 
solved. He is the conqueror of death and sin. The initiation 
into the Mithramysteries was marked by the symbol of water- 
baptism— Nork, 86; Matthew, iii. 11-17. The Warriors of 
Mitlira held the first rank in the Mysteries. See Rev. xix. 14,15, 
f ; xx. 9, the Camp of the Saints ! Mithra confirms his soldiers, 
signing them on the forehead. As Light, Auramasta is first of 
the 7 Archangels ; he is one of them as the Sun is one of the 
7 in Rev. i. 13, 16. In the Jewish Temple the Golden Candle¬ 
stick symbolised the 7 planets, of whom the Sun was the 
centre. He was Amon, the Creative Mind and Logos, the 
Hindu Om, the Egyptian Amen. Mithra was the Sun in the 
Equator, and intervenes (Rev. xix. 11, 13) as Logos in the War 
of Light against the Darkness.—Luke, i. 78, 79. These are the 
antecedents to the Apokalypse and the Gospels of Luke and 
Matthew. They are the Mithramysteries,—in which were re¬ 
vealed the mysteries of divinity.—1 Tim. iii. 16; 2 Tim. i. 10; 
Mark, iv. 11; 1 Cor. xv. 51. There was something that pre¬ 
ceded the Apokalypse. We have found it in the Mysteries of 
Mithra. Something preceded the Four Gospels. We have 
seen it in the Apokalypse, Essenism and Ebion-Nazorenism, 
and a set of writings known to Messianists before the Gospels. 

Justin refers to the Sibylline Book, to Hystaspes, to the 
Apokalypse, not to Simon Magus, Menander and Markion as 
giving clear prophetic descriptions of the Son of God; but he 
mentions them. Besides the scripta of Simeon ben Iochai 
regarding the Messiah, the Christians had Hermes Trismegis- 
tus, Henoch, lxix. 29, and the Pastor of Hermas; and the 
Christians were nicknamed Sibyllists. No trace of our Gos¬ 
pels is met in the fragments of Dionysius of Corinth, a.d. 170- 
177; on the other hand the Fathers used other gospels, these 
were in exclusive circulation amongst various communities, and 
even until much later times many works which have no place 
in our Canon were regarded by them as divinely inspired. 
Take the Gospel according to the Hebrews, for instance, or the 
Gospel according to Peter; the Ebionites and Nazarenes used 
these gospels.—Supernat. Rel. I. 419, 429; II. 167 ; Matthew, 
xvi. 16, 18. The Gospel according to Peter varies from that 
according to Matthew, and Matthew’s Gospel expressly founds 
the Church on Peter! The sect of the Encratites made use of 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 845 


apocryphal gospels (—S.R. II. 162), and at a time when apoc¬ 
ryphal works were habitually read we do not hear of the pub¬ 
lic reading of our Gospels.—ib. II. 171. The Christian Church 
seems to have brought on ‘ the double night of ignorance,’— 
the Dark Ages. In about 176-177 Athenagoras mentions 
neither Christ nor the names of his Gospels, but speaks of the 
Logos having prohibited £ kissing twice.’—ib. II. 199. But, as 
he mentions Christians, he must have been a Nazarene, like 
St. Paul.—Matth. v. 28. Self-denial and communism must 
have been the original gnostic foundation of Christianism,—a 
broadened Essenism, broadened into a Gospel of Resurrection 
and the hope of eternal life. Philo, Josephus, and Eusebius 
confirm this. So do Simon, Menander and Saturninus. If 
then Christianism had its source in older works than our Gos¬ 
pels, with a reference to events unknown to our third Gospel 
but indubitably chronicled elsewhere (ibid. II. 203, 204), these 
chronicles must have had precedents in an Ebionite-Iessaean 
self-denying morale based on the claims of the spirit adverse to 
the flesh, which Athenagoras admits. The crucifixion of the 
flesh of the Iessaean apostles preceded Luke’s or Peter’s theory 
of the Crucifixion. The oriental contrast of spirit and matter 
had made the centuries its handmaids in bringing about the 
crucifixion of the flesh in the interest of Christian self-denial 
and the hope of the resurrection of the soul under an abiding 
trust in the Saviour. But the handwriting on the wall was 
‘spirit and matter .’ Here we have a philosophy in action. And 
when it utters itself in the 2nd century it has the Sibyl, 
Daniel, Elxai, Hystaspes, the three oldest parts of the Sohar, 
Hermas, Henoch, lxix. 29, Hermes Trismegistus and the Ca¬ 
nonical Apokalypse under its influence. Nowhere, so far, does 
the Crucifixion appear. Therefore there is nothing but Daniel, 
ix. 26 and Hippolytus, vi. 20, and these mention, one the death 
of the Messiah, the other the death of Simon Magus; but 
neither mentions Crucifixion , nor does Revelation, xi. 8, mention 
it, for it is speaking figuratively of the Lord being crucified in 
Rome, by the cruel treatment of both Jews and Christians. 
Here we are then, on the threshold of Christianism. From 
this spot, at this period of its existence, we must expect the 
addition of Crucifixion-stories to the previous status of Mes- 
sianism. But the subject of Crucifixion must first be called 
into existence. The birth, infancy, teachings, and parables 


846 


TEE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(Pastor of Hermas has parables) have to be described, then 
the denouement; and the narrative closes with the Besurrec- 
tion. 

The fact that the entire New Testament writings, including 
the Jewchristian, also the first canonical evangel, the Epistle 
of James and the Apokalypse originally were written in Greek, 
that also the Jewchristian ‘Evangel according to the He¬ 
brews ’ has been present in the Greek tongue and only later 
has been translated into Aramean, testifies undeniably to the 
early and general prevalence of the Greek idiom in the oldest 
Christian as well as the Jewchristian communities. More es¬ 
pecially do the three first canonical gospels indicate the early 
need of the young church to possess the evangelical materials, 
that originally stood in the Hebrew language and letters, im¬ 
mediately also in a written Greek interpretation.— Kesch, 
Paralleltexte, p. 111. But they received them in Greek, not in 
Aramean. Who guaranteed that they were strict translations, 
or new works in a Galilean dress ? 

Essene and Nazarene morale supplies the teachings, par¬ 
ables were the common usage, the accounts of the birth and 
the infancy were spread abroad in many tracts and narratives ; 
but the Crucifixion was without a precedent. Yet it was con¬ 
ceived in connection with the Crucifixions after Jerusalem 
fell and the Destruction of the Temple. O Jerusalem, Jeru¬ 
salem, your Temple is left desolate! Jerusalem will be trod¬ 
den down by the Gentiles. The Kingdom of the God is nigh. 1 
Be worthy to stand before the Son of the Man in the final 
Judgment, 2 according as the Sibyl prophesied ! Was not the 
T sign (also +) on the forehead a prophetical suggestion ? 
The precanonical evangel was in Hebrew.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 
63 ; Sup. Bel. I. 461; Alfred Besch, Aussercanon. Paralleltexte, 
pp. 66, 68, 83, 84. The Sibylline Book and Henoch give the 
early Messianic standpoint without Mark’s, Luke’s, or Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospels and without a hint of the Crucifixion. The same 
is true of the Apokalypse, known to the author of Justin’s 1st 
Apologia. The Crucifixion story would have been out of place 
before the death of Barcocliebah about 134-135, and the point 
is whether Bev. xi. 8 did not suggest to one of the authors of 
the Gospel according to the Hebrews or the three Synoptic 

1 Matth. xxiii. Luke, xxi. 

2 Matth. vii. 23 ; xxv. 41, 46; xxiv. 3. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 847 


Gospels a Crucifixion at Jerusalem ! While Jerusalem looked 
for a Messiah, she was not prepared in 130 to accept a de¬ 
ceased one. Rev. xix. 11, xxii. 12, 20, have not yet been ful¬ 
filled. She longed for a Warrior Messiah, and Barcochebah 
offered himself as such, with the sanction of Rabbi Akiba. 
Note the contrast between Rev. xix. 12-15 and the obedience to 
the Caesar. —Mark, xii. 16,17, Luke, xx. 24. Only to an Oriental 
mind would ifc occur to write the Crucifixion narrative and 
only to the mind of a Greek would it occur to in writing rec¬ 
ommend a surrender to Roman domination.—Rev. xii. 10. xiii. 
17, 18, xviii. 18-21, xix. 15. Matthew’s Logia was said by Pa- 
pias to have been written in Hebrew.—Supern. Rel., I. 461. 
The Jew first, and then the Greek!—See Resch, 85, 86. But 
the Hebrew was Aramean-Syrian, in Hebrew letters. The 
Evangel according to the Hebrews, however was first written 
in Greek.—Resch, 111. Greek was known in Syria since b.c. 
170. The Jews read the Septuagint. Greek was evidently the 
language of the Christian Messianism. 

Philo was born about 15 to 20 years before the Christian 
era. His Logos doctrine belongs within the first forty years 
after Christ. Irenaeus appears to state (III. xi. p. 257) that 
the Nikolaitans and Kerinthus agreed in holding that there 
was One Father (not the God of the Jews) and one Son the 
Onlybegotten, and the Logos who is the true Son of the Only- 
begotten. The Gnostics had a similar doctrine : The Light in 
the Abyss (Buthos) is blessed, incorruptible and infinite, and 
is called the Father of all and the First Man ; His Son is Mind , 
called Second Man, Son of the Man; the third male (who is 
also incorruptible light) is called Christos.—ib. I. xxxiv. Si¬ 
mon and Menander held a Primal Power Unknown to all, that 
the world was made by Angels sent out from Mind ; and some 
thought (Irenaeus, IY. xxxvii. p. 371; I. xxi.; 1 Thess. iv. 17) 
that a Salvator was to save men, who were never to die! Sat- 
urninus held One Father Unknown to all, who made Angels; 
Seven of these made the world, and angels made man. And 
that the Jewish God was one of the Angels. He held that the 
Christos was the Salvator. Here again we have the three in 
succession, perhaps, the Unknown Father, (the Logos ?), and 
the Saviour Christos. Philo has a primal God and a Second 
God the Logos. Irenaeus, I. xxv. leaves out what Kerinthus 
thought of the three personae , mentioning only the Unknown 


848 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Father and the Christos ; but from the agreernent that Irenaeus 
specifies between Kerin thus and the Gnostic Nikolaitans we 
may, perhaps, assume a third persona the Logos, as Father of 
the Christos (?). Then the Gospel of Matthew follows with 
only the Father and the King, the Son of the Man, Iesua Sal¬ 
vator. St. John, i. 1 comes last, with the God and the Logos. 
The logos belongs to Philo’s gnosis, and £ the Son of the Man ’ 
belongs also to the gnosis that Matthew uses. So that the 
gnosis is there in the N. T. The Oriental Gnosis is the father 
of all the gnostic symptoms. The Creative Power is called 
God, the Kingly Power is called Lord.—Philo, Quaest. in Gen. 
IY. 2; Gen. i. 4; Matth. xxv. 40; John, i. 1, 3, 4. The world 
is not an emanation from God, as the Neo-Platonists said, but 
it has been created. Instead of one pervading law throughout 
the whole system of the universe as the Neo-Platonists thought, 
the Judaist-Christians conceived God as outside the world. 
The Christian Revolution developed a notion of Causation, 
the antithesis of that of Greek Philosophy and of Modern 
Science.—Stuart-Glennie, in the Morningland, pp. 267-269. 

Since, too, Jews ask signs (miracles) and Greeks seek wisdom.—1 Cor. i. 22. 

The whole system of Christian dogma, including its central 
theory of the supernatural character of Iesous the Nazarene, is 
only a mythology, of which the ultimate roots are in the causes 
which determined Osirianism. The Nile valley is the scene of 
a daily ‘ Resurrection of the Sun,’ a wonder of eternal Rebirth ! 
—ib. 306. Osiris enters the Moon.—De Iside, 18, 41. They 
place the power of Osiris in the moon.—De Iside, 43. The 
Manicheans in the third century held that Christ’s power was 
in the Sun, his wisdom in the moon.—Faustus; Milman, p. 
280, note; 1 Cor. i. 24. Again Adon (the Lord), entering the 
moon, loses sex. Adonis-Asar is Osiris-Asarel or Isarel, or 
Iacholi and Iacchos, Lord of life. Osiris is the Good Principle 
(the spiritus) in the sun.—De Iside, 52, 35, 40, 42 ; Julian, Ora- 
tio, iv. 132, 133. Osiris is Lord and King (—De Iside, 10, 12, 
13) dies and rises from Hades.—ib. 19, 42. What was between 
a.d. 100 (when these things were written) and the Salvator of 
Saturninus in 125-135 ? The Good Principle (in Matthew, xix. 
17) is crucified, and rises from the dead.—Matthew, xxviii. 6 ; 
Luke, xxiv. 6. But, according to ‘ Supernatural Religion,’ I. 
485, II. 481, not a trace of the existence of our 4 Gospels can 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 849 

be found for a century and a half after the events they record. 
Spurious works in great numbers appeared in the first two or 
three centuries of our era.—ib. I. 460. Only the traditions 
(Sagen) only the sources that l^y before him does Luke let 
speak. The charge of ‘ unreliable ’ (nicht sicher) applies not 
only to the “ Many ” as regards their compilations but also to 
their sources , by virtue of the words “ just as the original eye¬ 
witnesses handed down.” Papias, too, uses the words ‘not 
what those say who only know right well to relate, and to whom 
the great multitude adheres.’—Gfrorer, I. 62, 381. Suppose 
that the accounts that Luke found have declared the general 
opinion of his time and his coreligionists to be declarations of 
eye-witnesses ; for the world is very quick to baptise writings. 
After he had read them through there rose up in the back¬ 
ground of his spirit the suspicion that all that he found there 
was impossible to be true. This mistrust, when it came en¬ 
tirely to consciousness, and ran through its natural course, led 
to at all events the suspicion that those accounts could not al¬ 
together come from eye-witnesses. But it was not obliged to 
go so far but that Luke could well stand by that first impression 
which he afterwards softly utters in the preface as if only half 
consciously. Since his subject compelled him to say something 
about the sources of his predecessors he describes them, in the 
customary at that time generally accepted way, as accounts of 
eye-witnesses ; and perhaps he supposed that the greater part 
of those sources was true and came from eye-witnesses—ibid. 
63; Luke, i. 4. He expected to make Theophilus certain of 
the truth, which he himself had to get out of those (suspected) 
sources. But Gfrorer, if he assumed that Luke deceived him¬ 
self, does not admit that the work came from an eye-witness, 
or only in the smallest part.—ib. 63, 64. Luke considered a 
part of the written sources ascribed to eye-witnesses, many of 
the compiled accounts unreliable ; and Gfrorer supposed it 
probable that the accounts, purporting to come from eye-wit¬ 
nesses, actually came from later persons who got them from 
the mouths of the eye-witnesses.—ib. 64. In fact, we have be¬ 
fore us the hearsay testimony of an excitable people and an 
uncritical and unquestioning period. If the origin from eye¬ 
witnesses had been attested by external marks such as letter, 
seal, genuine signatures, judicial records, Gfrorer thinks there 
is good reason for suspecting that Luke would have uttered not 
54 


850 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


a shadow of doubt against documents thus attested. But Luke 
has thrown some suspicion on the writings of preceding Chris¬ 
tian authors, affecting their credibility. From the moment on, 
when he uttered his doubt, we can no longer say that those ac¬ 
counts had the warranty for themselves of the whole Christian 
Church. 1 —ib. 65, 66. This explains the necessity that existed 
for Justin, Irenaeus, Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, 
to sustain the status quo of Christianism against Markion and 
the gnostics. Hermes however was accused of appearing in 
human form, and the Sabian Arabs ought to have known 
something about that. Matthew, v., vi., vii., x., xiii. 35, 50, is 
a direct bid for the suffrages of the Ebionites; x. 5 is especially 
so, and is directly in conflict with xxviii. 19. But xxviii. 19 
shows the Gospel to be late, so late as to have abandoned the 
subject of circumcision. Consequently the passages, v. 17, x. 
5, 6 look like the work of some adroit populist or politician 
who well knew those whom he addressed. 2 The Iesua is de- 

1 We can easily imagine that a more sharp-sighted critic than Luke or one less 
prejudiced by Christian opinions might have recognized the spurious character of many 
more among them. Our obligation to believe the statements, which he held for genuine 
and therefore embodied in his Gospel, depends singly and alone upon the confidence 
which we place in his critical acumen.—Gfrorer, p. 66. One thing we observe that 
Luke may not have read Matthew’s Gospel; and indeed the more critically the latter is 
examined the greater seems the probability that it was a late Gospel. Luke says that 
“many undertook to regularly set in order a statement.” Matthew’s Gospel seems to 
answer this description so well that Gfrorer, I. 79, says that the Gospel of Matthew was 
not yet written ; for Matthew gives more than Luke and has a thoroughly well written 
evangelium, so that Luke instead of writing another evangelium would have sent Mat¬ 
thew’s instead to Theophilos, if it had then been in existence. Luke claims to have 
kept up with all from the first and to narrate in orderly succession (kathexSs). Mat¬ 
thew does this ; and there was apparently no reason for his work unless to bring out 
and emphasise certain points more fully, such as abandoning circumcision, a closer con¬ 
nection with the transjordan Jessaeans , etc.—Matth. v. 17; x., xiii., xxviii. 18, etc. 
But Luke’s account was written to Theophilos, while Matthew’s is general, directed to 
teaching all the Gentiles. Gfrorer is convinced, from the circumstances, that Luke in 
writing that he had kept up with all from the beginning, did not mean to include Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel in the all.— Die Heilige Sage, I. pp. 80, 82. Mark is excluded from the 
All, since his work is made from Luke and Matthew. John too is excluded, as being an 
eye-witness, not writing as the All had handed down from the first.—ib. 80, 82. Philo. 
Quaest et Solut. II. 34 (II. 24) gives us a hint: Pugnantinm mos est mentiri arte, ut 
ignorentur res. Lying must be done skillfully, so that the things be not known. 

2 Seews evonl&To, ‘as he was considered.’ Gfrorer, I. p. 109, regards these words as 
Luke’s addition to his sources, and a decided qualification of his descent.—Luke, iii. 
23. David was a popular hero. Hence a son of Dauid would be a favorite name for a 
Messiah on earth. Hence the genealogies of Matthew and Luke, deriving Iesu from 
Dauid, ‘ as was thought,’ says Luke. Matthew wrote his evangel not long after Luke. 
—See Gfrorer, I. 82. The Devil was an important constituent of Ebionite belief.— 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 851 


scribed as remaining in the deserts until the day of his exhibi¬ 
tion unto the Israel.—Luke, i. 80. Here is another special ref¬ 
erence to the Ebionites who lived in the Deserta Arabia. So 
the evangel really appeals to Arabian sympathies in the trans- 
jordan region, to men that, like Daniel, ix. 11, held firmly to 
the Law of Moses. When, therefore, Markion claimed that 
the Iesoua descended from the heavens, unborn, he stood by 
the earlier doctrine that the Saviour was Spirit and not flesh, 
the doctrine of Saturninus and the Gnostics. 1 —Psalm, ii. 7 ; xlv. 
2, 6 ; Micah, v. 2 ; Dan. vii. 13, 14; viii. 16 ; Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. 
The God of the Jews, Saturninus said, was one of the Angels 
hostile to the Father, therefore the Christus came to destroy 
the God of the Jews and for the Salvation of those that 
believed in himself ; that the Salvator came to destroy the bad 
men and daemons.—Iren. I. xxii. Paris, 1675. 

The term ‘ Oracles of the Lord ’ would suit the addresses of 
wandering apostles 2 as well as it suits the parables in St. Mat¬ 
thew. Papias was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia and suf¬ 
fered martyrdom under Markus Aurelius Antoninus (161-189) 
about 164-167. Papias preferred tradition to any written 
works with whidi he was acquainted.—Supernatural Religion, 
I. 445. He wrote a treatise, an Exposition of the Oracles of the 
Lord, based mainly on tradition. Now he apparently had 
never seen our four Greek Gospels; and he certainly would 
have been likely to have mentioned the Gospel of Matthew in 
Greek, because he wrote his own work in Greek about the mid¬ 
dle of the second century.—ibid. 444, 445. Papias inquired 
minutely after the words of the presbyters, what Andrew or 
what Peter said, or what Philip or what Thomas or James, or 
what John or Matthew, or what any other of the disciples of 
the Lord, and what Aristion and the presbyter John, the dis¬ 
ciples of the Lord say, “ for I held that what was to be derived 
from books was not so profitable as that from the living and 
abiding voice.”—ibid. 445; Eusebius, H. E. iii. 39. His testi¬ 
mony is very much against the value of any Gospels in 150-160, 

Uhlhorn, 185, 273 ; Luke, iv. 3. Baptism in the Jordan and self-restraint were neces¬ 
sary, in order to contend against him. Spirit against Matter. The Iesua was led into 
the Desert to be tempted by the Devil.—Luke, iv. 1. That was in accord with the 
Ebionite orthodoxy. 

1 Luke, ii. 32, speaks of light to enlighten the Gentiles ; but Matthew, v. 17, x. 5, 
6 causes us to consider this a late conception, as late as xxviii. 19. 

2 The call of the preacher in the Desert: Prepare the way of the Lord.—Isa. xl. 3. 


852 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and amounts to about the same and no more than is found in 
the works of Justin Martyr. Since he died about 164 (164-167) 
he was a contemporary of both Justin and Markion, both of 
whom exhibit (154-166) a knowledge of some Evangel or other. 
Papias said that Matthew wrote the Oracles in the Hebrew 
dialect.—Eusebius, H. E. iii. 39. The author of £ Supernatural 
Religion,’ I. 477, says that the Greek Matthew is no transla¬ 
tion ! Therefore Papias may have been imposed upon by one 
of the delusions of tradition; more especially, as St. Jerome, 
a great translator, avoided giving us the supposed Hebrew 
Matthew in any shape, although he translated the Greek Mat¬ 
thew into Latin. The opinion of the author of Supernatural 
Religion, I. 459, 460, is that the more primitive gospels have 
entirely disappeared, supplanted by the later and amplified 
versions. This, moreover, tends to explain the cautious but 
conspicuous position of Papias on the fence. Nevertheless it 
was a long time from the end of Barcocheba’s insurrection (c. 
135-136) to about 150-152 or later, when the Gospel according 
to Matthew may have appeared,—long enough to have got out 
a dozen or more Messianist Memoirs in the style of Justin 
Martyr’s own production, in which Philo’s Logos played the 
prominent part. But neither from Philo nor any other Gnos¬ 
tic writer could they have obtained the idea of the logos made 
flesh ; for that would be a defiance of the then ruling doctrine 
of ‘ spirit and matter.’ The Son of David idea evidently came 
out of the Old Testament, and probably was made use of as 
late as a.d. 138-148. Ideas are nothing until a party is formed 
to promulgate them. And the doctrine of a Messiah, already 
come in the flesh and expected to come again quick^, would 
not have been credited as long as Barcocheba was in the field. 
There may have been Essene, Elchasite, or Ebionite Oracles 
(logia) of the Lord in circulation prior to the appearance of the 
complete Gospel according to Matthew. Antiqua Mater, p. 
143, mentions the lofty teachings of the Didache, the Hagioi, 
apostles, prophets of the Diaspora during the 2nd century. 
“ The Yoke of the Lord ” is not to be made too oppressive.— 
ibid. 137-143. The expression “ Oracles of the Lord” and 
“Yoke of the Lord” both point to some Lord that each ac¬ 
knowledges. Perhaps Papias was keeping track of the Saints 
and the oracles of some Didache. “ No period in the history 
of the world ever produced so many spurious works as the first 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 853 


two or three centuries of our era. The name of every Apostle 
or Christian teacher, not excepting that of the great Master 
himself was freely attached to every description of religious 
forgery. False gospels, epistles, acts, martyrologies, were un¬ 
scrupulously circulated and such pious falsification was not 
even intended or regarded as a crime, but perpetrated for the 
sake of edification.—Supernat. Relig. I. 460, 461. Neither as a 
translation from the Hebrew nor as an original Greek text can 
our Matthew claim Apostolic authority.—ibid. I. 479. All its 
Apostolicity is gone.—ib. I. 476, 480, 482. Papias was ac¬ 
quainted with a Matthew different from ours, one that in its 
account of Judas directly contradicts the account in Matthew, 
xxvii. 5.—ib. I. 482, 483. As Papias says that he eagerly in¬ 
quired what Matthew and the others said, he would not have 
contradicted his statement if he had known any work attributed 
to him that contained it.—ibid. I. 482. Therefore Our first 
evangel cannot possibly be the genuine work of the Apostle. 

Irenaeus places Markion at home under Anicatus (invaluit 
sub Aniceto), that is, in 154. Markion became of consequence 
under Anicetus from 154 to 166. Justin is the first who men¬ 
tions that Iesu was crucified (—Apol. I. p. 139, and in the 
Dialogue); but Tertullian (Adv. Markion, I. 24; II. 28) tells us 
that Markion also knew about the gospel, at least Luke’s Gos¬ 
pel. Yet Justin apparently knows not one of our Four Gospels 
but quotes from another one, ‘the Euangelion, according to 
the Hebrews’ or the Gospel according to Peter. As Justin 
mentions Markion in his first Apology, about a.d. 160 or later, 
Markion, if we believe Tertullian (c. 207), knew of some Gospel. 
Markion was under Anicetus whose episcopate lasted from 154 
to 166. Did he know a gospel before 166 ? If he did not, then 
the first gospel was not written before 140. The Apokalypse 
knows no gospel, but Justin knows that the author of the 
Apokalypse was called John. Now the gnosis preceded the 
Old Testament, which last cannot be older (as a whole) than 
the Book of Daniel, about b.c. 150; and in a.d. 70 the Old 
Testament was (after the Temple and Holy Place were de¬ 
stroyed) still a gnostic work. —Gen. xi. 7; xviii. 2. Conse¬ 
quently, from Simon Magus down, the Gnostics would no 
longer feel prevented from exercising their own minds in gno¬ 
sis in such manner and form as best suited them. We may 
presume that, after the Persian Antithesis (Ormazda and 


854 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Areimainjus), the Jewish Antithesis in Job, ii. 1 and in Rev. 
xx. 2, 3, some other one would harp for a thousandth time on 
the same string*. And Markion of Pontus, in all the pride of 
Ascetic Gnosis—inherited from India and from the banks of the 
Jordan, from Banous and the Ebionites in the Desert and from 
John himself who presided over Living Water—felt called to 
make an effort. He had before him the Book of the Revela¬ 
tion with possibly the name Iesua in it then, that of the quickly 
coming Son, or Saviour Angel, Christos Iesua. 

Markion ventured to put forth a somewhat novel and (as 
Tertullian shows) absurd theory when confronted with the vast 
array of increasing multitudes of believers in the cruel death 
of the Lord. What brought forth, after Rome had torn Jeru¬ 
salem to pieces, a swarm of Gnostic theorists concerning su¬ 
pernal things? Because they knew the late origin of the 
Hebrew Bible and disbelieved its gnosis! In the same way, 
John’s Apokalypse was ignorant of what the Gospel may have 
taught. Tertullian about the year 207 expressly gives out that 
Markion knew the Gospel. Nevertheless it is not always safe 
to take Tertullian’s testimony , but only his logic. In the ab¬ 
sence of Markion’s work itself, we cannot tell with how ample 
a mantle of Gospel riches Tertullian has invested him. After 
all, the Apokalypse is a singular book, unless it was first com¬ 
posed prior to all the gospels ; and its most astonishing trait 
is that not a word is uttered against the Pharisees in the Book 
of Revelations. Is it that it was written at Antioch or in Asia 
that no mention is made of the hated sect , or was it that it pre¬ 
ceded the great Messianist change that the new gospels were 
to usher in! In the Apokalypse it is Palestine against the 
Romans; in Matthew, it is the Ebionite and Nazarene against 
the Pharisee ! It is peace with Rome! Surrender to Caesar ! 
—Matthew, xxii. 21. Had Hadrian’s Aelia Capitolina or policy 
anything to do with this ? Only the Christians were allowed 
to go there. In this connection remember the Ebionim of 
Irenaeus, I. xxvi. who read only the Gospel of Matthew, w r ho 
quotes the Septuagint. But as Justin mentions the Apoka¬ 
lypse and its author as one of the apostles of the Christos, why 
may not Rev. xi. 8 have suggested the idea of the Crucifixion 
itself (such as we find it in both Justin and Matthew) to the 
author of £ the Gospel according to the Hebrews ’ or of some 
other gospel, or to the author of Matthew’s Gospel ? The 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 855 


Apokalypse calls Jerusalem the * Holy City ; ’ the expressions 
' Sodom,’ ‘ Egypt,’ ‘ Babylon ’ it applies to the ‘ Great City ’ 
Rome ; where the Lord had been figuratively crucified in the 
treatment of both Jews and Christians. But it happened not 
at Rome, Matthew says, but at Jerusalem! Therefore the 
Lord's crucifixion in Rev. xi. 8, cannot be the crucifixion de¬ 
scribed in Matthew! Matthew (xxiv. 23, 24) not only writes in 
Greek but he (xii. 21) quotes from the Septuagint Version, and 
was late enough to have, like Justin, frequently heard of false 
Christs. It must have taken a long time to collect so many 
like Simon, Menander, etc., all Gnostics! The Gospel of Mat¬ 
thew was not written in Greek for the Transjordan people. 
The Christos of the Apokalypse, however, seems to have been 
originally the Jewish Messiah, apparently altered , later, into a 
different person by the addition of the name Iesliua or “ Iesous.” 
Now that the God in the midst of the Seven Candlesticks (Rev. 
i. 13) is the Hebrew God, behold the evidence. 1 The Logos is 

1 The Koran tolerates no religion but the Sabian, Jewish, and Christian, for the 
reason that all three are Arabian religions. Those Sabians that worshipped the stars 
maintained that God created the world; therefore Irenaeus, I. xxvi., says that the 
Ebionites are agreed that God created the world. The Sabian festivals were appointed 
for the days when the exaltations of the planets occur, but the greatest of them takes 
place on the day when the Sun enters Aries, which with them is the first day of the 
year, when they put on their Sun-day clothes. They celebrate the festival of every 
Planet in a chapel dedicated to him, and derive their religion from Noah himself. The 
Sabians of Mt. Lebanon seem to pay a greater regard to Seth than the Supreme Being; 
for they always keep their oath when they swear by Seth. The intelligences residing 
in the stars they call Gods and Lords. “Gods many, and Lords many.”—1 Cor. viii. 
5. They also maintain that once in 36125 years there will be a complete reestablish¬ 
ment (anakatastasis) of all mundane things. Their temple at Mecca is said to have 
been consecrated to Zochal (Sohal, Saturn), whence the name of Zachelach (1 Sam. 
xxvii. 6) politely degraded, in modern theology, into Ziglag. So with the name Iach 
(Praise him by his name Iah = Iach.—Ps. 68. 5). This Name was pronounced Yauk. 
The Arabs worshipped Yauk under the figure of a Horse (the Great White Horse of 
the Persians, the Sun’s Horse, the Horse of the Divine Logos.—Rev. xix. 11, 13). As 
the Arabian Jews degraded Brahma into Abrahm, Zachel into Izchaq, and Cabir 
(Aqbar) into Iaqab, so Iach (the God of Life surrounded by the Seven Planets) was 
described as a man of great piety, and his death much regretted : whereupon the Devil 
appeared to his friends, in human shape, and undertaking to represent him as he was 
in life, persuaded them by way of comfort to place his effigies in their temples, that 
they might see it at their devotions. Seven others of extraordinary merit were hon¬ 
ored the same way. Now, considering that Iach (Yauk) was the Great God of all life, 
represented as the Hebrew God in Revelations, i. v., the reader will see here a practi¬ 
cal illustration of the doctrine of Euhemerus, who about three centuries before the 
Christian Era explained that the Gods had been men. Iach on the Sun’s White 
Horse stands in the centre of the Seven Sabaoth, amid the wandering orbs that preside 
over the 7 days of the week. The Ebionites believed in Satan, and of course did as he 
said. For they said that he was not begotten of God, but born of a change in the 


85G 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


God (—John, i. 1), is the Holder of the Seven Stars regarded as 
the Seven Eyes of the God, and is the Lamb in Aries. The 
Chaldaeans revered the King of the Seven Kays, and the Phoe¬ 
nicians and Jews did the same. Moses made the Candlestick 
of pure gold (the Snn’s color) with six branches and Seven 
Lamps (the Sun’s place on the top, in the centre of the six 
branch-lamps).—Exodus, xxxvii. 17, 18, 23. The Iao (Iahoh) 
who presides over the 7 planet-orbits ! This gnostic symbol 
stood in the shrine of the Temple ; and John’s Revelation re¬ 
places the human form in the midst of the Seven Lights that 
the commandment forbade to be represented.—Exodus, xx. 4. 
He is the God of the Sabaoth, the Seven Planets. Layard 
found a Deity standing on a lion and surrounded by Seven 
Stars. Compare Kev. i. 16. 

He made oath, stretching (his arms) out (invoking) the Rays of the Sun and 
the God of the Hebrews.—Photius, Bibl. p. 339 : Movers, I. 552. 

The emperor Julian, about 361-2, held that the rays of the 
Sun which are able to raise up the souls 1 are specially adapted 
to those desiring to be freed from generation. The Sun draws 
all things from the earth. And if too I should touch upon the 
ineffable initiation into the Mysteries which the Chaldaean 
bacchised about the Seven-Rayed God, raising up the souls 
through him, I shall tell things unknown and very unknown 
to the masses, but well known to the blessed theologers. 
Wherefore I will be silent about these at present.—Julian, 
Oratio, Y. 172. The Chaldaean God of the Seven planetary 
Rays reappears among the Jews in the Seven-branched Can¬ 
delabrum in the Moses-temple, in Zachariah, iv. 2, a Stone with 
Seven Eyes (—Zach. iii. 9), Numbers, viii. 1, xxiii. 14, 2 Kings, 
xxiii. 5, and the Apokalypse, i. 12, 20; v. 6. The Chaldaeans 


“ turning ” and of 4 the Mixture outside.’ The young ram of Aries, in Julian’s oration, 
is identified with the ram of the Sabians on the day when Sol enters Aries, and with the 
astronomical Lamb of Revelations, v. 6. But when we turn from this to the Gospel of 
Matthew we come upon a learned man who quotes from the Septuagint Version 
and from the Scriptures generally. Whether his Gospel was written at Antioch, 
Alexandria, or in Palestine, no fisherman wrote it. It is the Essene Evangel changed 
into Scripture for the Ebionites. 

1 The sun was the Symbol of the Logos.—Philo, Quis Heres, liii.; Vita Mosis, 
xxxix.; on Dreams, xiii., xiv., xv., xvi. When he speaks of the sun, he means the 
Divine Logos (the Word) the Model of that sun which moves about through the 
heaven.—Philo, On Dreams, xv., xvi. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 857 


call the God IAO instead of Mind-perceived Light, in the Phoe¬ 
nician tongue. But he is often also called Sabaoth as the 
One over the Seven Circles, that is, the Creator. Sabaoth the 
Creator, for so among Phoenicians the Creative number is 
named.—Lydus, de Mens. iv. 38, 74, 98, p. 112; Cedrenus, I. 
p. 296. Iao is throned above the 7 heavens of the Chaldaeans. 
He was the Spiritual Light principle from which, in Chaldaism, 
the souls emanated. Compare Genesis, ii. 7, where the God 
breathes the breath of life into man. Iao was regarded as the 
Creator. All this fits Bel.—Movers, I. 550, 552. 

The Egyptians had their Book of the Breaths of Life ; and 
Genesis, ii. 7 mentions “ the spirit of lives.” One of the invo¬ 
cations made by Isis for her brother Osiris is “ that he may 
reach the horizon with his father the Sun, that his soul may 
rise to heaven in the disk of the moon.”—Records of the Past, 
p. 121. “ Man and the Sun generate man,” said Julian; and 

the Sabians of Palestine and Arabia agreed with him. The 
psalm, xix. 4, said that in the sun He hath set his tent. The 
Sun in Aries was the Young Lamb. The emperor Julian after 
361 wrote his ‘ Oration on the Sun ’ and mentions those gods 
who surround the King of all things, who aid him in scatter¬ 
ing the souls upon earth, saying that the visible disk is a 
cause of salvation! In his next oration he mentions the 
“ Little Mysteries ” as celebrated when the Sun is in the Ram 
(Aries). About two hundred and twenty years earlier we find 
in Rev. v. 6, a Lamb standing between the Throne and every 
other divine emanation, like the Angel of His presence, the 
Angel Iesua, or Saviour Angel. In Babylon he was called 
Helios noetos and Logos, the God of the Seven Rays, who 
lifts up the souls to the world that is perceived by mind. In 
these Chaldaean-Sabian-Jew-Christian mysteries of the Ies- 
saeans we perceive that gnosis like salvation cometh from 
the East, even from Nabathaea and beyond the Jordan. When 
therefore the Arabians in later centuries worshipped, some the 
Sun, others, Christ, it is obvious that they had reference to one 
Logos, the disembodied Logos, the Angel-King of St. Matthew 
and the Ebionites. When the Messiah (the King) is met with 
in the Old Testament, we must admit that at some time, 
before or after Christ, or at both periods the Jews and Ebio¬ 
nites contrived to mix up this asarJcos idea of the Divine Son- 
ship with the idea of the ‘Son of David,’ and further com- 


S58 


THE OHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


plicated it with the restoration of Jerusalem’s Kingdom and 
the rebuilding of the Temple. 

The King in his beauty thine eyes shall see !—Isaiah, xxxiii. 17. 

From the issuing of the word to frame and build Jeru¬ 
salem until Christos the Prince, seven weeks and sixty two 
weeks!—Daniel, ix. 25, Greek. He shall destroy the City 
and the holy place together with the Coming Leader.— 
Daniel, ix. 26, Greek Version. A kingdom of Gentiles will 
destroy the City and the holy place with the Christos.— 
Daniel, ix. 25, 26, according to the o. Here we have the angel 
gnosis. The angels came and ministered to their King.— 
Matthew, iv. 11. The Anointed King has been appointed to 
rule over all hosts.—The Sohar, Commentary to Gen. xl. 10. 
For my Son Messiah will be revealed with those that are 
with him, and those who remain will be happy in the 40 years, 
and it will be after these years and my Son Christus will die, 
and all men that have breath.—4th Esdras, vii. 28, 29. And 
after seven days the Age which does not yet watch shall be 
awakened and shall die corrupted; and the earth shall give 
up those that sleep therein, and the dust dwelling in that 
silence, and the storehouses shall restore the souls entrusted 
to them, and the Most High shall be revealed on the Seat of 
Judgment.—ibid. 31-33. 4th Esdras, vi. is Ebionite; recognises 
Moses as the Lawgiver (vii. 59) ix., 31, 32. Our sanctification 
has been made forsaken, and our altar is demolished, and our 
temple is destroyed . . . and, greater than all, the sign (or 
seal), Sion, since it was stamped with its own glory, is now too 
delivered up in the hands of those that hate us.—4th Esdras, 
x., 21, 23. This description dates the book later than the first 
century, and belongs rather to the period when Bethar was 
taken and Bar Cocheba killed. “ Haec est Sion, quam nunc 
conspicis ut civitatem aedificatam.” Sion was rebuilt by 
Hadrian. 4th Esdras, x. 55 seems to have sketched the New 
Jerusalem of the Apokalypse. In xii. 32, Esdras brings in the 
Messiah and the Last Judgment, like the Jewish Sibyl in 
manner and form. Expect your Shepherd, he will give you 
a rest of eternity, for he is in the nearest future who shall 
come in the end of the age.—Fifth Esdras, ii. 34. (Compare 
“I come quickly” in Rev. xxii. 20.) A young man of high 
stature, taller than all the rest.—Fifth Esdras, ii. 43. It is the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 859 


Son of God whom they have confessed in the world.—ii. 47. 
This is the description of the image of the dead Adonis that 
Theokritus saw outside the proconsul’s door. No one will be 
able to see my Son unless in the time of his Day.—ibid. IV. 
xiii. 52. Moreover Fourth Esdras, viii. 3‘reads : Multi quidem 
creati sunt, pauci autem salvabuntur, which may have sug¬ 
gested “ Many are called, but few chosen.”—Lachmann’s text, 
Matthew, xx. 16. 

The Persians and all Magi preferred Fire to all the ele¬ 
ments. They regard (Sio, Ziua) Zeus as the substance of fire 
in two sexes. This is the Hebrew doctrine in Genesis ii. and 
Simon Magus held fire to be the primal source from which the 
Great Male proceeds who has, conjoined to him and within 
him the Mother of all, the Two Powers, (in Hebrew) Ash and 
Ashah.—Hippolytus, vi. 17, 18. The world of the Gentiles 
partook of the Oriental Philosophy ; it was not confined to the 
Jews. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, fire to fire,” said the 
Persian. Spiritus intus alit, spirit within us sustains us, said 
Vergil. And the spieit was fire ! The vital fire ! Herakleitus 
said that the Archon of all things is fire. For from fire all 
things are born and in the fire all things die.—Justin, pros 
Hellenas, p. 11. 

The Eastern religion of the Mysteries required circum¬ 
cision. The descendants of the worshippers of the Assyrian 
Azar were pure. The rite was calculated to give the people an 
enormous pride of circumcision 1 and a corresponding con¬ 
tempt for the Goiim, the foreign peoples. "When therefore 
the Messiah-worship took such a hold on the peoples north¬ 
west of the Jordan the Ebionites might well feel surprised and 
perhaps jealous of their prerogative. Here to the north of 


1 The Ebionites are circumcised and persevere in these customs that are according 
to the Law and use the Jewish character of life, and adore Jerusalem as if it were the 
home of the God.—Irenaeus, I. xxvi. So, too, Matthew, iv. 5, xxiii. 27, xxvi. 61, xxvii. 
40. “Does not Eusebius, according to the trick of the time, antedate his evangelists 
into the reign of Trajan ? ”—Ant. Mater, p. 60. The Ebionites as described by Ire¬ 
naeus exactly correspond to the Iessaian Nazorenes as described in the Gospel of Mat¬ 
thew, v., vi., vii., x., especially in their adherence to the institutions of Moses.—ibid. v. 
17, 18; x. 5, 6. Matthew’s connection with the Ebionites is the source of many of the 
inferences we have drawn in the preceding pages, as to late dates and ‘ the origin of the 
evangel attributed to the conversions in the northwest.’ The Ebionites did not sur¬ 
render on the question of circumcision until 160. Matthew is Ebionite (viii. 4) ; but 
he never mentions the subject, showing that his Gospel was written after 150.—Matth. 
v. 17; x. 6; xvi. 18. 


860 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


them was a vast conversion 1 of the uncircnmcised going on at 
Antioch and Laodikea, in all Syria, then in Kilikia, Galatia, 
Armenia; and the headings of the epistles, Ephesus, Colosse, 
Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, showed the wonderful prog¬ 
ress of this uncircumcised phenomenon with an Apostle at 
the head of it, whose name rung out loudly and whose fame 
was whispered even on Jordan’s sacred shores. The seed of 
the Messiah that Moses and the Prophets, the Jewish Sibyl, 
Henoch, Fourth Ezra and all the Sabians had planted was 
ripening for the benefit of the Gentiles! Something had to 
be done at once. When the public is stirred, the only way of 
reaching it is by publications dispersed through missionaries, 
or apostles. The only thing left for the Iessaian, Nazoraian, 
and Ebionite Saints to do was to sexfd a counter Apostle to 
Antioch, get out an Euangelion and send it after him as soon 
as possible. That Apostle to the Heathen was called Kephas, 
perhaps. Compare the names Kab and Kepha or Kefa. At 
any rate, among the later Ebionites Peter was regarded as the 
Apostle to the Heathen, while Paul was called an apostate 
from the Law of Moses, and attacked in the Clementine Homi¬ 
lies under the name of Simon Magus (?). But, as might have 
been foreseen, the Church increased under so much advertising 
just as the conflict of two parties led by selfish politicians 
draws public attention ; and it became expedient for the Book 
of Acts to be put forth, making out on paper an entire agree¬ 
ment and unanimity between Paul and Peter. Hence the 
quasi Ebionite Gospel could say of Peter, “ On this rock I will 
build my Church ” and (as against Paul) “ I come not to de¬ 
stroy the Law.”—Matthew, v. 17 ; xvi. 16,17, 18. As Irenaeus, 
III. 1, says : “ For we have not known the arrangement (plan) 
for our salvation through others than through those through 
whom the Euangel came to us, which indeed they at that time 
preached, 2 but later delivered to us in Scripturis , through the 

1 Knowing the Christians from Gentiles (to be) more numerous and truer than those 
from Jews and Samarians.—Justin, Apol. I. p. 156. The expression ‘the teaching of 
his apostles ’ was very likely intended to draw criticism away from the euangelion to 
the so-called apostles. 

2 Irenaeus’s only information on that point, whether any apostles preached , he 
gathered from the Scripture. So, if there was any tradition, it came from the Written 
Evangel according to the Hebrews. If Irenaeus calls that Matthew’s Gospel, the two, 
as far as Justin Martyr quotes the ‘ Evangel according to the Hebrews' read like one 
another, if not literally, at least one would think the quotations were out of Matthew. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 861 


will of the God, to be the fundament and pillar of our faith. 
For it is not proper to say that they preached before they had 
perfect knowledge, as some dare to say, boasting that they 
are the reformers (emendatores) of the apostles. For after our 
Lord rose from the dead and they were clothed with the power 
of the supervenient Holy Spirit from on high, 1 they were re¬ 
plenished in regard to all things and had complete knowledge 
and went out to the bounds of the earth proclaiming the things 
which from the God to us are good, and announcing heavenly 
peace to the men who indeed both all equally and each of them 
have the Euangelium of the God. Thus Matthew among the 
Hebrews 2 in their own tongue issued a Written Evangel, at 
the same time that Peter and Paul preached the Glad Tidings 
at Pome and founded the Ecclesia.” The argument of Irenaeus 
here seems to be that he relies on the Gospels, because of the 
men through whom the Evangelion came. It would be in¬ 
teresting to know if the name of Kephas was ever mentioned 
among the Ebionites before the Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews was put forth. Did Markion admit the existence of the 
Twelve Apostles ? The Apokalypse, xxi. 14 mentions 12 apos- 
toloi of the Lamb. This Lamb is slain, but not crucified. It 
is the centre of the Seven and the leader of the Twelve, both 
Sabian sacred numbers; therefore the 12 apostoloi of the 
Lamb (Mithra) may well be the Spirits or Angels of the 12 
Zodiacal Signs sent forth. The very names of the 12 Apostles 

But as all Irenaeus knows of the apostles comes out of the Gospels, he should have put 
the Gospels first. Because then he was sure of what he was talking about. But when 
he put the apostles first, he did not know of his own knowledge. Still (like the author 
of Antiqua Mater) he might have thought that the first Christian teachers and preachers 
were roving saints, or apostoloi, without knowing their names or any particulars con¬ 
cerning them. One glance at the New Testament separates Paulinism widely from the 
Gospels as a wholly different element. 

1 He gets this too from the Scriptures. Now Matthew represents the Ebionite 
Scriptures. The Ebionites lived with the Nazoria, east and southeast of the Dead Sea 
and along up to Beroea, and, probably eastward towards Hilleh, Babylon. 

2 We notice here that the Evangel according to the Hebrews (as quoted by Justin 
Martyr.—Supernat. Rel. I. 420) bears a very surprising resemblance to the Gospel of 
Matthew. The Gospel according to the Hebrews was in use among the Ebionites.— 
ibid. I. 420. And Irenaeus, I. xxvi. states that the Ebionites use only the Evangel 
according to Matthew. The inference would naturally be that these two gospels were 
the same. But there were certain differences ; and in the Stichometry of Nicephorus 
the Gospel of Matthew is said to have 2500 verses, whilst that according to the He¬ 
brews has only 2200.—ibid. I. 426. The general opinion of the early church was that the 
latter was the original of Matthew’s Gospel.—ibid. I. 425. If so, the Gospel according 
to the Hebrews must have been enlarged, and with some alterations perhaps. , 


862 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


were possibly unknown to Justin so late as about 160. 1 —Ant. 
Mater. 300. Markion, says Harnack, criticised Tradition from 
a dogmatic standpoint. Can we conceive of his doing so had 
trustworthy accounts of the Twelve and their doctrine been 
extant at the time and been influential in wide circles ? Thus 
Markion supplies weighty evidence against the historical trust¬ 
worthiness of the opinion that the Christianity of the multi¬ 
tude was actually based upon the tradition of the Twelve 
Apostles.—ibid. 301. The 12 counterpoised the one apostle 
(Paul). 

The result of the whole is this, that if to the Paul of the 
canon and Markion we join the preceding name of Simon 
Magus, we get the three names mentioned in the Grundschrift, 
the basis or groundwork, over and upon which (under the name 
of Kerugma Petrou, Peter’s preaching), according to G. Uhl- 
horn, the Clementine Homilies were superwritten. Therefore, 
the Kerugma Petrou must have followed Simon, the Paul- 
inist; and Markion (about 165) about six to ten years after the 
first evangel with Peter’s name (in it) appeared. While Jus¬ 
tin’s first Apologia mentions Markion and the “Memoirs of 
the apostles, called evangels,” it nowhere speaks of Peter . . . 
or of “Peter’s Preaching.” The Didache describes a set of 
wandering apostles in the third century. Matthew, x., describes 
a similar class, like the Essenes on their Travels, and apparently 
announcing the Coming Kingdom, but not paying for the 
lodgings. Suppose that there was a Didache (Teaching) of 
the saints in the first and second centuries ; since it takes time 
to get an institution of the nature of a wandering Ecclesia well 
agoing, even if the Essenes set the example. The N. T. has 
the word “ teacher.”—Matthew, xii. 38; John, iii. 2. Where 
did they get it from if not from a Didache ? Now mark what 
Justin Martyr, Apol. I. p. 156, says : ‘ And thus we see events, 
the desolation of the land of the Jews and from every race of 

1 Three are mentioned in Justin’s dialogue, but they could be interpolations in the 
Ms. Of course where there were Hagioi (Saints) in the East, there were apostoloi, 
angeloi, messengers. The Essenes or Iessenes on their “Travels” might be mes¬ 
sengers. We may add to these the apostles in the Didache and Apostolic Constitu¬ 
tions, rules for whose conduct in their goings were prescribed. Antiqua Mater, 136- 
143, supposes that they carried moral proverbs memorialised. Matthew’s Essene 
apophthegms in chapters, v., vi., vii., have something of that look. Then again there 
were Jewish apostles, emissaries of the Sanhedrin. “ The DidachS of his apostles.”— 
Justin Apol. I. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 863 


men those persuaded by the Didache of the apostles! ’ They 
prayed, but never paid. Thus the Didache was in full swing 
in Apostolic times, and preceded, very likely, the Gospel of 
Matthew. We must remember that the date of Justin’s first 
Apologia is about 160 or later; so that there may not have 
been a single Evangel according to the Hebrews or Greeks in 
existence before 140. We see, in Justin, a mass of converts 
already, the converted Greeks more numerous than Hebrew 
or Samaritan converts. The point is whether the Hellenic con¬ 
versions (Galat. ii. 2) did not cause the Ebionites 1 to prepare 
some gospel. When did the Ebionite apostles come upon the 
scene ? If the Apokalypse originally did not know the man 
Iesu, nor anyone of his Apostoloi, but only the Lamb in heaven 
was it Ebionites, Diaspora, or the leaders of the Ecclesia that 
prepared the first Evangelium, the one that Justin mentions ? 

Hermas, Sim. ix. 6. 1, says: I see an array of many men 
coming. And in their midst some Man lofty in size so as to 
overtop the tower. “ A young man of high stature taller 2 than 
all the rest.”—Esdras, Y. ii. 42. Who then first brought in the 
name Iesu, as distinguished from the name of the Angel Ie- 
soua ? D. Cremer holds that the question who was Iesus can 
never be settled by means of historical research. The Epistle 
of Barnabas first presents the name in the flesh. Hermas ig¬ 
nores the names Iesus and Christos, and speaks only of ‘ the Son 
of God ’ who is apparently in his thought a glorious Angel of 
God.—Antiqua Mater, 72, 97. Iesus is named some twelve 
times in the Epistle of Barnabas, which is forged.—ibid. 88, 
91. The author is bitterly contemptuous towards the adherents 
of the letter of the Law, and the restorers of the Temple and 
entirely ignores the name Christianos.—ib. 90. The writer of 
Barnabas is evidently late, perhaps one of the Diaspora.— 
Compare Antiqua Mater, 86, 88, 95, 96. Renan, Evang. 374 

1 The Ebionites disliked Paul, calling him an apostate from the Law. But it is the 
Second Paul (according to Loman) that they disliked. It has been supposed that the 
manuscripts of Josephus have been interpolated. An interpolation in a manuscript is 
easily made. 

2 Markion and Valentinus taught that the Christ came in a vision (in phantasia).— 
Gennadius, Illustr. Viroru.m Cat. xxvi. Himself is the ‘ Son of the God,’ whom they 
have confessed in the world.—Esdras, V. ii. 47. Then will my Son be revealed whom 
thou didst see ascending like a man.—ib. IV. xiii. 32. The Lion that thou didst see 
awaking and coming roaring out of the forest (commanding the unjust Roman eagle to 
disappear),—this is the Christos whom the Most High has reserved until the End.—Es¬ 
dras, IV. xii. 32. 


864 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


thinks that Barnabas, like the Apokalypse of Esdras, was com¬ 
posed in the reign of Nerva. The “ forger of Barnabas ” does 
not appear to have been the first to use the name Iesus as the 
name of a man, or Iessaian, or Angel. Iesoua was the name 
of the Saviour Angel Metatron-Mithra; whether Iesous was 
regarded as the mythic source of Iessaean dogma is a matter 
concerning which we have no further evidence than the doc¬ 
trines of Elxai, which might suggest any human appearance. 
Compare the notions of Simon Magus, Saturninus (Iren. I. 
xxii. p. 118, putative autem visum hominem), and the Gnos¬ 
tics. The first or 2nd Gospel seems the most likely to have 
first produced an effect on the mind of the author of ‘ Barna¬ 
bas.’ For by what reason should we have believed in a cruci¬ 
fied man that he is Firstbegotten to the Unborn God and will 
himself pass Judgment on the whole human race, unless before 
he came, born a man, we found testimonies prophesied concern¬ 
ing him ?—Justin, 1st Apology, p. 156. 

I saw a dream, and lo, an Eagle came up from the sea.—Esdras, IV. x. 60. 

A wind surged up from the sea, disturbing all its waves. And lo, that 
man was flying with the clouds of heaven, . . . the Man who had ascended 
from the sea!—Esdras, IV. xiii. 2. 3, 5. 

The Messiah shall be revealed in the land Galil.—The Sohar, I. fol. 119. 

As if a vision of a Man (kimareah adam).—Ezekiel, i. 26. 
This is a kabalist vision of Adam ; for Adm (in the kabalah) sig¬ 
nified that the soul of Adam would reappear in Dauid and the 
Messiah. Irenaeus followed the conception of a Son of Dauid 
in Matthew’s Gospel and was inclined to carry the idea of the 
two natures in Iesu as far back in the direction of Saturninus 
as possible. Saturninus, like the Apokalypse, has all the pu¬ 
tative appearance of a man, while the Apokalypse talks of the 
Lamb and the Root of Dauid, but neither ever gets so far as a 
human man. Saturninus only gives the Salvator the appear¬ 
ance of flesh, as in Ezekiel,, i. 26 ; but the Apokalypse never 
gets even as far as that, but says “ one like a son of man.”—Rev. 
xi. 15. Compare the epiphanies in Genesis, xviii. 2, Exodus, iii. 
2, Judges, xiii. 18-22. Irenaeus has not helped St. Matthew 
much, in regard to the anthropomorphist conception of a Iesu 
as Healer and leader of Iessaians. The words in Luke, xiii. 
34, 35, ‘ Your temple is abandoned by you,’ showed that they 
were penned after the House of Judah was broken up. Com- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 865 


pare ‘ Jerusalem’s dolor/ * Sion delivered into the hands of our 
enemies/ ‘ incendio Sion.’—Esdras, IY. x. 20, 23 ; xii. 44. 

Hierusalem, Hierusalem, slaying the prophets and stoning those sent to her 
. . . behold your House is abandoned by you.—Luke, xiii. 34, 35. “ Ruina 

Ierusalem.”—Esdras IV. x. 48. 


The Hellenists of Asia Minor must have continued in the status 
indicated in the Apokalypse, a confusion of Hellenist and 
Diaspora, a tumult of circumcision and uncircumcision be¬ 
tween Jew and Greek until the views of some Paulus predomi¬ 
nated, contending for both Jew and Greek, the law for the 
Jews, Christos and self-denial for the Greeks, while Kerdon, 
Markion and Justin were wrangling about which was the God, 
the God of the Jews or the Unknown Father, and whether the 
Christos was the Son of the Unknown Father or of the God of 
the Jews whose tabernacle was destroyed by the Romans and 
the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus put in its place by Hadrian. 
Apelles contended that the flesh of the Christos was sidereal. 
—Adolphus Harnack, p. 84. Both Markion and Apelles de¬ 
nied the nativity, human nature, and human body of the Chris¬ 
tos.—ib. 81, 84, note. The notion of the ‘ Son of Dauid ’ is 
taken from 1 Sam. xvi. 1, Isa. lv. 3, 4, lxi. 1. In his Harmony 
of the Evangels Tatian cut out the genealogies of Iesu.—Har¬ 
nack, 89 ; Theodoret, Haeret. Fab. I. 20. 

The Apokalypse expects the Messiah’s Coming and the 
Judgment. But the four Gospels maintain that he had come 
before the year 50. If Markion became famous in a.d. 154 it is 
not probable that he produced his “ Apostolicon ” at any 
earlier period. A dozen years of growth is not too much to 
allow before Markionism could have assumed the dimensions 
which Justin’s Apology suggests.—Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 819. 
Dr. Paul Yiktor Schmidt (Der Galaterbrief, pp. 64, 67) says 
that Markion before a.d. 150, and as early as about 140, knew 
ten of Paul’s epistles, with the exception only of the Pastoral 
Epistles. This Dr. Loman most decidedly denies. 1 It seems 
unnecessary to repeat Loman’s reasons, because Irenaeus tells 
us that Markion gained strength (invaluit) under Anicetus 

1 Galatians seems to quote from Justin Mater (Paris, Lutetiae, 1551. p. 156) 
“ That many more are the children of the deserted woman than of her that hath the 
husband.”—Gal. iv. 27. We doubt if in 65 there was any Petrine controversy over 
circumcision. Too early for it. 

55 


866 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


(Aniketus).—Iren. III. iv. p. 243. Paris, 1675. The episcopate 
of Anicetus began in 154 and lasted 12 years.—Smith & Wace, 
Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 816. Loman evidently doubts whether 
the Evangelium as Irenaeus and Tertullian knew it (in our 4 
Gospels) could claim to have been premarkionite, that is, 
before Markion’s Gospel was written.—Schmidt, p. 66. If this 
were so, and if Markion actually wrote the first gospel of all, 
a parcel of partisans would not have hesitated to charge him 
with mutilating, pruning, and altering Luke’s Gospel. Bitschl 
had, before Loman, already remarked that probably Markion 
had not even seen our Luke-Gospel.—Schmidt, 64. But, ac¬ 
cording to Irenaeus there is no probability that Markion got 
out his ‘ Apostolus ’ or Apostolicon prior to 154 ; and Dr. Lo¬ 
man can find no trace of the Paulinist before that time. The 
author of ‘ Antiqua Mater ’ is very much inclined to think that 
Markion’s light in some degree led the way for the Evange¬ 
lists to see ; and Markion certainly stood on the very ground 
of the Apokalypse which knows no flesh in its immortal 
‘ Lamb.’—Bev. xi. 8, 15. The word kurios (Lord) in Revela¬ 
tion xi. means the Jewish God not Christ, as the words ‘the 
Kingdom of the kosmos of the Lord of us and of His Anointed ’ 
decisively show. Therefore the author of the Apokalypse ap¬ 
pears to be dohetic like Markion and the Gnostics. Another 
thing indicates that 'Markion stood on the ground of the early 
Nazarene askesis. He was an Encratite of the strictest kind, 
like Banous the Baptist, like the Essenes, like the Iessaians 
and earliest Ebionites. He didn’t need to go to the Jordan, for 
he was Jordan asceticism itself. This question of the origin of 
Christianism is easily settled by its two sources, Judaism (in¬ 
cluding its Diaspora) and Enkrateia. The Apokalypse is 
(roughly speaking) the last stage of Judaism, like the Sohar, 
before it plunges into Christianism. There are only two En¬ 
cratite verses in it, Rev. xiv. 3, 4, showing its tendency in that 
direction. But Pilate, the Crucifix, the Baptist and the Jordan 
Encratites had yet to be joined on to it. Who can deny that 
Markion’s example and preaching may have suggested the idea 
to the authors of the first Gospels to start from the Baptism by 
John.—Luke, i. 13 ; vii. 27, 28. If this is not so, why did Luke 
first and then Matthew send the Iesua to John to be baptised 
by him ? The Evangelium needed a point to write from, and 
after the current Son of Dauid Messianism the Jordan Encra- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 867 

tites and their religion (Mithrabaptism) afforded the motive, 
the starting-point for a further movement which the Pharisees 
and even the Apokalypse could not give, but which the yet un¬ 
written Transjordan Didache and Diaspora-teachings were at 
hand to supply. The two self-denial verses in the Apokalypse 
could hardly afford a basis on which to found a further Messian- 
ism. But the Jordan could do it, if coupled with the Crucifix¬ 
ion by Borne’s soldiers. Whatever has happened on this 
planet, be sure that Nature or man or both have been at the 
bottom of it. Markion could not have believed in the story of 
the Crucifixion, and the Apokalypse does not mention it; for 
the word Lord in Bev. xi. 8 is not applied to the Saviour 
Christ, but means the God of the Jews. If neither Markion 
nor the Apokalypse knew of a Crucifixion of the Saviour by 
Pilate, the dating Markion’s Apostolicon a dozen or 14 years 
earlier does not tend to show that in 140 Markion or the Apok¬ 
alypse knew any more about the Crucifixion than they did in 
154. A person to be crucified must first have a body; but the 
Apokalypse held that he had none. See Luke, xxiv. 27. 

‘ That Christ had a real earthly body Markion of course could 
not admit.’—Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 821. Now if from 125 to 
140 or 150 Markion knew nothing of the Saviour’s Crucifixion 
by Pilate, or, knowing, disbelieved the statement, does it help 
the matter any when Dr. Schmidt says that Markion’s “ Apos¬ 
tolus ” exists about the year 140 ? Markion did not rehabilitate 
forgotten or mistaken Pauline Epistles, and may not have 
known them.—Loman; quoted by Schmidt, 83, 84, 85, 101. 
The Pauline Epistles probably did not exist in Justin’s time, 
were at least not published and used as such. — Loman; 
Schmidt, 85, 114. Probably the final completion of the 4 Chief 
EiDistles immediately preceded their admission into the canon 
(particularly Galatians), and this occurred after Markion and 
Justin, at the same time with the reception of the other Pau¬ 
line Epistles into our canon.—ib. 85, 86. According to Loman, 
Galatians may have come along after Justin.—ib. 78, 79, 82, 
85, 97, 119. Niemand moge sich doch auf dem kritischen 
Gebiete der Erforschung des n. T. allzusicher fiihlen. Noch 
seien wir durchaus nicht im Besitz irgend welcher befriedi- 
gender Kenntnis vom Entstehen unserer kanonischen Schrif- 
ten. The opponents of Paulus (Canonicus) that Irenaeus 
fights were not the opponents of the Historical Paul de- 


868 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


scribed in the Book of Acts. This is Loman’s view.—Schmidt, 
174. 

Irenaeus, I. xxxiv. (35) gives this order of gnostic emanation: 
1st Man, 2nd Man (also called Son of the Man), 3d the Christos. 
The Aidra Babba, x. 177-179, shows that from the Man one 
spirit shall go forth to the Short Face (Seir Anpin). And one 
is the spirit of life (Creator Spiritns). And the spirit issues 
from the Man’s shut or closed brain, and at some time will rest 
upon the King Messiah. The Spirit of the Ancient of the 
Ancient descends on the Shortface (the Sun). —Kabbala Denu- 
data, II. 101. From the Kabalali therefore Matthew, xxv. 34, 
40, reproduces the King Messiah while Matth. iii. 16, 17 ex¬ 
hibits the spirit descending upon the Messiah; and Matth. iv. 
11 shows the angels around their King. Hence the King is 
another designation of the Son of the Man, the Seir Anpin, 
who is the Sun. —Matthew, xvii. 2, Bev. i. 16. The Apokalypse 
indicates only the Divine nature in the Christos ; but Matthew 
has exhibited the two natures in Iesus. Thus it is made clear 
that the Gospel of Matthew has borrowed its basis from the 
Jewish Kabalah and superadded the line of Davidical descent, 
the miracles, the parables, the Essenism, the Crucifixion, and 
the Besurrection. The Idra Babba is one of the two most an¬ 
cient parts of the Kabalah. Matthew has copied both Gnosis 
and Kabalah (wdiich is a part of the gnosis) on which to build 
his Gospel. He duplicates the Kabalist doctrine in the New 
Testament. We may judge of the skill of the oriental rea- 
soner, when what he does escapes notice for 1700 years. 

Markion was in Borne in the episcopates of Aniketus, Soter 
and Eleutherus. 1 Our single date 154-166 (twelve years epis¬ 
copate of Anicetus) is all we have to guide us in the search 
after the date of the earliest gospel. But that one date coup¬ 
led with the remarkable unconsciousness of the Apokalypse of 
the existence of any gospel at all has a tendency to reveal a 
certain Messianist period when the Jewish Messiah was expect¬ 
ed, believed in, regarded as Angel-King, Presence Angel and 
Saviour Angel (Iesua, Metatron) before the first conceived 
gospel appeared, when the memory of the fall of Jerusalem 
was revived in the fall of Bettar. An expectation of Messiah’s 
Coming might still prevail in the Coming of the Christos, but 

1 Markion was turned out of the Christian Church in the episcopate of Eleutherus. 
—Tertull. de Prescript., xxx. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 869 


before 136 it would be too soon to pretend that he had come al¬ 
ready in his first parousia, and vms to appear again in his 
Second Coming! Before Bettar not many could have been 
found to believe that he had come already; for the reason that 
his Coming was most expected after the loss of the Holy City. 
Then he was most needed! They awaited his coming, they 
could not believe that he had already appeared in the time 
of Herod. But at Bettar, in the mountains near to Jeru¬ 
salem, a second check ruined the Jews’ hopes. Then among 
a mixed population in the Levant, along the Jordan, in Arabia, 
a new era began in which the assertion of his first coming 
nearly 136 years before could not so readily be discredited. 
Adding the Baptism of the Jordan, the fame of the Essenes, 
Nazorenes, and the self-denial of the poor, to sicknesses caused 
by devils, the communism then in vogue, the parables, the in¬ 
struction in doing right, the dependence upon Caesar, the 
doctrine of fatalism (John, iii. 27), the resurrection of the dead, 
the future state, the Coming Messiah, his Crucifixion by the 
Romans and his ascension from the grave into the heavens,— 
see what a power the first evangelist possessed to create a new 
religion on the Jordan, in Syria, in Asia Minor after the year 
136 of our era. In Moab things grew not quite spontaneously, 
but when the sower plants the seed in the right spot it grows 
fast.—1 Thessalonians, iv. 16-18. The Logos, the Saviour, was 
in the Sabian sun. When Dionysius Areopagita saw an eclipse 
of the sun, he said : “ now the Lord is suffering something.” 
'O Kvptos to t Tvcvfxd io-Tiv : the Lord is the spiritus. — 2 Cor. iii. 17. 
The breaths of life and fire were in the sun.—Diodor. I. 11. 
The Christos was considered the Creator.—Colossians, i. 16,17 ; 
Matthew, iii. 11; Diodor. Sic., I. 11. 

According to Menander the Primal Power was Unknown to 
all: he claimed to be the Saviour himself.—Irenaeus, I. xxi. 
Markion omitted all mention of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark 
and John, according to Tertullian against Marcion, IY. chapter 
v. According to Saturninus, Kerdon, a Gnostic, and Markion, 
the Christos was the Son of the Unknown Father, not of the 
God of the Jews ; but Iesua was manifested (to human imagina¬ 
tion) in human form. The fathers had a chance to make of the 
Syrian word Iesoua , meaning Saviour, a proper name for a man. 
But if, as Hippolytus, vii. 37 holds, Kerdon said that the God 
proclaimed by Moses and the Prophets is not the Father of 


870 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Iesou Christos, and if Markion said that, in the 15th year of the 
reign of Tiberius, the Soter (Salvator, Iesoua, Saviour), Un¬ 
born, descended from above, being mediate between Evil and 
Good, to teach in the synagogues, and that Iesous descended 
non-generatus, in order to be remote from all evil, both Ker- 
don and Markion would have delivered their testimony only 
in regard to the Angel Iesua and said nothing about the man 
Iesus. This was leaving him out entirely. Replace the words 
Iesou and Iesous by the Syrian word Iesoua which means Sal¬ 
vator, Saviour ; and a change suddenly comes over the scene. 
Kerdon and Markion were speaking of the Saviour Christ and 
again of the Saviour and Mediator. Just so Saturninus men¬ 
tioned the Salvator and Christos ; Saturninus knew no flesh in 
Christos, his Messiah. His Logos was asarkos , without flesh ! 
But when Irenaeus and his pupils war against those that held 
the Christos to be without flesh (for flesh and blood cannot in¬ 
herit God’s Kingdom.—1 Cor. xv. 50) why dont they attack 
psalm ii., where the Son and Messiah is equally asarkos f 
Another branch of the Sarmana in India were the Physi¬ 
cians, who were not such in the proper signification of the 
word but a sort of Jogin , who on account of their supposed, 
knowledge of divinity practised the healing art. They were 
also as penitents distinguished in this way, that they lived on 
the mountains and wore the skins of gazelles. They carried 
sacks full of roots and remedies, and sought to cure by means 
of magic, exorcisms and laying on of amulets (Strabo, xv. 1, 70. 
p. 719). According to Megasthenes they lived in moderation 
eating rice and meal. Although not staying in the forests 
they were yet penitents because they continued the whole day 
in the same positions. All was given them by every one 
therefor bidden, who also took them in hospitably. After the 
Vanaprastha (the forest hermits) they were the most honored, 
because they made man the object of their endeavors. It was 
thought that they by means of their remedies could make men 
and women fruitbearing. There was also another class of Sar¬ 
mana (^ramana) that wandered through the cities and villages 
as prophets, and another, more liked by the people, which 
knew the rules for a God-fearing and holy life and the tradi¬ 
tions of the dead.—Lassen, Indische Alt. II. 2nd ed. p. 714. 
This last reminds one of the apostles in the Didache, who 
seemed to be provided with rules for a pious conduct. This 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 871 


was the Ecclesia of the Saints.—Anti qua Mater, 70, 71, 86, 146, 
147, 148. The Didache has the Lord’s Prayer, and the ‘ Hyp¬ 
ocrites,’ the same as in Matthew, vi.; it is not called the 
Lord’s Prayer in the Didache.—ib. 148. The Ecclesia is a 
Diaspora meeting-, not a Jewish synagogue. 

So in Palestine we find wandering preachers (Isa. xl. 3), apos- 
toloi, teachers, and hagioi (saints). The apostoloi, like the Es- 
senes, roved around the country, but were usually kept and fed 
for one night. Compare Matthew, x. 10, 11. The Saints, Es- 
senes, and the Hindu Physicians undoubtedly had a high code 
of morality which has, more or less, been preserved in the Epis¬ 
tle of Barnabas, the Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions. 
The Essenes especially endeavored to realise the Kingdom of 
the heavens, or the Kingdom of God, says the author of Antiqua 
Mater, p. 71, and we have not yet been able to trace out a 
Founder or Founders of this new order of things. There is no 
Canon, no New Testament, no body of writings of any kind 
on a level of authority with the Old Testament.—ibid. p. 129. 
In Barnabas and the Apostolical Constitutions we have before 
us an outline of the moral teaching of Hagioi, Apostles, proph¬ 
ets of the Diaspora during the second century.—ibid. 141-143. 
To state that the morality of the Didache and of the * Epistle 
of Barnabas ’ is borrowed from the New Testament is to beg 
an important question, and that in opposition to the prima 
facie evidence.—ibid. 146. ‘Hernias’ never uses the word 
Evangelion; Barnabas uses it twice: but he betrays no 
knowledge whatever of any preaching of Iesu in the syna¬ 
gogues of Galilee or elsewhere,—no knowledge of John the 
Baptist or of the personnel of the ‘ apostles.’ One circumstance 
distinguishes him from ‘Hernias’—he has the idea of ‘the 
beloved Iesoua ’ and his Testament and little more.—ibid. 151- 
153. As to Iesua and Christos, Hermas ignores these names. 
—ibid. 97, 160. Not only, as the author of ‘ Supernatural Re¬ 
ligion ’ with patient toil has shown, are those beautiful books 
we know as the Gospels unknown until late in the second 
century ; but ‘ the Gospel ’ in any sense is seldom referred to, 
and in nowise so as to hint the existence of a rich narrative or 
a body of ethical teaching, such as we do find current under 
the name of the ‘ Apostles,’—their Didache , or their Memora¬ 
bilia. Barnabas describes ‘ the Gospel ’ as the good tidings of 
remission of sins and a clean heart. Isaiah speaks of ‘ good 


872 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tidings to the meek.’ But how can the chasm be filled up be¬ 
tween this slight and simple reference to a belief founded 
upon the nature of the God who delights to pardon on the 
ground of conversion alone, and the allusions to the cross and 
passion and resurrection as essential to ‘ the Gospel/ and the 
ringing and repeated sound of the word in a passionately 
exclusive sense in the ‘ Epistle to the Galatians ’ ?—ibid. 156. 
Barnabas (about 96-98 perhaps) distinctly names Iesous and 
Christos (—ib. 166); Hermas does not; and he does not 
speak of the ‘ Son of God ’ having suffered an ignominious 
death or having risen again.—ibid. 166. After mentioning 
some absurd inferences from numerical letters, the author of 
Antiqua Mater, p. 167, says : It could only have been in utter 
ignorance of a ‘ historical Jesus ’ that men snatched at evidence 
of this far-fetched kind. It is in the last degree improbable 
that this writer (Hermas) had before him any tradition that 
either the Son of God or the Spirit or the Logos had become 
incarnate in Jesus or in a ‘Christ.’—ibid. 162. The necessity 
of the Apostle Paul to the imagination of the so-called Haere- 
tics corresponded to the necessity on the Katholic side of the 
Apostle Peter. The Katholics had the last word; and have 
contrived by an effort of poetic imagination to represent their 
chief apostle as the elder in election. As far as the evidence 
goes, we must hold that Peter is rather the later and the 
feebler creation called forth by the intense jealousy of the 
Markionite apostle.—Antiqua Mater, 295. The next thing w~as 
to found the whole Church on Peter. As the Katholics had 
the last ivord we find it in Matthew, xvi. 18. “ Petros one of 

the Apostles ” says Justin, p. 105. Tertullian writes against 
Markion as if he were living, apparently from the year 207 ; 
and in this interval of forty or fifty years the whole legend of 
Peter and the other apostles must have sprung up.—ibid. 300. 
Three hundred and sixty prophets will go out from the city 
Jerusalem, and indeed in the name of the Lord of Greatness, 
and those vagabundi (wandering).—Codex Nazoria, I. 56. We 
cannot certainly date the Christian use of the term apostles 
until the time of Justin. 1 —Ant. Mater, 55. The history of the 


1 Persuaded by the teaching (SiSaxi?) from his apostles.—Justin, Apol. I. p. 156. 
The prophets sent off to announce the things from Him are called both Angels and Apos¬ 
tles from the God.—Justin, Trypho, p. 85. The square stones, white and fitting their 
joints, these are the r.postles and overseers and teachers and stewards that walk in the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBTONITES. 873 


Church and of its dogmas properly begins with the period of 
the Antonines, a.d. 138 - 180 . — ib. pref. p. xix. The world 
swarmed before Justin’s time with a body of men, the first 
‘Propaganda,’ then known as saints and apostles, or holy 
apostles.—ibid. 56 . These were apostles of the Christos. • 
Barnabas, 2, 6, speaks of 12 for a testimony of the 12 tribes in 
regard to the authority of the remission of sins, and Justin 
adds that they set out from Jerusalem (—Ant. Mater, 95 , 96 ). 
If you divide those 360 prophets from Jerusalem by 30 , the 
days in a month, the number 12 will be the result in the Codex 
Nazoria. Showing that the calculations of the Codex Nazoria 
are not entirely removed from those of the Nazoraioi on the 
Jordan. “ The real founders ” (of Christianism), ££ it may be 
inferred, were certain roving teachers called £ Apostles,’ rem¬ 
iniscences of whose instructions had been preserved in cer- 

holiness of the Lord.—Hermas, III. 5. Hernias mentions “ some good announcement,” 
a mere expression not referring to any gospel. But in Hermas the Son of the God is 
the most distinguished Angel, the Great Archangel.—Hermas, Sim. ix. 12, p. 126; Hil- 
genfeld, Hermae Pastor, p. xvi. Here we are evidently on Ebionite ground, for 
Hermas calls this Greatest Angel “the Son of the God.” Still we are not yet on 
Gospel ground, for the Gospels (written in Greek) call him Iesus and give him a human 
body.—Matthew, i. 21; Luke, xxiv. 39. Hermas does not mention the name Jesus or 
Christ.—Antiqua Mater, pp. 97, 152. But Hermas mentions the Saints as the back¬ 
ground of the picture that he draws.—Herm. Vis. I. 1, 3 ; II. 3; III. 3. And in II. 2 
he speaks of oppression , while in Vis. III. 1 we find “ suffering for the Name of God.” 
In Rev. ii. 2 we find unacceptable apostles, in vii. 14 great affliction, in xiii. 10 the 
Sauits : while both Hermas and the Apokalypse use the famous word Gentiles. “ Giv¬ 
ing power over the Gentiles,” “who say they are Jews but are not,” the twenty-four 
elders, “ all the tribes of the Children of Israel,” and “ outside are the dogs ” make the 
Apokalypse look as if it had been originally a portion of the literature of the^ Disper¬ 
sion.’ When we get back prior to a.d. 125 we come upon a between period of Messi- 
anism,—between the year 70 and the earliest gospel. But it does not follow that a 
gospel earlier than Matthew’s gospel was produced prior to 136-140. The Siphri ha 
Minim that Delitzsch relies on can mean the books of half a dozen different sects from 
Elxai to Simon Magus. Minim means sectarians, haeretists. There were Genistae, 
Meristae, Galileans, Hellenists, Baptists, Masbotheans, Gnostics of all kinds, Naaseni, 
Sethians, Nikolaitans, Elkesaites, Nazoria, Ebionites, etc. Those that received “the 
law and the word that came from Ierusalem through the apostles of the Iesoua ” ac¬ 
cepted the law of the Saviour. But those that believed that Iesous the Healer was 
a man having flesh were on the side of the Gospels, influenced by them. The Gnos¬ 
tics could believe in Iesoua the Saviour; but, like psalm ii. they denied that the Son 
came in the flesh. In the 2nd century the book called Didache contained rules for the 
conduct of life.—Antiqua Mater, 57-65. The Hagioi are the Saints and Teachers of 
the word of God.—ibid. 54. Justin p. 89 speaks of John the author of the Apokalypse 
as one of the apostles of the Christos. On p. 107 he mentions 1 the apostles of the 
Iesous.’ That to Justin the Christos and the Saviour (Iesoua) were one, needs no 
proof. The number 12 points out the divinity of the Saviour referred to. 


874 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tain note-books accessible to Justin.”—Antiqua Mater, 43. 
Elxai, who sided with the Ebionites, taught a baptism in the 
name of the Most High God and of his Son the King, and to 
invoke the 7 witnesses named in his book. Taking the Sabian 
doctrine as a criterion of the Jordan Religion (which the Jews 
shared.—Isaiah, xxiv. 21; Matthew, iii. 5-7) we find that the 
first chapter of Genesis is largely to be found in Hermes Tris- 
megistus, cap. 1, and Sabianism seems to have been nearer 
to the religion of the Jewish masses in the doctrine of the 
gnosis regarding Angels than is usually stated.—Rev. i. 12 ff; 
Gen. ii. 2 ; vii. 2. Then the people over the Jordan, in Idumea 
and Nabathaea, the Ebionites and Nazoria, as well as the Es- 
senes, had a great respect for Moses. The Ebionites partic¬ 
ularly adhered to the Law.—Matthew, v. 17, 18. But the 
Pharisees, after Jerusalem fell, still had some influence until 
Bar Cocheba’s rebellion. Under them the Law still obtained, 
while the Pharisees were in the seat of Moses. But when, 
after 135, no Jew could enter Jerusalem under pain of death 
the Essene-Ebionite Evangel of Matthew assails the Pharisees 
(—xxiii. 2-8), calls them stuccoed tombs (Whitened Sepulchres), 
bids them beware and clean themselves inside (xxiii. 13, 15, 
26), calls them Children of Gehenna, it is evident that these 
complimentary expressions were more freely used by the Saints 
against the hated adversaries after these had fallen from the 
imperatorial grace of Hadrian than before. We know not in 
what town or seaport of Palestine Matthew’s Gospel was writ¬ 
ten. All we know is that the Kara Ma66cuov came after the 
“ Gospel according to the Hebrews.” See Matth. xv. 13, 14; 
xvi. 3, 4. Communism is the very essence of the Essene-Ebi- 
onism.—Matth. v., vi., vii., x.; Acts, iv. 32-37. Consequently, 
communists would be on bad terms with everybody else who 
did not belong to their “ Kingdom Come.” 

The Judaisers at Rome have been the nucleus of the Chris¬ 
tians.—Ernest Havet, Christianisme, III. 484. Out of the con¬ 
nection of the T sign with the sun, as the Christians of the 
first centuries supposed, is explained why so learned a script¬ 
ure-scholar (Scliriftkenner) as Clemens Alexandrinus held it 
as no mere child’s play that the numerical value of the Old- 
Hebrew letter tau, 300, pointed to the 300 Ellen (yards) of 
Noah’s ark, whose name also he could connect with the sun. 
At all events he points out that Noah’s ark was built accord- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 875 


ing to exact proportions, and ‘ through divine ideas, that is, 
through the gift of insight ’ or gnosis, which he describes as 
the secret science of the Initiated still existing in his time and 
resting on interior revelation. The tau T was originally con¬ 
nected with the Pleiad Year (?) later with the sun the symbol 
of the Word of God. So it is no groundless assumption that 
the Targumists interpreted the scripture according to verbal 
and historical tradition, gnosis or secret doctrine of the Ini¬ 
tiated.—Ernest Yon Bunsen, Symbol des Kreuzes, p. 170. This 
connects the Targumists with the Kabbalah of the Book Sohar. 
Paulus, too, refers to the Hidden Wisdom.—1 Cor. ii. 7; iv. 1. 
The flood-story of Genesis connects itself with the autumnal 
rains and the Pleiads, Seven Stars. Hence Noach (Anoch, 
Na’h) takes the animals by sevens into the Ark. Eusebius, H. 
E. II. 17, says that the Tlierapeutae considered the verbal in¬ 
terpretation as signs indicative of a secret sense communicated 
in obscure intimations; and identifies Therapeute practices 
with those of the apostles and Jewish Communists. 

But Some of the Ebionites thought Adam to be the Christos 
(Messiah).—Epiphanius, contra Haer. xxx. 3. One sort of 
Ebionites held Iesus to be the son of Joseph, the other agreed 
with Matthew, i. 20, 21.—Origen, Cels. v. Irenaeus, I. xxvi. 
Ebion affected the impure superstition of the Samaritans. 
Again, it took its name from the Jews, its doctrines (opinions) 
from Ossaians, Nazaraians and Nasaraeans. Then it endeav¬ 
ored to usurp the form (ideas) of the Kerinthians, the wicked¬ 
ness of the Karpokratians, and finally the appellation of the 
Christians : certainly not, with their name, their conduct, pur¬ 
pose (yi/c ofJLrjv, opinion), gnosis, and union (or agreement) in re¬ 
gard to the faith of the Evangels and Apostles. Being in the 
midst of all, so to speak, it is none. Being Samaritan on ac¬ 
count of its beastliness, it refuses the name. But confessing 
itself Jewish it is opposed to them, although partly agreeing 
with them. Ebion agrees with the rest, except that it adopts 
the Law, sabbatism, circumcision, and usages of the Jews and 
Samareitans. The Ebionim avoid touching some (any) of the 
other tribes (or sorts). And on each day, if ever they unite 
with a woman and get up from her, they are baptised in the 
waters. If on coming out of the waters the Ebionite meets 
any one he must be baptised over again, with his clothes. At 
present, virginity and self-denial (enkrateia) are altogether 


876 


TEE GEEBERS OF EEBROE. 


given up among them. At one time they sanctified virginity 1 
(in the time of James the Brother of the Lord). And the be¬ 
ginning of this was after Jerusalem was taken (by the Homans). 

1 Pauline.—1 Cor. vii. 1. Basileides (they say) lived under Hadrian, but Hadrian 
lived until 139. Basileides exhibited first Nous (Mind) born from the Unborn Father ; 
but from Nous sprung Logos, afterwards from Logos came Intelligence, from Intelli¬ 
gence Sophia and Dunamis ; but from Dunamis and Sophia sprung the Powers, Princes, 
and Angels, whom, too, he calls the first, and by them the first heaven was made. 
What is noticeable about Basileides is that he holds that the Chief of those Angels, 
who afterwards hold the heaven together and created all things that are in the world 
and made for themselves parts of the earth and of the peoples upon it, is supposed to 
be the God of the Jews. And since he wished to subject the other peoples to the Jews, 
all the other Princes rose up and opposed Him. And therefore the other nations op¬ 
posed the Jews! But the Unborn and Unnamed Father, seeing their perdition, sent 
His Firstborn Nous; and he it is who is called Christos.—Irenaeus, I. xxiii. We see 
here something like the hand of Markion. As Markion came more into notice, from 
154 to 166, this does not tend to make Basileides appear earlier than about 144-150. 
Like Basileides, the Epistle to the Colossians declares the Son to be the Chief, the 
Firstborn of all creation, whether in heaven or on earth, the seen or the unseen, whether 
1 Thrones ’ or ‘ Lordships ’ or * Leaders ’ or ‘Powers.’ Those Angels “that hold the 
world together ’’ remind us of the Seven Angels of Saturninus and the Apokalypse. Sa- 
turninus is dated by D. Chwolsohn (I. 113) at 130. Irenaeus contrives to mention Basi¬ 
leides together with Saturninus in such a way as to give the impression that they were 
about the same time. We rather think that Basileides came after Saturninus. But 
Irenaeus wrote his first three books about as early as 185-187. Comp. Supernat. Rel. 
II. 213. 

Basileides lived in Alexandria about 125 (according to Supernat. Rel. II. 41, where 
we are warned to exercise caution, as all that is known of him comes from his oppo¬ 
nents ; Eusebius, H. E. iv. 7 ; a great partisan). Basileides wrote an evangel and dared 
to call it by his own name.—Origen, Horn. i. in Lucam. Supposed by Supern. Rel. II. 
43 to have been a form of the Gospel according to the Hebrews. The followers of 
Basileides affirm that Glaukias was his teacher, the interpreter of Peter.—Clemens Al. 
Strom, vii. 17. § 106. But it is plain that Basileides ignores entirely the canonical 
evangels, and not only does not offer any proof of their existence, but proves that he 
did not recognise any such works as of authority.—ibid. 45. The Commentary of 
Basileides was upon his own gospel, whether it was the Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews or the Egyptians.—Supernat. Rel. II. 46, 51. 

When Basileides is quoted as knowing the Gospels, the passages were taken from 
his School, or from writings of Gnostics of his own time.—ib. II. 52-55. In nothing 
does Valentinus afford any evidence even of the existence of our Synoptic Gospels; 
and even in the time of Irenaeus the Valentinians rejected the writings of the New 
Testament as authoritative documents, which they certainly would not have done had 
the Founder of their sect himself acknowledged them. Moreover, his perfectly ortho¬ 
dox contemporaries recognised no other Holy Scriptures than those of the Old Testa¬ 
ment. —ib. II. 77. Compare the position which Papias takes against the scripta. 

Valentinus claimed (according to Clemens Al.) to have direct traditions from the 
Apostles, his teacher being Theodas a disciple of the Apostle Paul. But Hippolytus dis¬ 
tinctly affirms that Valentinus derived his system from Pythagoras and Plato and “not 
from the Gospels ” (ovk an'o twv EuayyeAiW). Irenaeus, too, asserts that the Valentinians 
derive their views from unwritten or unscriptural sources, and accuses them of reject¬ 
ing the Gospels : For they say that the truth was not conveyed by written records but 
by viva voce.—ib. II. 76; Irenaeus, III. ii. 1. Observe here that Papias in like man- 


THE GllEAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 877 


For since all those who believed on Christos dwelt in the 
Transjordan district (Peraia) at that time, for the most part in 
a certain city of the Decapolis (mentioned in the Evangel) 
called Pella, near Batanea and the Basantis region, the fact 
of their removing at this time and residing there was, for this 
reason (ex tovtov ), a pretext (motive, propliasis) for the Ebion.— 
Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 2. The Ebionites may have avoided 
touching any of the allophuloi (other orders) like the Essene 
highest order of recluses in their monastery; allophulos , liter¬ 
ally, means one of another tribe! In mentioning, in the last 
half of the 4th century, that the Ebionites were at one time as 
strictly wedded to virginity as Philo’s Therapeutae , Epiphanius 
directly connects the sect of Ebionim with the Essenes of 
Josephus, the Iessaeans of Matthew, xix. 9, 12 (who were the 
Ebionites) and Eusebius, H. E. II. chapter 17.—Acts, iv. 32-37. 
In pointing out their former virginity Epiphanius directly 
connects the Ebionites with the Essene Communism and Bap¬ 
tism, as well as the Hindu latric sect: showing also that the 
first idea among the Ebionites regarding the Messiah was that 
he was an Angel, created, but superior to the other Arch¬ 
angels. A stronger form of this view is seen in psalm ii.; and 
something similar in the words of the Jewish Sibyl: “ Then 
from the sun God shall send a King.” With this we have to 
combine Isaiah’s “Presence Angel,” Philo’s “Oldest Angel,” 
and the “ Angel Iesua ” of the Jews. Finally, Epiphanius 
locates the Ebionites beyond Jordan as we have done. 

ner prefers the living and abiding voice (of tradition).—Supern. Rel. I. 445. The 
Valentinians neither consent to Scripture nor to tradition.—Irenaeus, III. ii. 2. If 
they did not, who lived in 180, why should we who live in 1893 ? They had the whole 
testimony before them. Now much of what they knew is made way with. Omnes 
haeretici. Cum enim ex scripturis arguuntur, in accusationem convertuntur ipsarum 
scripturarum, quasi non recte habeant, neque sint ex auctoritate, et quia varie sint dic- 
tae, et quia non possit ex his inveniri veritas ab his qui nesciant Traditionem.—Iren¬ 
aeus, III. ii. 1. It is evident that Irenaeus here makes allusion to the way the contem¬ 
poraneous Haeretici received the latest authorised Gospels. After all this , Matthew’s 
Gospel comes along, stiff against Samaritans, firm for the Ebionite lost sheep of Israel, 
describing (x. 7-20) the way and walk of the apostoloi and prophets according to the 
euangelion and the DidachS (Antiqua Mater, 57): but astonishingly indifferent about 
circumcision, the main thing with Jew and Ebionite ! No, he takes no interest in the 
subject. How many years of conflicts over this question of all questions, described in 
Galatians, had it taken the author of the Gospel according to Matthew to arrive at this 
status of sublime indifference ! Matthew himself, whenever he may have lived, prob¬ 
ably never attained to it. Justin to Trypho, about 162, says that circumcision is 
needful for Jews alone.—Justin, p. 44. It was time then for Matthew’s Gospel not to 
mention the subject. 


878 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


In what are called the Epistles of St. Paul the word Gentiles 
occurs 41 times. In Acts it is found twenty-two times. Acts, 
xiii. 45, 46, indicates that the Messianist preaching* which 
began in the Diaspora was continued among the Gentiles. 
But whence came the spirit that animated the man of Tarsus ? 
Arabia was one of the concurrent sources of his spirit.—Gala¬ 
tians, i. 17. Justin Martyr, too, points to “ Arrhabia ” as the 
country where the Magoi saw the Star of the Saviour. “For 
we saw his star in the sunrise, and came to adore him.” It 
matters not much whether the latest author of the Pauline 
Epistles was not Paul himself. The mere circumstance that 
he used this name proves the existence of an original Paul 
among the Diaspora. Men counterfeit only the genuine coin, 
not the substitute! The policy of the Church was to unite the 
eastern wing to the Hellenic offshoot; and, previously, a great 
missionary had been moving between Antioch and the iEgean 
Sea, who was the Light of the “ Dispersion.” When, there¬ 
fore, the canonical Paulinist mentions the Crucifixion of the 
Christos he shows that he has read either the evangelium that 
Justin Martyr had seen, or some other gospel, very likely the 
Gospel according to Matthew.—Gal. vi. 14; 1 Cor. xv. 3-8. He 
distinctly says: I delivered to you what I too received, that 
Christos died for your sins according to the scriptures!! Hence 
he had read such writings as Daniel, ix. 26 or the Gospel of 
Matthew. Now, if this gospel was not written before a.d. 
150 the author of Galatians and 1st Corinthians must have 
been a very posterior apostle. And if Markion, 1 between 154 
and 166, said that the Iesua (or Ieshua) came down to Kefer 
Naum, a city of Galilee, he of course meant that Iesoua the 
Soter, the Saviour, the Celestial Spirit of the Gnostic system 

1 There are'very strong reasons for considering Markion’s Gospel to be either an 
independent work, derived from the same sources as our third Synoptic, or a more 
primitive version of that Gospel.—Sup. Rel. II. 83, 83, 85, 88, 100, 101, 108,133, 137, 
134, 136, 139, 144. Markion comes after the Paul of our canon.—Comp. Supernat. Rel. 
II. 107, 131, 140. There is no principle of intelligent motive which can account for the 
anomalies presented by Markion’s Gospel, considered as a version of Luke mutilated 
and falsified in the interest of his system.—ib. 135, 126. There is no evidence at all 
that Markion had any knowledge of the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John 
in any form.—ib. 144. Although Markion obviously did not accept any of the Gospels 
which have become canonical it does not by any means follow that he knew anything 
of these particular Gospels. As yet we have not met with any evidence even of their 
existence at a much later period.—ibid. II. 145. Tertullian adv. Markion, iv. 3, shows 
that Markion had read the Epistle to the Galatians, which in our canon Dr. A. D. 
Loman considers late. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. S79 


descended in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar.—Antiqua 
Mater, p. 226. So, apparently, Markion must have had the 
benefit (in c. 150) of some gnosis or gospel from which he got 
thus much information. Tertullian was estopped from saying 
‘ You have no evidence of what occurred in the reign of 
Tiberius,’ for this would have cut the ground from under his 
own feet.—ibid. p. 227. Markion had his eye fixed on Essene 
self-denial and love ; and on the contrast between the spirit 
and the flesh! It is in vain to try to cut off the connection 
between parent and child. Eusebius and Philo both knew 
that the ancestors of the Christians were to be found in Arabia 
and amid the Therapeutae of Mons Nitria, Eusebius traces the 
Christians to such ascetics as Daniel, but Ernest de Bunsen 
connects the Paulinist with Essenism. 

St. Matthew is on an Ebionite foundation because the 
“ Gospel according to the Hebrews ” is Ebionite, Justin Martyr 
is Ebionite, and, before him, the author of the Apokalypse 
was an Ebionite or Jew of the Diaspora (Dispersion) but some¬ 
what earlier, since he does not make any mention of any 
gospel not even of the Gospel of Matthew which is sort of 
Ebionite ; while he does mention the Saints (who it is supposed 
were the Ebionites.—Luke, vi. 20-22).—Rev. xv. 3. The 
Ebionim were not only in Nabathaea, Moab, Bashan, the 
Paneadis, but in the Antiocheian region, Cyprus, and, above 
all, in Asia (—Irenaeus, p. 127. ed. Paris, 1675, Note 1, quotes 
Epiphanius). In Asia Minor (for that is what the word Asia 
anciently meant) the scene of the Apokalypse is laid; and 
finding the Diaspora or Ebionites there, as well as at Rome, 
we grasp the vast extent of an earlier Christianism that w r as in 
part Hellenic, but sometimes contrapauline.—Rev. i. 11; Eu¬ 
sebius, H. E. iii. 27. The Ebionites were in Samaria (—Note 
1 to Irenaeus, p. 127. Epiphan. Haer. xxx. 2, 3) where Justin 
Martyr had formerly lived. The Apokalypse shows that these 
prior Christians were not at all of the Pauline special views, 
and that therefore a contest arose between the “ beggarly 
elements ” of Ebionism and the Pauline universalism. “ The 
Law, then, is not contrary to the promises (announcements) of 
the God. For if a Law able to make live had been given, 
truly from Law might have been justice (righteousness); but 
the Scripture shut up all things in sin in order that the 
promise through faith of Iesoua Massiacha (Iesoua Christou) 


880 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


should be given to those believing. And before the faith came 
we were guarded under Law, shut up for the Revelation of the 
future faith. So that the Law has been our teacher until 
Christ, in order that we might be justified through faith : and 
when the faith came we are no longer under a teacher ; for you 
are all Sons of God through the faith in Christos Iesoua. For 
those of you that have been baptised into Christos have put on 
Christos. There is neither Jew nor Hellen, neither slave nor 
freeman, neither male nor female ; for you all are the posses¬ 
sion of Christos Iesoua. And if you are Christ’s, then you 
are Abraam’s seed, according to promise inheritors.”—Gala¬ 
tians, iii. 24-29; iv. 4, 9. These words created considerable 
commotion between Hellenists and the Ebionites. We see the 
response in Matthew, x. 5, 6. The apostoloi from Ebion are 
no longer to go to the Gentile Greeks nor to any but the Beni 
Israel. Beggarly Elements indeed! “ Apostolum Paulum 

recusant (Ebionaei), apostatam eum Legis dicentes! They 
deny Paul and call him an apostate from the Law ! If he was 
a Jew from Tarsus, he was a Hellenist Jew of the Diaspora. 
One thing, however, is to be noted. Galatians, iv. 4, may have 
known the Gospel according to the Hebrews (Matthew, i. 20) 
for it refers to “ the birth from a woman! ” But Loman’s view, 
that the Epistle to the Galatians was written posterior to the 
genuine Paul, takes away the difficulty. Ebion decided that 
Iesu was merely a man, and only of the seed of Dauid, there¬ 
fore not also Son of the God, manifestly somewhat more 
glorious than the prophets, so that, therefore, among some he 
is said to have been an angel.—Tertullian, de Carne Christi, I. 
i. 2. Epiphanius, contra Haer. 30, said: To begin indeed, 
Ebion decided that the Christos was born from the seed of a 
man, that is, the son of Ioseph himself.—Irenaeus, ed. Paris, 
1675, p. 127, Note 2. The Paulus Canonicus deals with Iesus 
Christus as the Messiah. He takes the ground of the Book 
of Acts, the conciliation, only in part; else why is Galatians 
so contentious ? In a.d. 165-155 or later Justin Martyr is 
silent about Paul, but knows the Apokalypse. But Paulus 
Canonicus regards Iesu as the Christos, while the Ebionites 
did not consider him the Messiah. 

Jerusalem “in bondage with her Children ” . . . “the De¬ 
serted Woman ” (Gal. iv. 25, 27) does not look as if this was 
written until after its destruction. The increase of Her Children 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 881 


points (iv. 27) to the increase of the Christian Diaspora. The 
apostles and “ brothers ” in Iudaea waxed angry when the Gen¬ 
tiles received the teaching of the Christos.—Acts, xi. 1, 8, 9, 
17, 18. Paulus of our canon said : For I ought to have been 
sustained by you ; for I was not inferior to the over much (pre¬ 
dominant) apostles, even if I am nothing! But the signs of 
the apostle were wrought among you in all patience both in 
signs and wonders and powers. For in what were you inferior 
to the other churches except that I myself did not weigh heavily 
on you ? Forgive me this injury !!—Paulus, 2 Cor. xii. 11-14. 
If we compare with this the passages in Galatians, i. 17 ; ii. 6, 
9-16, 19, 21, Acts, vi. 1, we cannot fail to notice a serious doc¬ 
trinal and racial disagreement between the Christians north 
of Antioch and the more southern Ebionites. But it is equally 
clear that the Pauline writer of Galatians knew the Evan- 
gelium. It is also certain that there must have been a prior 
Messianic period of both Jews and Ebionites, prior to the 
time when a Iesu (with two natures, the divine and the human) 
was made part of the Gospel, in fact, its very foundation. 
Psalm, ii., Daniel, the Sibyl, the Apokalypse Henoch and the 
Sohar point directly to that period. And in that period a 
Hellenist Messianism may have sprung up in Antioch and 
have reached Tarsus; but this would not suffice to make a 
Tarsus man leader in Jerusalem. 1 Cor. ix. 5 and 2 Cor. iv. 
8-11 have a late aspect. The Church was very far advanced, 
according to the description. 

The adversaries of the canonical Paul had advocated their 
own Judaist origin as a title of superiority over the Apostle 
of the Gentiles. Epiphanius showed that the Ebionites de¬ 
nied that Paul was a Jew.—Supernat. Religion, III. 316, 317; 
Rev. ii. 2, 9, 14, 20. There was a breach between the refined 
Judaism of the Diaspora and pronounced Hellenism ; and the 
brethren of the Diaspora were equally aloof from the Christiani 
in Justin’s sense—Antiqua Mater, 72, 103, 105. 

Sometimes when a lawyer has no case to stand on he, to 
divert attention from his predicament, batters the opposing 
counsel. The attack on the Scribes and Pharisees suggests 
the suspicion that a wiser man than Tertullian handled the 
case of Matthew. In a late period the Christians were numer¬ 
ous enough to have splits and form parties.—1 Cor. i. 11-13. 
A brisk attack on the Jews and Pharisees would have the ten- 
56 


S82 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


dency to withdraw attention from the origin of Cliristianism. 
The first results of the spread of the Messiah-worship among 
the Gentiles 1 under the original Paulus 2 were probably star¬ 
tling enough to the Encratite Judaists on the Jordan and in 
Nabathaea. Starting with Sabian and Jewish Messianism the 
Jordan populations saw themselves likely to find an opposition 
to their Messianism. 3 We see, after the first exploits of Paul 
and the party whose centre may have been Antioch, how im¬ 
portant it was for the Jordanists and Transjordanists or their 
allies in Pome to support their peculiar position between Juda¬ 
ism, Sabianism, and Samarianism. Nothing but an evangel 
would sustain their predominant status. Otherwise the North¬ 
west would altogether run away with Messianism. An evangel 
would perhaps tend to retain the prestige of the Jordan Chris¬ 
tians coming from the Iessaean Ebionite beyond measure 
apostles of the Messianists of the Jordan.—2 Cor. xii. 11. The 
first effect of this is seen in the subordinate position taken up 
by the Epistles in the New Testament, 4 the Gospels preceding, 

1 As regarding the evangel, indeed, (the Jews are) enemies by reason of you ; but, 
as regards the selection, loved on account of the fathers.—Romans, xi. 28. See verses 
1-29; 1 Cor. xii. 2. 

2 1 Cor. iii. 10 ; iv. 15. “ Ten thousand teachers in Christos.” This looks late, as 

the Paulinist mentions the evangel. If Matthew wrote after 150, the Paulinist must 
be late ; since he mentions “the evangel.” 

3 Their minds were blinded ; for until this day the same veil remains, not with¬ 
drawn, over the reading of the Old Covenant. . . . But even to this day, when Moses 
is read, the veil lies on their heart.—2 Cor. iii. 14, 15. Paul’s “day” wears rather a 
late look. See 1 Timothy, vi. 20. Loinan, Theol. Tijdschrift, 1880. p. 90, thinks that 
1 Tim. vi. 20 refers to Markion. In Rev. xxii. 7, 20, 1 Peter, iv. 7, the Coming of the 
Lord is stated to be immediate. So, too, in 1 Cor. vii. 29-31. In Matthew, xxiv. 3, 
27, 30, 34 ; xxv. 34, it is not so immediate, but still expected. 

4 Romans, iii. 20. Then the division into sects (1 Cor. xi. 19) has a very late look. 
But 1 Cor. xi. 23-26 exhibits a knowledge of the Crucifixion-account in Matthew, which 
is said to date about the middle of the 2nd century. Then the Epistle to the Corin¬ 
thians must be still later. Justin, Matthew, and the Paulinist all wrote in Greek. The 
expression 1 down to the present day ’ in Matthew, xxviii. 15, indicates that the Greek 
Matthew is late. The Greek alone is a late enough symptom; since the Gospel of 
Matthew is a genuine Greek Gospel, and no translation ; yet, before it was the Ara- 
mean “Gospel according to the Hebrews,” written in Hebrew characters. Therefore, 
Justin, Matthew and the Pauline Epistles cannot be placed in the earliest Ebionite 
Palestine period, but are of a secondary date.—2 Cor. iii. 14. Matthew’s Gospel is an 
original Greek Gospel, founded on the Gospel of the Hebrews, i.e. Ebionites; and, 
while not translated from the “ Gospel according to the Hebrews,” yet is preceded by a 
large number of passages taken by Justin Martyr from Peter's Gospel or out of the 
“Gospel according to the Hebrews,” w r ho knows these evangels alone. There were dif¬ 
ferences of opinion among the different divisions of Ebionites, and the fact that the 
Ebionites used only the Gospel according to Matthew (Irenaeus, I. xxvi.) authenticates 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 883 


followed by tlie extraordinary views contained in the Epistles. 
These last give no account perhaps of the preceding period of 
activity in the time of the first Paul, but introduce us to a sort 
of preaching utterly unknown to the Four Gospels. The 
authors know nothing of an earlier period than their own, they 
feel absolved from the necessity of proving that any one was 
the Christ, or that Christ was crucified. All this was cared for 
and attended to in a former platform on which they stood. 
There was no occasion to prove the platform ; that could take 
care of itself. All that remained to do was to handle the vast 
results arising out of the event of a Crucified Redeemer! The 
Pauline self-consciousness is confession ! The inner-conscious¬ 
ness of the Paulinist writer has let out the secret, that he came 
late , after all the rest!! The evangel had forced his party’s 
hand ; and the Paulus Canonicus saw himself turned off on an¬ 
other subject,—Circumcision, Christ Crucified, and the infer¬ 
ences resulting therefrom, in connection with the Law of 
Moses. The Ebionite had held his own! 1 Look how he con¬ 
its close relation to the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Still, Tertullian must speak 
of other branches of the Ebionites than the one just referred to, since he states that the 
Ebionites regarded Iesus only as a man (—Euseb. H. E. iii. 27)—a position that Kerin- 
thus is said to have held. Now the Ebionites would not be very likely to use a Greek 
evangel; but the DidachS was written in Greek, and the Diaspora read the Septuagint 
Greek Bible ; we can perhaps interpret the w r ords of Irenaeus to mean the “ Gospel ac¬ 
cording to the Hebrews ” when he uses Matthew’s name. Even that (i.e. the Hebrew 
Gospel) was written first in Greek, afterwards put into Aramean, according to Resch, 
p. 111. The Nazorene Gospel was that commonly called the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews, and the same Gospel was in use among the Ebionites.—Supernat. Relig. I. p. 
420. Hegesippus knew of no canonical Scriptures of the New Testament; like Justin, 
he rejected the Apostle Paul; he still regarded the Gospel according to the Hebrews 
with respect, and made use of no other.—ibid. 421. From Justin’s quotations, it would 
seem to have been the Gospel of Peter or the Gospel according to the Hebrews. How 
then are we to account for the names of certain prominent apostles mentioned in Gala¬ 
tians, or in Justin’s dialogue, or by Hegesippus ? Peter’s name may have been earlier 
put in as a counterpoise to the Apostle Paul. Where James and John were obtained 
except from the association of Iessaean apostles, it is hard to say. But as the Chris¬ 
tians, like the Essenes, rose with the sun and paid their adoration to the Christos (the 
King Sun, as Logos) it is plain where the number 12 (apostles) came from; but Paul 
attached no exclusive importance to the Twelve. It is solar, Sabian, Ebionite. The 
Anointed King has been appointed to reign over all hosts.—The Sohar to Gen. xl. 10. 
Where the Saints (Hagioi) are found, the apostles, prophets, teachers are not far off; 
some appear to have been itinerant.—Antiqua Mater, 54, 64, 71. But the Paulinist, 2 
Cor. xi. 13, is firing at some ‘apostles.’ 

1 Hegesippus said: There were also different opinions in the Circumcision among 
the Children of Israel, against the tribe of Iudah and the Messiah, namely, the Es¬ 
senes, the Galileans, Hemerobaptists, the Masbothoeans, the Samaritans, the Sadukees 
and Pharisees.—Eusebius, H. E. iv. 22. The word for sectarian opinion is haeresis. 


884 


THE QHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tends against Simon, Paulus and Markion; and see how he 
girds himself to a new effort in the Clementine Homilies! Ob¬ 
serve too the fling at the apostles in Galatians, ii. 8, 9. It 
shows that the name ‘ apostles ’ had come into use to signify 
the leaders. Galatians, ii. 8, is evidently late; and verse 9 
shows the existing hostile animus. 

In Barnabas the theoretic necessity was that the Son of 
God should come in the flesh that he might abolish death and 
show forth a resurrection.—Antiqua Mater, 200. In a.d. 97 
Elxai knows no Jesus. But Barnabas 138-170, or later, admits 
a Jesus, and Kerinthus (on Irenaeus’s own statement) only ad¬ 
mits the son of a human father by the Maria. Saturninus 
does not mention Jesus at all, only the Unborn Christos the 
Salvator (one old Ms. reading ignotum for innatum ; Elxai 
has “ Christos a manlike figure unseen by men.”—Hilgenfeld, 
N. T. extra canon, recept. III. p. 158). The Sampsaioi (Sun- 
worshippers) thought that the Christos was a created being 
and always appearing at some time, and was first formed in 
the Adam, and put off the body of the Adam and put it on 
again when he wished.—Hilgenfeld, 158, Epiphanius, Haer. 
LIII. 1. Elxai follows the Jews in the keeping the sabbath, 
circumcision, and adhering wholly to the Law ; only, like the 
Nasaraioi, he rejects the Bibles.—Hilg. p. 162 ; Haer. xix. 5. 
The Essenes revered the divinity in the sun. 1 —Jos., Wars, II. 7, 
8. The Ebionites selected the day of the Sun, Sunday, for Lo¬ 
gos-worship. The pure Christos doctrine followed the Jewish 
doctrine of the Messiah. In these days the disciples (Greeks 


We have, then, at least four (rather, ten) sects of Minim mentioned by Hegesippus.— 
Eusebius, iv. 23. If to the Essenes, Hemerobaptists and Galileans we add the sects 
Elchasites and Ebionites we shall see that the expression 4 4 Books of the Haeretists 
(Siphri haminim) ” can be used of other books than the 44 Gospel according to the He¬ 
brews.” The Nazoria, Ebionites, Essenes and Elchasaites, all were in possession of 
Siphri haminim ; not to mention Simon’s followers, et al. When some could read the 
books of the Hebrew Bible, they certainly could read a little Aramean ; and it is hardly 
to be maintained that the Essenes or Iessaeans or Nazoria had no lists of the Angel 
names. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the Essenes and Nazoria had be¬ 
fore the Christian era held views concerning the Son of the God more in consonance 
with psalm second than with those of the Ebionites about whom Tertullian makes com¬ 
plaint. There were, however, Ebionites who acknowledged Paul without claiming him 
for their community.—Credner, Beitrage, I. 370, 371. Lucian knows (c. 165) that the 
strongholds of the Christiani are in Syria, Palestine and Asia Minor.—Supern. Rel. p. 
256. Some Ebionites regarded Paulus as apostle to the heathen.—Credner, I. 370. The 
Ebionites considered Peter the Apostle to the heathen.—Euseb. H. E. iii. 4 ; 1 Peter, 1. 

1 psalm, ii. 2, 7, 12; xix. 6 Septuagint; Num. xxv. 4. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONTTES. 885 


vs. Hebrews) were increasing.—Acts, vi. 1. In those days (of 
self-denial) was Nikolaos of Antioch, one of seven. By the 
hands of the apostles (compare the rules in the Didache gov¬ 
erning the apostles and prophets) many signs and miracles were 
wrought. The people made much of them, and more believers 
were still added to the Lord, crowds of men and women. 
They brought out the sick into the squares, that, as Peter 
came, his shadow perhaps might overshadow some one of 
them.—Acts, v. 15, 16. It overshadowed the Eastern and Ro¬ 
manist Church.—Matthew, xvi. 18. Faith moves mountains of 
men (xvii. 20). 

It looks very much as if Irenaeus, I. xxvi. (xxvii.) was de¬ 
scribing the Ebionite seceders, who under Markus, in 136, 
settled in Jerusalem. Those Ebionites who differed from 
Kerinthus concerning the Lord and used only the Evangel ac¬ 
cording to Matthew (—Irenaeus, I. xxvi.) must have been a late 
branch of the Ebionites, since Irenaeus, I. xxxiv., says that 
(according to one set of Gnostics) many of the disciples of 
Iesu did not know the descent of the Christos into Iesu: but 
that when he descended upon Iesu then he began to perform 
miracles, and to heal, and to announce the Unknown Father, 
(Remember Markion’s Unknown God) and openly to confess 
himself the Son of the First Man. 1 Now we have a different 
set of Ebionites, who were probably more primitive than the 
Ebionites of Irenaeus, I. xxvi. (xxvii.). For Epiphanius, xxx. 
16, says of his Ebionites : They do not say that he (Christos) 
has been born 2 from God the Father, but has been created, as 
one of the archangels, but greater than these, and that he is 
Lord of the Angels and of all things made by the Almighty. 
According to Uhlhorn, p. 397, Christos appears as Angel. 
These last Ebionites were not of the sort that held the Christos 
to have been begotten, not made (like the Ebionites in Luke, 
i.), but were closely related to the Ebionites that Tertullian 
hated. These last, if they recognised a Iesu at all, regarded 
him as the son of Joseph, a man born in the flesh like other 
men, not a virginal birth. If, then, the Ebionites, in Epi¬ 
phanius, xxx. 16, held the earliest Christian doctrine, the doc- 

1 This is what Irenaeus, I. xxv. claims that Kerinthus taught. 

2 This is the Hermes doctrine. Hermes Trismegistus dates before the Christian 
period. Of course the Christian writers used Hermetic as well as Kabalah scriptures. 
—Plut., De Iside, 37. 


886 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


trine of a Christ not manifest in the flesh, Philo’s Logos-doc¬ 
trine, we have substantial evidence that the descent of the 
Christos into a man was not held much before the 4 Gospel 
according to the Hebrews ’ was written and not until after a.d. 
136, at Aelia Capitolina, where one church was given special 
permission to reside. The theory of the Kabalah that the 
Microprosopos was manifested and not manifested (Sohar, 
Siphra di Xeniutha, IV. 1) does not mean that the Shortface 
was manifested in Iesu, for this name is not known to the So¬ 
har. The word gnosis means, as applied to Christians, those 
who have the intuition of divine things. So Clemens Alexan- 
drinus applied it (Menard, p. xxxii.). Menard, p. lxi. discovers 
relations between Christianism and the Hermetic doctrines. 
Hermes said that the Father made the body of the universe 
with all the matter that he had under his power.—Menard, p. 
49. This is Ebionite doctrine.—Irenaeus, I. xxvi.; Uhlhorn, p. 
180-185. The generative and Creative Word renders the water 
productive.—Menard, Hermes, p. 281. The heaven and the 
earth are governed by the Sun, the Creator.—ib., p. 287. “ The 

Logos became united to the Creative Mind; ” 44 the Creative 
Mind together with the Logos.”—The Poimander, 10, 11. Par- 
they. The Logos is the Saviour of the really existing things.— 
Parthey, logos katholikos, 12. The Father, cause of sons and 
seed and food, takes desire of what is good through the sun.— 
ibid, the Kleis, 3. A stele in the Berlin Museum (says Mar- 
iette) calls the Sun the Firstborn, the Son of God, the Logos. 
—Menard, Hermes, p. xliii. Who is the generator of re¬ 
generation ? The Son of the God, one Man, by God’s will.— 
Hermes, logos apokruphos, 4. ed. Parthei. The only salvation 
for man is the gnosis of God.—Hermes, Kleis, 15. To us has 
come the Gnosis of the God, and when this comes, agnoia 
(ignorance) has been driven out.—ib., logos apokruphos, 8. 
This 44 agnoia ” which Justin Martyr uses is the expression 
that Lucian thought ridiculous in about a.d. 160. 

Philo and Josephus never speak of Messianic hopes ; Philo, 
however represents the Jews of the Diaspora returning to take 
possession of Jerusalem conducted by a personage who is vis¬ 
ible only for them.—Ernest Havet, le Christianisme, III. 388- 
389. There were disciples (of Iesua) according to certain 
gnostics who did not know (Iren. I. xxxiv. 136, 137,) the de¬ 
scent of the Christos into Iesu; and there were disciples of 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 887 

John the Baptist who had not heard of the spirit (the pneuma). 
—Acts, xix. 2. There was a great variety of doctrine among 
the Ebionites. The Christos descended in gnostic fashion (— 
Iren. I. xxv. compare xxxiv.) on Iesu (according to Irenaens, I. 
xxv.). He charges Kerinthus with this view. But the Ebion- 
ite gnostic idea preceded every thing else, except the old Tes¬ 
tament, and probably preceded some of that. The Christos 
appears as the Chief of the six archangels in the Book 
of Henoch, was represented by Elxai as a human figure of 
enormous size, the Pastor Hermae represents him as Angel, 
many Doketae so regarded him, and he was called the Great 
King.—Uhlhorn, 397, 398. If the Book dates about a.d. 100 
(—Ferd. Philippi, p. 30) then the Book of Henoch would 
be contemporaneous with Elxai. The Book of Henoch (c. 
100) makes no reference to a Iesus, but mentions a Christos. 
The fourth Esdras 1 (c. 100) in the Syrian, Aethiopian and Ar¬ 
menian texts knows only the word Messiah. Iesus was only 
put in, in the Bomanist Latin text. The strongest evidence 
that the Messiah or Christos was not at first connected with 
the idea of any man 2 is found in the kabalah, the oldest Jew¬ 
ish tradition. For the Sohar knows the Messiah only as the 
King of the Angels, it knows nothing of Iesu and never men¬ 
tions him. Consequently the history of Iesu is a late addition 
to the Messiah doctrine. There were two factions of the 
Ebionites : some asserted that Iesus was purely and simply 
a mere man born from Ioseph and Maria; others confessed 
that he was taken up by the virgin from the holy spirit (e 
sancto Spiritu) even as they denied that he is God and the 
Logos, or (that he) existed before.—Epiphanius, Animadvers. 
to Haeresis, xxx.; Eusebius, III. 21. Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 

1 The 4th Esdras dates itself about 30 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, 
and speaks of the desertion of Sion and the abundance of Babylon.—4th Esdras, iii. 1. 

2 . 

2 In Jacob the Archangel the author of the first evangel had a specimen of an An¬ 
gel brought down from the skies and declared a man.—Gen.- xxxii. 29-32. Thus from 
an Archangel Iaqab is (euhemeristically) turned into a man. It would be a similar 
mental process in Saint Matthew’s time (about a.d. 150) to make out of the Angel 
Iesua a man Iesua, Iesu. The popular idea of the Son of David would suit. Hence 
the Genealogy.—Matthew, i. 6, 17. The time to do such a thing would be when Chris- 
tianism was becoming quite popular. There was no inducement at an earlier period. 
Christianism had to be treated on business principles, even if it professed the very op¬ 
posite. Eastern cunning was very profound. Even in Rome, they took a good Ms., 
scratched out a word, and then rewrote the same word (as before) to make it look like 
an altered Ms., thus destroying its value as evidence. It belonged to St. Jerome. 


888 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


16 speaking of the Mysteries of the Ebionities says : They say 
that Iesu was born of the seed of a man and selected, and thus, 
according to election, called Son of God; and that from the 
realm on high the Christos came on him in the form of a dove. 
They do not say that he has been begotten by God the Father, 
but was created, as one of the Archangels, but being greater 
than they : and that he is Lord of the angels. Moreover the 
Ebionites regarded the Christos as the God of the coming 
world, but the Devil as the Lord of the present world. This 
Ebionite view is seen in Rev. xx. 2, 4; 2 Cor. ii. 11. That Ke- 
rinthus shared the opinion of the most liberal branch of the 
Ebionites is plainly indicated in Irenaeus, I. xxv. Since he is 
there described as holding that the Christos was not Iesus and 
was not crucified. It is plain enough that Kerinthus was later 
than we supposed and that the Angel-king was admitted by 
the Ebionim ; as Gabriel was by the Nazoria as the Chief 
Angel. But when the evangelium was sprung upon the 
Ebionites and Nazoria in a land of the ignorant, without 
learning, with few books, no newspapers, the people would be 
found totally uninformed about the situation, probably having 
never heard of the man Iesu, but ready to believe in miracles 
generally. Naturally the credulous would be of many minds, 
and no positive information on the subject. What could be ex¬ 
pected of the Ebionite mind, that believed in demons, seven 
at once in one man, demons entering into a herd of frightened 
pigs, or the Mighty Powers (of the Angelic or Demoniac hosts) 
working through the body of a deceased preacher. 

It was the reign of the Eastern Saints ! But what is sin¬ 
gular, the Paulus of our canon does not repeat the story of the 
Gospels, nor does he recite the teachings of the Iesoua, nor 
the incidents of the trial and crucifixion of the Redeemer of 
mankind. As the parables, the ‘ Essene sentences,’ and the 
trial constitute the most interesting of the particulars given 
in the New Testament, we are convinced that the Pauline 
author was late, that the Evangelium was an Eastern Ebionite 
production and of little interest to the Paulinist, else he would 
have referred to it more in detail. The Paulinist knows that 
Iesu was crucified. He does not tell us who Iesu was; but 
that he rose from the dead.—Rom. viii. 34. There I saw One 
who had a Head of Days and His Head was white like wool, 
and with him was another whose face was like the appearance 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 889 


of a man, and his countenance was full of charm, like to one 
of the Angels. The Lord of the Spirits has elected that Son 
of Man.—Henoch, cap. 46.1, 2,3, 4. The expression in Daniel, 
vii. 13, 14, is plainly followed by Henoch in cap. 48. 2, 3 and 
his name was named before the Sun, the (Zodiacal) Signs, and 
the Stars. In cap. 52. 4, he is plainly called Christos (Mes- 
siacha). In cap. 55. 4, this Selected One (the Anointed of the 
God) sits on the Divine Throne and gives Judgment in the 
name of the Lord of the Spirits,—as the Messiah does in the 
Sibylline Books. The King that psalm, ii. and the Ebionites 
looked for was no human being, but the King of the Angels, 
the Son of the Man (the Kabalist Man , which is the name of 
Deity itself).—cap. lxix. 26, 27; Bev. xi. 15. 

While now, the Paulus, that in Clemens Al. Stromata vi. 5 
is brought in as speaking, is found still on the Jewish-Chris- 
tian standpoint that he can recommend the Jew-Cliristian 
Sibyl and the Hystaspes book conceived in the same spirit, 
the Pseudoclemens of the Homilies and Becognitions, in con¬ 
sequence of the appearance of Markion, has felt compelled 
to purify the apostolic Christianism from the reproach of 
having, as in the Kerugma Petrou, abandoned the absolute 
prerogatives of Judaism and granted to the Heathen also the 
right to interpret the Old Testament as a book accessible to 
them and therefore to place it on a par with their own writings 
and thereafter also to treat it. Thus now is completely ex¬ 
plained the otherwise inconceivable theory of the hidden 
meaning of Holy Scripture (which was held by Philo, Origen 
and others), of the regard in which Christ was held as the Di¬ 
vine prophet par excellence. But so is also at the same time 
explained the Polemic of the Clementina against the Heathen 
who had made the Sermons of Peter unknowable, against the 
homo inimicus (the inimical man), against Saul, the not con¬ 
verted to the Paul, id est, against the impersonation of the 
Judaism that is raging against itself and therefore also rav¬ 
ing against the Christians, and against the quasi converted 
Magus, that is, against the Markionites who in this way 
sought to insinuate themselves into Christianism, by referring 
to the false apostle, namely the falsified apostle of our Epistle 
to the Galatians. 

First after the appearance of the positive antijewish gnosis 
is the appearance of the Clementina conceivable ; then first is 


890 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the relation between the Kerugmabook cited by Clemens Al. 
and the doubtful Kerugmata Petri of the Clementina plain to 
us, if we regard the last as called out by the first; then first 
becomes to us that which has been laid in the mouth of Paulus 
by the Anonymus of Stromata VI. 5 fully comprehensible if we 
think the historical Paul nearer to Judaism than to Markion 
and place him nearer to the ‘ Acts ’ than to the Epistle to the 
Galatians. 

Begarded in this light, Clemens Alexandrinus becomes a 
witness for the origin of the Epistle to the Galatians. If 
Irenaeus assures us that the Ebionites accept only the Mat- 
tliew-Evangeliuin and reject the Apostle Paulus, this simply 
means that they do not admit into their harbor the new lading 
sailing under old apostolic flags, if we too out of this testimony 
of Irenaeus cannot fully show that our canonical Matthew- 
Gospel has been accepted as a whole by these conservative 
people. The last is admitted by Hilgenfeld. In reference to 
John’s Gospel Hilgenfeld agrees with Loman. Only one step 
further, if he should go, and all would be clear. But this step 
means that he recognise : The Nazarenes could at the same 
time and with the same right ascribe to Paulus as the last of 
all apostles the evangelisation of the entire coast of the Med¬ 
iterranean Sea and reject the Epistles which the Katholic 
Church ascribed to him, if the picture of Paulus, that these 
people had borrowed from the conservative direction, from 
the oldchristian tradition, varied perceptibly from that of the 
so-called Pauline Epistles.—Loman ; Schmidt, 191-193. 

The testimony of Hieronymus regarding the Jew-Chris- 
tians who loved Paulus ceases to astonish. Loman mentions 
the so-called testimenta of the 12 patriarchs—ib. 193. This 
book was once supposed to be apart of Jew-Christian litera¬ 
ture, then again Paulinist, and last a production of the two 
other parties, first through rewriting and alteration become 
what it now is. Loman recognises the acuteness of Dr. Vorst- 
mann and others recently in their examination of its composi¬ 
tion. But he distinctly says that in this analysis the synthesis 
is wanting so long as we do not fully appreciate in what sort 
of circles the mixtum compositum of this book meets the wishes 
of the readers. The Tubingers by no means knew how to ex¬ 
plain it, while the answer would sound very simple if one only 
strictly adhered to the distinction between Paulus historicus 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 891 


and the Paulus of the canon.—ib. 194. But now if we only- 
drop the first theory (the first lie), the assumption of the gen¬ 
uineness of the first 4 Pauline Epistles the misunderstanding 
between Ritsch and Hilgenfeld disappears. Then, says Loman, 
we regard the author of the Testamenta as one related in spirit 
to the Nazarenes as Hieronymus describes them, and full of 
admiration for Paul the offshoot of the tribe of Benjamin, the 
friend of the Lord (Deut. xxxiii. 12), who, as the Testament of 
Benjamin says, “ has brought to all peoples anew perception,” 
who from the booty taken from Israel has given to the Syna¬ 
gogue of the Heathen, and there even to the end of the times 
will be a beautiful song in the mouth of all, etc.—ib. 195. 
Benjamin’s great descendant Paulus will bring the light of 
knowledge also to the Heathen. As the Nazarenes explained 
Isaiah, viii. 19 f., Paulus was the persona prophesied by the 
prophet, who was called to carry the Gospel to the Heathen, 
and so to spread the risen Light in Galilee over the coasts of 
the Mediterranean. The Nazarenes held that the Evangel 
preached in Galilee which Paul brought to the Heathen is 
nothing but the taking away the yoke of perversion and dark¬ 
ness which through Israel’s pretended Gods and Kings, that is, 
through Pharisees and Scribes (Schriftgelehrte) has been laid 
on the necks of the people. In Paulus canonicus love for 
Israel sits only on the tongue, the love for the Jewish nation 
is dead. Among the Nazarenes and in the author of the (12) 
Testamenta this love is living, and in spite of the judgment of 
God that fell on the people the motive force of their belief and 
hope remained.—ib. 196. 

We point here to this position of the Nazarenes, described 
by Loman, as strikingly identical with Matthew, x. 5, 6, and 
particularly Matthew’s hostility to the Scribes and Pharisees. 
Their identity points to late Nazarenes and a late Matthew- 
Gospel. ( The Ebionites went to the Peraea and the city Pella 
where all Christians dwelt at that time. Hence Ebion’s oppor¬ 
tunity to extend its views. The Elkesaites also rejected the 
whole Apostle Paulus.—ib. 199. It looks exceedingly fishy 
when the so-called Paulus, Gal. i. 14, speaks of his progress 
in Judaism and getting ahead of others by his zeal for the 
traditions (borrowed from or suggested by Acts, viii. 1-19). 

Justin the inveterate opponent of Markion about 150 (say 
rather about 154 or later.— author) acts as if the personage and 


892 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the Epistles of the Paulus either did not exist, or at least had 
nothing- to do with the controversies of his time. Orig-en, II. 
p. 489 against Celsns, V. says of both Haeresies, the Ebionite 
and the Encratite, that some Haeresies do not receive the Epis¬ 
tles of Paul, such as both Ebionites and those called Enkratites. 
The Markionites, decided Encratites like Tatian, equally op¬ 
pose the endeavors of the katholic party to admit the absolute 
authority of Paulus, while they made a free use of the other 
Epistles in so far as they take much from them, other things 
reject, but will know nothing of the Pastoral Epistles in their 
entireness. Severus rejected the Pauline Epistles and even 
the Acts. Loman considers that this antipauline movement in 
Encratite circles points to the deep-incisive Interest of the 
Katholic Church to have Paulus as confederate in opposition 
to the radical Asceticism. Compare Philosophumena p. 276 
ed. Muller, where of 1 Tim. iv. 1-3 it is said: So Paul wrote 
as Prophet against the Encratites ! Baur showed the antien- 
cratite tendency of the Pastoral Epistles. The same tendency 
appears in 1 Timothy. Y. 14 recommends marriage, and iii. 2, 
12, recommends the same status to the bishops and deacons. 
The words ‘ Antitheses of the falsely-named Gnosis ’ remind 
us of the Markionites.—1 Tim. vi. 20, 21. Neither the En¬ 
cratites nor the Ebionites were taken in by Epistles like the 
Pastoral Letters. 

Loman points to the great moderation in the polemic of 
Clemens Alexandrinus against Markion. Clemens never re¬ 
proaches Markion with having made a mistake in the Evangels 
or £ the Apostel.’ He does not like Markion’s forsaking the 
world and his rigorous Askesis connected therewith. As to 
the existence of ‘ Galatians,’ up to the last quarter of the 2nd 
century the Old-Christian Literature affords no actual proof 
of it. Begarding the Synoptic Evangels the first traces of 
Church use are seen already in Justin. The need of authorita¬ 
tive scriptures regarding the existence of Christianism with 
the Old Testament arose first when the want of unanimity in 
the heart of the Christian community itself had reached a high 
stage and threatened the Church with complete destruction. 
The first necessity was that people should have complete cer¬ 
tainty about the words of the Lord ( ipsisissima verba domini) 
and obtain regarding their destiny and their acts an absolutely 
reliable TJrkunde (tradition). This character the Evangels 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 893 


found in circulation bore, so far as people could be convinced 
that they originated out of the Apostolic time and were prop¬ 
erly vouched for by the position of their Apostolic authors. 
The main point was the ‘ logia kuriaka, lechthenta kai prach- 
thenta Iesou,’ as the written and verbal tradition had taken 
and preserved them from the mouth of the 12.—ib. 217. Now 
as to these Logia or oracles of the Lord !! The account given 
by Papias of the work ascribed to Matthew is as follows : “ Mat¬ 
thew composed the oracles in the Hebrew dialect, and every 
one interpreted them as he was able.”—Eusebius, H. E. iii. 39. 
Supernat. Pel. I. 461. Therefore a Matthew composed the 
oracles (or maxims of the Lord). His name may have been 
used subsequently to introduce the first evangel at a late 
period in the second century. At all events, the Gospel named 
after him keeps an eye upon the Ebionites as carefully (Mattli. 
v. 17, 18; x. 5, 6) as the Apokalypse does upon the Diaspora. 
Luke’s Gospel, that is, in its present form was known to the 
author of the epistles to the Gal., Phil., Eph., Kol., and 1 
Thess. The primitive Luke has already used the Epistle to 
the Pomans and the first of Corinthians. Urlukas (the earliest 
Luke) and the authors of £ Romans ’ and ‘ Corinthians ’ have 
here and there made use of a still older gospel.—Bruno Bauer; 
Schmidt, 89, 90. Loman, however, says that a positive influ¬ 
ence of Pauline thoughts in the characteristic form of the 
Epistle to the Galatians begins to first show itself clearly 
after 150, while both the so-called Pauline similarities (Ank- 
lange) about which so much has been said and that, which, in 
this period points to a polemic directed against Paulus, are 
better regarded as an incident (Moment) of a development- 
phase that must have preceded in point of time the era (Zeital- 
ter) of the origin of the first 4 Epistles, especially £ Galatians.’ 
The Pauline Epistles were later than Justin’s time.—ib. 89, 91. 
Take as the starting point for the formation of the evangels a 
fully naive Juden christenthum that had no idea of the prin¬ 
ciple-questions 1 handled in £ Galatians,’ and let this Juden chris- 

1 Questions about main principles, (das von den durch den Galaterbrief behandelten 
prinzipiellen Fragen noch gar keinen Begriff hatte).—Schmidt, p. 94. The belief of the 
earliest apostles could not hold its own before the bitterness of the cross.—Loman; in 
Schmidt, p. 96. According to Loman, Matthew, if he lays strongly tinged especially- 
Jewish expressions in the mouth of Iesu, yet does not hesitate to find the whole col¬ 
legium in the person of Peter, primus inter pares, the first of the apostles, and to 
separate the value of the Messiah-belief of these old Christus-witnesses (the first 


894 : 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tenthum develop itself ever freer and freer up to that uni- 
versalist form that we find in the Epistle to the Galatians and 
in the 4tli Gospel. Luke’s Gospel is the most Paulinist of the 
first 3 Gospels, and the peculiar pauline form, by which the 
sections of the 3d Gospel are distinguished as a rule, speaks 
for a relatively late redaction of these sections ; in other words, 
the specific pauline phraseology of the Lukesections (Lukas- 
perikopen) is to be regarded as a coloring or as a stamp which 
in older texts are brought in and consequently (especially in 
comparison of parallel sections) have to pass as criteria of more 
recent redaction and later origin. Loman infers that the 3d 
Gospel made use of Pauline pieces which for his corelator were 
not yet in existence, at least not yet known. This implies that 
these Pauline passages (Stiicke) also must be of relatively 
later date. If this is not admitted, because this assumption 
would not harmonise with the genuineness of the Pauline Epis¬ 
tles, then we must assign special motives to the other tivo 
Synoptics which caused them to make no use of the aforesaid 

apostoloi, Urapostle) from the thought entertained by the conservative party, as if 
this value consisted in the personal relations of the first apostles with Iesu. Loman 
points to the remarkable connection between the previous glorification of Peter (Matth. 
xvi. 18) and his subsequent fall and the testimony of Paulus concerning himself (Gal. 
i. 15-23). He considers the agreement between these two passages too striking to be 
an accident. Now, however, he perceives that Gal. i. 15 can be explained rather out 
of Matthew, xvi. 13 ff. than vice versa.—Schmidt, 96. If the Paulinist consulted not 
flesh and blood, that is, the Apostles, but went straight to Arabia to the Iessaians, 
Nazorenes, and Ebionites, he was likely to have met there more circumcision than the 
Apostle of uncircumcision would have relished, even if he found the fountain-head of 
Christianism among the poor east of the Jordan instead of at Antioch. But this anti¬ 
thesis implies an estimate formed already of the Paulusevangelium and that of the 
Urapostles, which is suited to a later time rather than to Paulus. But if we regard 
Matthew’s Gospel as earlier than ‘ Galatians ’ then how well all agrees with the spirit 
of the Evangelium whose tendency is to withdraw its authority from the Jewchristian 
Party that based itself upon the exterior human authority of the old apostolic tradi¬ 
tions. There we must hold the passage in Matthew as the original, the ‘ Galatians ’ 
i. 15 ff. as dependent upon it.—ib. p. 97. Tjeenk Willink has thought that the Epistle 
to the Hebrews and the Barnabas-epistle originated under a Paulinist influence ; but 
Schmidt, p. 92, thinks that he has not proved it. Schmidt opposes Loman’s views, 
without taking into consideration all that Church politics had done in the second cen¬ 
tury to efface the facts connected with the early history of Christianism in the 2nd 
century. The run of events, the position and power (and wealth) of Rome favored the 
creation of a Romanist Church, and history is usually less a matter of public concern 
than human interests of another sort. The true history of Messianism or rather Chris¬ 
tianism from 115 to 148 or even later, first among the Diaspora and later in the Church, 
was probably tossed around and changed until its originality disappeared from the 
primitive naive Jew-Christianism. The testimony of the Church from 160 is all in its 
own favor, tells too little of the Diaspora Christians, and is open to suspicion. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 895 


Pauluspieces. It was said that the in general not yet popular 
enough Pauline conception of the Evangel did not agree with 
the standpoint which the party to which Matthew and Mark 
belong occupied. But Matthew and Mark likewise preach a 
universalist Christianity and betray no less sympathy than 
Luke with the main thoughts of Paulus. Then too in heart 
they had broken with the Evangel of the earliest apostles, 
whose belief had not been able to stand up against the Cruci¬ 
fixion.—Loman ; Schmidt, 96. Galatians, i. 15, comes after 
Matthew.—ib. 97. 

The most conducive cause of a Messias-Community was 
the national disaster in the year 70. 1 The Essenism (self-de¬ 
nial) was ready to the hand, with Nazorianism and Ebionism 
affiliated to it. Finally, out of the conflict between the Dias¬ 
pora around Antioch with the Ebionism beyond the Jordan 
came forth in 160-165 ‘ the Gospel according to Matthew ’ with 
its Ebionism and the story of the Crucifixion. Take the Epistle 
to the Galatians, compare it with the Gospel of Matthew; if 
one is not genuine is the other any more so ? If we hesitate 
to admit that still in the second half of the 2nd century with 
so great boldness they made use of fictitious documents in 
fighting doctrines and movements that seemed dangerous, then 
look at a fragment in Eusebius, H.E. v. 16, against Montanism. 
About the year 193 the preparation of writings intended by 
their tone and form to deceive (te imponeeren) must have been 
at the time a not unusual means 2 in the hands of ecclesiasti- 

1 Loman, Theol. Tijdschrift, 1886. p. 83. 

2 Peregrinus understood perfectly the wonderful wisdom of the Christians, asso¬ 
ciating with their priests and scribes. In a short time he showed that they were 
children, being himself prophet, leader of the association, and assembler, and himself 
alone being the whole. And some of the books (bibloi) he interpreted and explained, 
and many too he wrote, and they looked upon him as a god, employed him as lawgiver 
and inscribed him chief. The great, at least, man they still worship, the impaled in 
Palestine, because he introduced this new mystery into life. Then too having been 
arrested for this, he Proteus got into prison. Which very thing he worked around 
into no small distinction for his succeeding life, the miraculous too, and popularity, 
of which he was desirous. When therefore he was in need, the Christians making the 
matter a calamity, moved everything, trying to get him off. And since this was not 
possible every other attention was given him, not superficially, but with zeal. And 
from dawn you could see him at the prison leading around little old women, some 
widows, and orphan children ; and some of them at last too slept inside with him, hav¬ 
ing bribed the prison guards ; then again various dishes were carried in, and their holy 
books were read, and the best Peregrinos (for still he was so called) was dubbed a new 
Socrates by them. Indeed from some of the cities of Asia there were some, the Chris¬ 
tians, furnishing out of the common fund, to aid, counsel, and console the gentleman. 


896 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


cal persons and managements to if possible stop in the birtli 
apparently dangerous movements in the sphere of public 
preaching and practice. Montanus appeared after 170. Clem¬ 
ens Alexandrinus saw positive points of contact between Mar- 
kionite Gnosis and that of the Alexandrian School; moreover 
the theology of Paulus canonicus has an Alexandrian tint, and 
the Alexandrian theology, as far as Philo 1 represents it, did 
not take Messianic expectations into consideration. If to this 
we add that the Epistle of Barnabas (written under Hadrian), 
the oldest document of Christian gnosis, first becomes intelli¬ 
gible when we place it before the Paulus of the canon, then 
there seems to be some ground for concluding that the com¬ 
bination of all these facts is made intelligible by the rejection 
of the now generally adopted hypothesis that in our canon we 
have epistles from the time and from the hand of Paulus his- 
toricus.—Loman, p. 99. The external proofs for the genuine¬ 
ness of the epistles standing in the name of Paulus are. of the 
same intrinsic value as those for the Apostolic origin of the 
fourth evangel.—ibid. p. 100. The circumstance that Galatians 
and Romans are so outspoken on the subject of circumcision 
shows them to be late writings of the 2nd century. Circum¬ 
cision is treated with contempt in the Epistle of Barnabas.— 
Baur, I. p. 144. London. 1875. Williams and Norgate. Barna¬ 
bas mentions a Jesus ; is therefore late. As the Gnostics 
were extremists who like the Essenes gave up the world and 
the flesh for God and the soul it was in keeping that they 
should teach the doctrine of the sacrifice of the flesh. What 
more potent example than that given in the Gospel of the 
Crucifixion! The Paulinist evidently thought so, since he 

Much money also came to Peregrinus on account of his bonds. For the unhappy people 
persuaded themselves that they would be wholly immortal and live to all eternity. On 
which account they despise death and the many willingly surrender themselves. And 
then the lawgiver, the first, persuaded them that they are all brothers of one another : 
when once having transgressed, they will deny the Hellenic Gods, but they should 
adore their impaled sophist and live according to his laws. And their thoughts are 
alike, adopting such without any accurate faith. If therefore any cheat came to them, 
a skilful man, and able to handle matters, immediately in a short time he became very 
rich, laughing at ignorant men.—Lucian, Peregrin. 11-14. Dickens’s account of the 
Rev. Stiggins in prison is far behind Lucian’s Peregrinos. Lucian wrote his Peregri- 
nos after 165, since he describes his death by fire; therefore not ten years after the 
k Gospel according to Matthew ’ appeared. Therefore he had heard the story about the 
crucifixion. He in 165 saw the death of Proteus who burned himself. 

1 Compare Philo’s Therapeutae whom Eusebius calls the early Christians. They 
and their Arabian allies were the forerunners of the Ebionites. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 897 

preached “ Christos Crucified.” Mithra in the later times was 
regarded as a God full of love.—Lassen, Ind. Alt. II. 834. 2nd 
ed. See Galatians, ii. 20. Mithra, however, was born Dec. 
25th at Christmas ; and in a cave. So was the Christos.—Jus¬ 
tin contra TrypllO, p. 87. Kai aapKos dvdcrTacnv yevr)CT€ 0 $(u €7ricrTa- 
/xeda : We know there will be resurrection of the flesh.—Justin, 
p. 89. See Luke, xxiv. 39. 

The Historical Paul (and the Paulinist writer probably) 
recognised the Jewish Law as binding so far as its morality 
is concerned, and, so far as it relates to Ceremonial and Ritual, 
to let it stand at least for the Jew-Christians if only out of na¬ 
tional regards and for the sake of custom to be observed even 
by the Jew-Cliristian. Paul summoned in Heathenism a Chris- 
tianism to life, that acknowledged the moral law as obligatory, 
but threw off the Ceremonial and Ritual Law entirely. Conse¬ 
quently his practice towards the Heathenchristians must re¬ 
sult, for the Jew-Christians who lived with the Heathenchris¬ 
tians, in a depreciation of the Ceremonial and Ritual Law.— 
Daniel Volter, Theol. Tijdschr. 1889. p. 290; see Acts, xxi. 21. 
But in all this we see the potence of the Jewish Principle of 
Life. 

The Religion of Messianism is, like the theories of the 
transjordan orientals, the offspring of the Eastern philosophy. 
We first find the Saints in possession of the Religion of the 
Messiah.—Acts, ix. 32, Dan. vii. 18. But the Duke of Somer¬ 
set tells us that in the Jewish mind religion and philosophy 
were indissolubly blended. The Hebrew Scriptures were sup¬ 
posed to contain a vast scheme of recondite philosophy, which 
could be unfolded by learned men under the assistance of 
Divine favor. Many allegorical interpretations of the older 
creed are found in the Septuagint version. Philo too makes 
Scripture the foundation for meanings that never were in it. 
The Jewish synagogues had departed to some extent from the 
literal meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures, as might be con¬ 
jectured from the writings of Philo. The synagogues to 
whom Paul addressed his epistles must have been imbued 
with similar notions, otherwise they would have objected to 
Paul’s allegorical exegesis.—Duke of Somerset, Chr. Theol. 
and Mod. Skepticism, 103, 120, 121. Any one who reads 
Isaiah in the Greek will find it very different from the He¬ 
brew Isaiah. It has been rewritten and has received altera- 
57 


808 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tions. This implies another school of thought, one to 
which the Greek Jews were attached. Critics observe in the 
Septuagint, says the author just quoted, many indications of 
an endeavor to adapt the narratives of Scripture to a later 
form of religious thought. Frequent use has been made of 
this version in the New Testament, and the Evangelists must 
have had a closer connection with Greek Jews than with 
Hebrews. Matthew quotes the Septuagint. The Pauline 
Epistles are in Greek. When the Gospel of Matthew lashes 
the Pharisees so unmercifully, it is difficult to regard the Pau¬ 
line author as a Pharisee (Acts, xxiii. 6), although there may 
have been among the Jewish population of Antioch a consider¬ 
able number of Pharisees, and very likely some in Kilikia, pos¬ 
sibly at Tarsus. The explicit avowal in Acts is so far con¬ 
firmed in the Epistle, that he was a Jew. Acts, xvi. 1 exhibits 
Jews in the very heart of Asia Minor. 

The Clementine Homilies are placed parallel to the Pauline 
Pastoral Epistles. Both oppose the Gnosis, both have the 
hierarchical tendency, both sprung from Borne. The Judaism 
that reigned in the primitive Boman Community, against 
which the Apostle’s Epistle is directed, can point to later im¬ 
portant documents. To them belong first Pastor Hermae, then 
our Homilies, w r hich likewise had their origin inside the Bo- 
man Community. The Palestine Ebionites of Epiphanius and 
the Boman Ebionites of the Clementine Homilies are merely 
two different forms of the same movement. It is the Judaism 
which has not merely already entirely given up the circum¬ 
cision but has even adopted the Pauline Universalism. The 
movement to which the Homilies belong appears no longer 
as sect, it is the main tendency and direction of the Boman 
Community, its belief the belief of the majority, its ideas of 
the constitution of the Church the basis of the constitu¬ 
tion of the Katholic Church. Essaism forms an important 
foundation for the hierarchical ideas of the Clementines. On 
this foundation (the rock-foundation of Matthew, xvi. 18) 
Ebionism wished to establish a Church. The pseudoclemen¬ 
tine writings were to be the sacred codex of this Church, and 
the Homilies the Apostle-history of the Pseudo-Church, and 
the Constitutions, with which Bothe compares it, the Collec¬ 
tion of Epistles. The Church of the Pseudo-Clementines is 
thus a liaeretical antitype of the Katholic Church. Baur held 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 899 


that their Church-Constitution was the basis of the Katholic 
Church Constitution in whose formation they actually inter¬ 
vene.^—Uhlhorn, pp. 15, 16, quotes Baur, etc. As to Pastor 
Hermae, the author of “ Antiqua Mater,” 151, 159 ff, puts this 
work very early, in the period before Christianism (—ib. p. 97) : 
Hermas ignores the names Iesus and Christos, and speaks 
only of ‘ the Son of God ’ (compare the Egyptian Hermes Tris- 
megistus) who is apparently in his thought a glorious Angel 
of God.—ibid. 97. But this is the idea that the Ebionites held. 
Nor is the preaching of the Son of God conceived as a Gospel, 
but as a Law.—ibid. 97. The Paulinist (Romans, i. 3) and some 
of the Theodotians considered his resurrection sufficient evi¬ 
dence of the divine nature of Iesu; but Kerinthus thought 
that he had not yet risen, but would rise in the final resurrec¬ 
tion of the dead.—Epiphanius, Haer. xxviii. 6 ; Lipsius, zur 
Quellenkritik, p. 121. That Kerinthus was as late as 140 we 
have no reliable evidence. Irenaeus puts him in the fifth place 
after Simon Magus. As Lipsius, p. 119, thinks Irenaeus in 
error, and as attempts have been made to connect Kerinthus 
with a use of the Gospel according to Matthew, it may be 
safest to hold that we know nothing reliable about him, ex¬ 
cept that he was in Antioch. The name Iesua (Saviour) could 
be used for more than one hypothesis, and the error that Lip¬ 
sius found in Irenaeus was that “ he has, under the influence of 
later Gnostic systems, altered the actual doctrine of Kerin¬ 
thus.” There is no doubt that the Churchfathers indiscrimi¬ 
nately used Iesua for Christos and Christos for Iesua; but 
Hippolytus (in opposition to Lipsius) held that Kerinthus says 
that, after the baptism by John, the Christos descended in the 
form of a dove upon Iesu! Here Hippolytus exactly copies 
Irenaeus; but where Irenaeus writes (I. xxvi.): “ The Ebion¬ 
ites do not think, regarding the Lord, the same as Karpokra- 
tes and Kerinthus,” Hippolytus, vii. 34, leaves out the negative 
(not), and states that the “ Ebionites relate the things about 
the Christos in the same way as Karpokrates and Kerinthus. 
They live according to Jewish customs.” It certainly looks 
as if Kerinthus had been somewhat tampered with, and as if 
Hippolytus had, in this matter, not helped either Irenaeus or 
Lipsius much. Epiphanius appears to be correct when his 
text reads: “ After the Iesu grew up who was born from the 
seed of Ioseph and Maria.” Lipsius suggests the reading: 


900 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


“After the Christos grew up.” But as the Christos (in Micali, 
v. 2 ; psalm, ii.) was supposed to have existed before time itself 
(Prov. Yiii. 23-30), it is to be presumed that neither Hippoly- 
tus ; Epiphanius, nor Lipsius would have ever dreamed of 
‘ Christ’s coming to man’s age ’ if the Gospel according to Mat¬ 
thew had not perverted their reason.—Col. i. 15. It is not easy 
to explain the Pauline total silence on the birth of Iesu, while 
the Epistles vindicate the divine nature of Iesu. An irrepres¬ 
sible suspicion arises that either the miraculous nativity was a 
later conception or that the Pauline author did not accept the 
narratives of Matthew and Luke. This is confirmed by Mark 
(who avoids the particulars given in Matthew and Luke) and 
in a measure by Matthew, i. 18, 20; iii. 14-17, where two dif¬ 
fering explanations are given of the acquisition of the pneuma 
hagion. See Somerset, Chr. Tlieol. p. 36. The Epistle to the 
Colossians is not Paulinist, but Gnostic, and contra the 
Ebionites. 1 —Baur, Paul, II. 28-32. It was written in order to 
unite the Christian Church.—Baur, II. p. 36. 

The Clementine Homilies oppose the gnosis in Simon 
Magus, Markion and the Pauline author, and support Peter’s 
pretensions to be the rock on which the Church is founded; 
therefore are posterior (Homilies, 17, 18) to the Evangelium 
Matthaei, xvi. 18. “For against me that am a firm rock and 
foundation of the Ecclesia.”—Horn. xvii. 19. The Gospel being 
late, after or near the middle of the Second Century, the Clem¬ 
entine Homily must be later still. And if Paul or Paulinist is 
anywhere referred to (Baur, Paul, I. 232, 233, ed. E. Zeller; 
Galatians, ii. 11 ; Horn. xvii. 19) his work must have been late ; 
for Justin Martyr does not mention him, and Irenaeus, a.d. 
189, does. That the conflict referred to in Galatians, ii. 7, 
8, 11, 12, occurred before the Gospel of Matthew appeared, 2 
that is, about 145, is clear from Matth. xvi. 18, xxviii. 19, be¬ 
cause we find in that gospel Ebionism, universalism, Essenism, 
but no mention of circumcision. Justin Martyr, too, fights 

1 Colossians, ii. 11, is evidently hostile to Ebionite circumcision.—Baur, II. 28, 42. 
The Epistles to Colossians and Ephesians regard the Mosaic Law as abolished by the 
death of the Christos : all distinction between Jews and Gentiles is abolished.—ibid. II. 
37. All this is evidently part of the latest possible form of Christianism. This is not 
Paulinism, it is beyond Paul’s standpoint.—ibid. 38, 39, 41. 

2 There is no external evidence of the existence of the Epistle to the Galatians be¬ 
fore the middle of the 2nd century.—Antiqua Mater, p. 81; quotes Loman, in Theol 
Tijdschrift, 1882, 1883. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 901 


against circumcision, like the Paulinist. The question pre¬ 
viously had been “ whether such a Gentile Christianity as the 
Pauline Christianity had now become ought to be recognized 
and tolerated from a Jewish standpoint.”—Baur, I. 113-117, 
91, 133 ; Gal. ii. 11, 12. There was a strong difference between 
the Pauline party and the party of Circumcision.—Gal. ii. 2-6, 
8, 14-16 ; vi. 15. So there must have been a movement at 
Antioch, under a leader, in opposition to a Petrified set of 
Ebionites. The Gospel of Matthew keeps itself well with the 
last, adheres to the Petrine element in part, while not object¬ 
ing to Gentiles as converts. The Ebionite feeling against 
Paulinism was very strong.—Irenaeus, I. xxvi. ; Baur, I. 125, 
234; Matthew, x. 5, 6, 16. And the 1st Cor. ix. 1 (Have I not 
seen Iesous our Lord) shows that the writer must have read a 
gospel. Then the Paulinist must have been a late writer, 
perhaps as late as the writer of the Gospel of Matthew. He 
claimed to be an apostle, which shows that the Apostolic sys¬ 
tem of the Gospel of Matthew was known to the Paulinist 
writer.—1 Cor. iii. 22. 

It seems to result, therefore, from all the testimony that 
Messianism was treated differently by Hellenists in Samaria, 
Antioch and Asia Minor, from what it was on the Jordan and 
beyond the Jordan. To the North it developed into a Paulin¬ 
ism of which we only know its result as stated in Galatians 
and by Irenaeus, that the Ebionites regarded Paul as an apos¬ 
tate from the Jewish Law and denied his preachings; while, 
on the other hand, the Gospel of Matthew seems to have been 
produced with regard to the Ebionites and contrapauline in 
aspect, although adopting some of the Hellenist universalism 
and dropping the subject of circumcision. Matthew’s Gospel 
Js consequently late. Then between the time of Markion and 
a.d. 180-190 came in the party disposed to compromise all dif¬ 
ferences and unite both sides to the controversy in one Katho- 
lic Church. Irenaeus of course represents this party, favoring 
Paulinism. In the meantime the Pauline Epistles 1 had ap- 

1 Baur only admits four, from Romans to Galatians. It is doubtful if Loman ad¬ 
mits any parts of Baur’s 4 to be genuine. Antiqua Mater, 240, ‘ can find no proof of 
Paul’s historic reality.’ At all events, the Second Century was a period of considera¬ 
ble gospel, with a minimum of conscience or personal honor; and the authors on the 
side of the Church at that time seem to have been mere partisans, like politicians in 
countries where universal suffrage prevails. 

As to the time when the theory of there having been “apostles of the Christos” 


902 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


pearecl not very long before the time of Irenaeus, as represent¬ 
ing a few reminiscences only of the Northern side (the Hellen¬ 
ist side) of the dispute. It is not supposed that they are 
absolutely from the hand of Paul, although apologetic, like 
the Book of Acts ; and still showing signs of the previous fray. 
Circumcision is nothing.—1 Cor. vii. 19. Matthew’s Gospel 
had ceased to lay stress upon it. 1st of Corinthians ix. 5 is 
late. So x. 16. 

There is no doubt that Jewish Messianism blew its most 
prolonged trumpet note after a.d. 70, posterior to the legend¬ 
ary date of St. Paul’s death. 1 Jerusalem’s temple and city 
were entirely destroyed. There was no great inducement to 
live there then; but in time settlers returned. Then began 
the most positive hopes of a Messiah’s reign to come, resulting 
in the rebellion of Bar Cocliebah against the Roman power. 
With the Jews ready to spring to arms to aid the insurrection 
of the Messiah they hoped for, there could be no place for a 
Prince of Peace. The words ‘ Render to Caesar what belongs 

arose (eypaxpav oi anoaroXoi avTov tovtov tov Xpurrov f)p.S)v .—Justin contra Trypho, p. 94) it 
preceded the period at which the Gospel of Matthew appeared ; for Justin’s text agrees 
with that of u the Gospel according to the Hebrews” which is supposed to be older 
than that of Matthew.—Supernatural Religion, I. 423. Therefore these words of Jus¬ 
tin Martyr regarding the “ apostles of the Christos ” belong probably to the years fol¬ 
lowing the death of Bar Cocheba (135-140) ; because prior to the total expulsion of the 
Jews from the ruins of Jerusalem (by Hadrian) the Matthew type of the Christian 
theory of Messianism could not readily become a success until after Bar Cocheba’s 
claims to Messiahship had first been disposed of, supported as he was by Rabbi 
Akiba. It was too early to preach a deceased Messiah when the public wanted a living 
one to conquer the Romans at Bettar. The Messianists were in Phoenicia, Cj^prus, 
and Antioch, at first preaching only to Jews, later to Greeks.—Acts, xi. 19-21; Rom. 
i. 7, 16 ; Acts, xiv. 19, 21, 22 ; xv. 1, 5. The hope of Israel, the salvation of the Mes¬ 
siah, had spread to the Gentiles. The Legend, in Clemens Al. II. 1. p. 148 D, that 
Matthew led an ascetic life, ate no flesh, but only seeds, fruits, and vegetables, points 
directly to the Baptist Iessaeans (Nazori) from whose sect Matthew, iii. 13, 16, ex¬ 
pressly derives the Messiah.—Bleek, p. 91. The Nikolaitans and their successor Ke- 
rinthus must have been busy from the beginning of the 2nd century in their work of 
exalting the new religion over Judaism.—Antiqua Mater, 216. Irenaeus, however, 
says that the Nikolaitans were multo prius, long prior, to the labors of Kerinthus.— 
Iren., III. xi. 

1 The Christian legend puts the death of St. Paul at about a.d. 65. Subtracting 
31 years from 65 leaves 34 years (that is, 3 years from a.d. 31) for Christianism to de¬ 
velop out of Nazorian Iessaeanism in the face of the opposition of the Pharisee party; 
for the Pauline Epistles to be written ; and the advance from Antioch and Beroea to 
Ephesus, Corinth and Rome of Hellenist Messianism. All this, before Jewish Messian¬ 
ism had fairly come to the front in the year 70. Just imagine that the Ebionites, St. 
Paul and the Gospel of Matthew should have practically abandoned circumcision before 
a.d. 135. It does not look true on its face. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 903 

to him ’ would have been out of place at that time, as Rabbi 
Akiba declared Bar Cocliebah the long awaited Messiah. Ac¬ 
cording to Dion Cassius 580,000 Jews (?) were massacred by 
the Romans, without counting the people sold into slavery, 
and all Judaea was almost turned into a desert. It was a great 
factor removed from the scene. Then Syria rejoiced over the 
mighty that were fallen, and made out the God of the Jews to 
have been only the nation’s Angel. Up to this period what 
space was there for anything but simply Jewish Messianism ? 
Until that ceased to be an active factor, what earthly chance 
was there 1 for a different Messianism, based on the first, to 
come forward ? There was no room for the Paulinist writer 
prior to Christianism, nor was there an opportunity for Chris- 
tianism to come to the light of day except through the matrix 
of Jewish Messianism. Nor before the great destruction of 
the Jews was there a chance that the ‘ Gospel according to 
Matthew ’ 2 would have taken sides with Caesar or ventured, 


1 Unless in Antioch possibly, or across the Jordan in Peraea. A messianism based 
on the Christos ( asarkos ) may have perhaps existed beyond the Jordan (See Matthew, 
iii. 2, 3, 4) quite early. But the pseudo-Pauline Messianism is based on the Cruci¬ 
fixion ! There may, however, have been an early Hellenist Messianism allied to a trans- 
jordan belief in Mithra.—Rev. xix. 11-14. Where did the Messianism of the Churches 
of Ephesus, Smyrna, Thuateira, Pergamos, Sardes, Philadelphia and Laodikea come 
from if not from Antioch ! And yet the revelation is from the Sabian Sun (Mithra) 
“ who rolls around the Wandering Stars,” “walking in the midst of the Seven.”—Rev. 
ii. 1; Claudian, de Laude Stilichon, I. 59. This is Sabian, even as the first day of the 
week is Sabian, and as the Sacred Candlestick with 7 lamps in the Jewish holy of holies 
is Sabian.—2 Kings, xxiii. 5. You will find no Crucifixion of the Chaldaean God of the 
7 rays mentioned in the Apokalypse, nor of the Christos (not even in Rev. xi. 8. for 
Rome is not the spot where the Crucifixion took place, according to the Four Evange¬ 
lists), nor of the Logos. But the reference to the Desert (Rev. xii. 6) marks the very 
slight connection with the Nazarenes and Ebionites “ in the place prepared by God ” for 
those sects. Now the directions to be observed by the Ebionites (as Epiphanius gives 
them) are found in material points to be identical with similar requirements in the 
Clementine Homilies.—Baur, I. 150; Clem. Horn. vii. 4, 8. The Paul of history be¬ 
longed to the class of those that held to the promises of the Jewish Sibyl and belonged 
to the standpoint of the Hystaspes-book.—Loman, p. 78 ; Clemens Al. Strom, vi. 5. 
The Clementines came later.—ib. 78. It is clear to Dr. Loman that the opposition of 
the Nazorenes and Ebionites was not to the historical Paulus but to the Paul of the 
New Testament canon, because, too, the last appeared first when Christianism had left 
its original Ebionite standpoint and put its new gnosis in the mouth of either the last 
called apostle Paulus or of John who survived all the others.—Loman, 68, 79. Loman, 
p. 77, speaks of the Christian communities of the Diaspora. If the Diaspora had its 
Messianists , a Paul could turn up at Antioch or Tarsus, or elsewhere. 

2 The Gospel of Matthew shows a consciousness of the fact that Jerusalem has been 
destroyed. It knows the fact as well as Justin’s Dialogue does.—Matth. xxvi. 61, xxvii. 
40. The destruction of the city and temple were accomplished at the same time. More 


904 


THE G1IEBERS OF HEBRON. 


under the protection of the Nazoria, Ebionites, and Baptists, 
to attack the Pharisee party. It was partly a Transjordan in¬ 
spiration! Jerusalem was merely a name. No Jew could 
enter Hadrian’s City on pain of death. If a Christian Mes- 
sianism starting from Antioch between a.d. 138 and 147 made 
converts among both Jews and Hellenists, remember that 
Borne in felling the cedars of Palestine had cleared a space 
for Christianism to put forth under Sabian aspects. Under 
such circumstances any Paul resembling the Paulus of Gala¬ 
tians might have had a motive for visiting Arabia and Damas- 
kus, but if he had ventured to go into Aelia Capitolina (Jeru¬ 
salem) the circumcision that he bore as a sign of Judaism 
would have put his neck in danger—with the further risk that 

than this, it betrays a knowledge, in Matthew xxiv. 15, of the temple of Jupiter Capi- 
tolinus w 7 hich Hadrian built in Jerusalem on the place of the Jewish sanctuary, after 
the destruction of Bar Cocheba’s forces in 135. Therefore it is not strange if the author 
of ‘Supernatural Religion’ dates ‘ the Gospel according to Matthew’ at least 15 years 
after the fall of Bettar. Neither in Matthew’s Gospel nor in the Clementine Homilies 
is there the least question of circumcision. This shows that Matthew wrote after 150, 
and that the Clementine Homilies are still later, since they quote him. ‘ Doubtless 
this rejection of circumcision had its ground in the conviction that the Gentiles could 
never be won over by any other means.’—Baur, I. 145. But Loman denies the genuine¬ 
ness of the Pauline Chief Epistles (Romans, Corinthians, Galatians).—Theol. Tijd- 
schrift, 1886, p. 49. No direct traces of the existence of ‘ Galatians’ until in the time 
following Justin Martyr.—ibid. p. 58. Loman seems to recognize the historical person, 
Paul, but not the epistles that bear his name.—ib. p. 75, 70, 78, 80. How improbable 
it is that we should possess in the Epistle to the Galatians the oldest monument of the 
Christian literature !—Loman, Quaestiones Paulinae, 1886, pp. 44, 46, 49, 58. The 
opposition of the Nazarenes and Ebionites was not to the Paul of history, but to the 
Paul of the canon.—ib. p. 68. Because Matthew, x. 5, 6, is inevitably Ebionite, and 
because the Ebionites, according to Irenaeus, used only the Gospel according to Mat¬ 
thew, they rejected the ‘ Canonical Epistles ’ on the ground that they showed apostacy 
from the Mosaic Law. Loman, Quaestiones Paulinae, p. 60, confirms this view of the 
passage Irenaeus, I. xxvi. This is no more than might have been expected from the 
Ebionite point of view. But they felt no opposition to the historical Paul in the Acts. 
The historical Paul has more resemblance to the Paul of ‘Acts’than to him of the 
Epistles.—Loman, 61. Loman, p. 62, cleverly clears away the fog that Irenaeus has 
left around the great name of Paul. The Paul of Clemens, Strom, vi. 5, seems to have 
been Jew-Christian (—Loman, p. 78) but the Pauline Epistles a new cargo shipped 
under the old flag.—ibid. p. 79, 81, 85, 86, 87, 89. 

Clemens Alexandrinus, 192-217, quotes from the Kerugma Petrou some words that 
appear to connect the mind of Paul with the standpoint of the Sibyl. This connection 
is not improbable. See Loman, 75, 76, 77, 78. For the genuine Paul was more likely 
to have lived at an early period when Christianism was first known to the Hellenists at 
Antioch, than afterwards during the contests with the Ebionites over circumcision. 
“ Inter arma ” the Sibyl and Hystaspes would soon cease to be authorities. But Mes- 
sianism was as ancient as certain Old Testament verses and had not ceased to exert an 
influence of some sort from the commencement of the second century of our era.— 
Loman, 85. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 905 


the Peter, James, and John he was looking for (—Galatians, i. 
ii.) had hardly yet been thought of, for Matthew, xvi. 18, xiv. 
28, xxvi. 33, 35, 73 and Acts, xv. 7 had not yet been written. 
The status of Messianism is seen in Matthew, v. 17, x. 5, 6; for 
salvation had its basis and its hope from Jewish Messianism 
(—John, iv. 22. See Acts, xvi. 17 ; Romans, ii. 10) which was 
carried to Arabia, Edessa and Greece by the Diaspora, until at 
last the Ecclesia produced the Gospels in affirmation of its 
apostolic claims. 

If we compare the Old Persian Ahuramazda and Angromai- 
nyus, Plutarch’s Oromazes and Areimanios, with Mani’s Good 
God and Evil Demon, the Good Deity (the Logos) of Julian 
(the Chrestos of the Philopatris, 17) and the Egyptian Typhon, 
with the Christos Logos and the Satan of the Apokalypse, or 
the Good Father and the Diabolos of Matthew, we find always 
the same contrast of Christ with the Evil Principle; so that 
Lucian’s idea (in 175-180) that the man of the Christian Relig¬ 
ion was great because he had introduced a new mystery is 
substantially true. The idea is taken from the Oriental Mys¬ 
teries and Rev. xii., xviii., xix.; and the Lamb in Aries (Rev. v. 
6, xiv. 10, xviii. 13) comes as freshly to us in the morning of 
doctrine 1 as Julian’s Sun in Aries (Jul. Orat. iv. 132, 133, 135 
TOV \A.7roA,Wa (TweSpevovra ra> Sew ; v. 167-169,173) for the King Adoil 
(Attis) enters the sign Aries in the Little Mysteries at the be¬ 
ginning of Spring : “ to the very Ram himself they declare the 
Little Mysteries.”—Jul. p. 173. Here we see the very Lamb 
of the Apokalypse, returned from Darkness to Light, as the 
Lamb of Aries in the March festival, the Christos of the Jew¬ 
ish Diaspora.—Rev. xix. 11. Lucian shows that the Christians 

1 The method of teaching was by sacred allegories, the morals recommended by the 
DidachS, Essene doctrines and parables. It looks very much as if Matthew and perhaps 
Luke (from Beroea or Antioch, or lower south in Palestine, or Galilee) had used Jor¬ 
dan sources and Transjordan virtues in connection with the wider scope of the Helle¬ 
nist Diaspora ; and it would seem as if Lucian had seen something in a Gospel that led 
him to express the thought that a great man “ had introduced this new mystery into 
human life ! ” 

Only one writing among the Evangelical scriptures among the Ebionitesand Nazo- 
ria had authority in the church, namely the Evangel written in Aramaic which they 
attributed to Matthew, and which was called Evangel according to the Hebrews, because 
it was in use among the Hebrew Christians.—Bleek, p. 97. The ancient claim was that 
the Evangel came first from the Hebrews. But what was it ? See Daniel, and per¬ 
haps Justin Martyr. Our Greek Matthew leans towards the Children of Israel.—v. 17. 
18, x. 5, 6. It is plainly Ebionite. As Baptists, they were the Nazarenes.—See Mat¬ 
thew, iii. 4. 


/ 


906 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


in the East about 165 were great fools and easily humbugged 
by Peregrinus. Their simplicity was no great blessing. Now 
the reading of the Septuagint Greek (according to Bleek, Einl. 
p. 65) was calculated to produce the very Hebraisms and Ara- 
mean idioms observable in Matthew’s Gospel; and Bleek says 
that these peculiarities are found in the Septuagint Greek 
text. Consequently this affords a hint in what direction to 
look for the residence of the author of the Gospel according to 
Matthew. The Diaspora read the Septuagint Version rather 
than the dead language of the Hebrew Bible.—Bleek, 65-67, 
77-81 if. Consequently we seem to have traced the origin of 
the Gospels to the Diaspora, the dispersed Jews who in An¬ 
tioch, Asia, or Egypt read the Septuagint Greek Bible. This 
is an important point. For the Church in Lucian’s time and 
later was more likely to affiliate with the Greek Diaspora 
(the people whose minds were prepared for a change) than 
with the Mosaicised Nazorenes and Ebionites that adhered 
stiffly to the Jewish Law. It might suit Luke and Matthew 
to find doctrine, illustrations and parables, on the Jordan or be¬ 
yond it; but when it came to the daily practices, customs, and 
usages, these were hard to uproot, and the views of the north¬ 
ern Diaspora in Asia and Antioch were more palatable to the 
Greek and Roman Ecclesiasts than the views of the Ebio¬ 
nites, Nazorenes and Essaians.—Bleek, 91, 96, 97. The Paul 
of the first 4 Epistles is undoubtedly from the Diaspora ; but 
Matthew is so essentially Essene, Ebionite and Mosaicist, that, 
if there is any difference in date between Paul’s first 4 Epistles 
and the Gospel according to Matthew, Matthew would appear 
to be the earliest (v. 17, 18; x. 5, 6); except that xxii., xxiv., 
xxiv. 48, and xxviii. 19 seem subsequent to v. 17; and xxviii. 
19 is Paulinist enough. The Jew-Greek includes, with the 
language of the New Testament, that of the Septuagint.— 
Bleek, pp. 79, 81. The language, then, leads us to the Dias¬ 
pora as the source of Christian Messianism. Which is the 
source of our Gospels of Luke and Matthew ? Is it the Nor¬ 
thern Diaspora around Antioch, or the Alexandrian Diaspora 
in Egypt ? The obvious derivation of the Gospels from the 
Jordan Nazoria, coupled with the movement of the Ebionites to 
Beroia (mentioned by Epiphanius) point towards Beroea and 
Antioch. The Diaspora read the Septuagint in Hebraised and 
Arameanised Greek. Although Lucian is a witness to the fact 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 907 


that the Crucifixion-legend was known in 165 or about that 
time, yet the Revelation of John, written in the time of the 
Saints and before Barcocheba and Rabbi Akiba were destroyed, 
shows that the Crucifixion narrative in Luke and Matthew was 
not then published, but that its Christianism acknowledged 
the Sun, the Aries-Lamb, and the Christos (according to Elxai 
in 98) and knew nothing at all of Matthew’s Evangel except 
the expected Coming of the Christos,—agreeing with Daniel, 
Henoch, the Sibyl, and 4tli Esdras (after 100). But the bring¬ 
ing in the Logos on the White Horse to destroy Babylonish- 
Rome (Rev. xvii. 18) on her seven hills, the expectation of aid 
from beyond the Euphrates, the use of the expressions Lamb 
and Christos in the original form of the Apokalypse, and the 
absence of all connection with the Gospel account point to the 
period 130-132, under Hadrian. Messianism, no matter what 
its antecedents had been, was located by the War in Galilee, 
around Jerusalem, and the Jordan country. Therefore the 
scene of Messianist manifestation is laid there, confined to 
those districts in the Gospel. But the Diaspora was divided 
according to location. Messianism had its more recent source 
along the hill country and in Galilee ; the narrative had to be 
confined therefore to the country where Messianist hopes had 
their source ; and the moral teaching was dominated by the 
doctrine of spirit and matter in the form that it took on among 
the Essaians, Iessaians, Baptists, Nazoria, and Ebionites, for 
of such was the Kingdom of the heavens. Hence we have the 
third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Matthew, hence the adher¬ 
ing to the Law of Moses.—Matth. v. 17, 18 ; x. 5, 6. But while 
the Northern Diaspora around Antioch was not disinclined 
toward Messianism and Christianism, it was not at all disposed 
to accept the Jewish Law, the Essene rigorism, or Ebionism. 
When the Christianism included the Greek as well as the Is¬ 
raelite, heed had to be given to Greek feelings and wishes. In 
the spread of Messianism among the Diaspora the conflict be¬ 
tween the Hellenist and the Law exhibited itself, as the Gala- 
tians-Epistle shows. The Roman Church had to side with the 
Greek, at the same time that it tried to hold on to the Ebio- 
nite and the Jordan. Writing from the Jewish AVar and Jose¬ 
phus, the Ecclesia could not cut the Galilean and transjordan 
basis from under itself, for then it would have nothing where¬ 
with to confirm and testify to the appearance of the Messiah 


908 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


whom it preached. To sustain its pretensions to have had a 
Messiah it was* obliged to appear to maintain the rigor of the 
Jewish Law and the doctrine that the flesh wars against the 
spirit. Take these away, and what else in the shape of doctrine 
was left for the Messiah to preach. To preach an acceptable 
doctrine the people had got to be told something that they 
were used to, something which agreed with previous prejudices, 
something that they knew before and were prepared to receive. 
But this does not detract from the ability exhibited in said 
Gospel of Matthew, while Bleek (Einl., 108, 109, 287) considers 
the Canonical Matthew the source of the ‘ Gospel according to 
the Hebrews,’ and the latter an Aramean Ueberarbeitung (al¬ 
teration or retouching) of the former. If the necessities of the 
Ecclesia required the composition of an Evangel in Greek, it 
would be a furtherance of the plan if an Aramean Gospel were 
produced substantially a repetition of the Greek Gospel. In 
fact the Greek Gospels so thoroughly base themselves on Jor¬ 
dan Religion that a Hebrew or Aramean Gospel was an abso¬ 
lute necessity as a guaranty of the Greek Synoptics. So that 
there is reason to think there must have been an Aramean Gos¬ 
pel even if they had to make one on the basis that the Greek 
Gospel of Matthew supplied. The very amount of supernatu¬ 
ralism in the Greek Gospel affects its credibility and awakens 
suspicion, as if the narrative was put forth to build up or sus¬ 
tain a Church. Bleek, 287, thinks it not unlikely that the first 
Aramean reviser (Bearbeiter) gave to the Aramean text of the 
‘ Gospel according to Matthew ’ the appearance of its being an 
Apostolic work of Matthew himself, in order to claim for it a 
higher authority. He regards it as probable that the idea of 
an Apostolic origin was transferred from the Aramean text to 
the Greek.—ib. 107, 287. It might thus happen that both Gos¬ 
pels (the Greek Matthew and the Aramean text) were attrib¬ 
uted to the Apostle Matthew.—ib. 288. This view suits ex¬ 
actly the proposition that Matthew’s Gospel was a late work 
in the 2nd half of the Second Century made for the benefit of 
the Church.—See Matth. xvi. 18, “ On this Peter 1 1 will build 
my ChurchJ 

That the idea in Daniel vii. 13,14, suffered no diminution 
in the first century the Malka Messiacha of the Sohar abun¬ 
dantly testifies, and the fall of Jerusalem before the arms of 

1 Petra = rock. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 909 


Titus strengthened the conviction of the Messiah’s Coming 
down to 131-132 ; at all events, we still find it in 4th Esdras, in 
Eev. xx. 4,11-13, in Matthew, xiii. 40, 41, xxiv. 2, 4 if. 1 This is 
the Reign with Christ on earth. It is purely Jewish! It is 
Jewish in the Apokalypse, but Diasporan in Matthew. The 
idea of the Reign of the Messiah on earth recedes before that 
of his future Kingdom after the End of the world. Also the 
Messiah must die with this whole ‘ Age 5 (Worldera), in order 
that the imperishable world be created.—Hilgenfeld, Jiid. 
Apok. p. 15. See Dan. ix. 26, and the Jewish Sibyl in the 2nd 
century before our era, according to Hilgenfeld, p. 13. The 
Ecclesia has used the Jewish standpoint, as it stood up to 135, 
and Matthew afterwards, like Luke, follows with Narrative, 
Parables, Iesua, the Crucifixion, and the Rock of the Church. 
But what stabs in the side of Judaism Luke, x. 33-37 and Mat¬ 
thew, x. 5, 23 inflict, when the Son of the Man is expected to 
come again to the Ecclesia ! The idea of the Conflagration of 
the w T orld underlies this whole period. The Apokalypse has 
the Judgment at the End; and Philo mentions the Conflagra- 
tio mundi in the early part of the 1st century. Behold how 
much material ready to their hand the Jews furnished to the 
Church ! Messianism and fire go together.—Rev. xix. 20, xx. 
10 if; Matth. iii. 11, 12 ; xiii. 41, 42 ; Rev. xix. 12. 

According to the Confession of R. Iahosa (ante xiv. secula 
defuncti), R. Iahosa ben Loi found Elias standing at the en¬ 
trance of the cave of R. Simeon ben Iochai (who together with 
the son in 12 years is related to have there remained concealed 
through fear of the Emperor Adrian, and to have written at 
that time the books Sohar and Siphri), asks Elias when the 
Messiah will come! The reply is, Go, ask himself. Where 
then is he ? He sits at the gate of Rome ! And what distin¬ 
guishes him (from others) ? He sits among the Poor burdened 
with diseases; all the others are undoing and tying up their 
bandages, but himself (handles) one bandage after another in 
turn, saying (to himself) ‘ perhaps I shall be called, nor will I 
delay ! ’ Then he goes to Christ, saluting him with the words : 
Pax super te (Salom olik), Peace upon thee, my Master! Who 
replied, Peace also upon thee, Son of Loi! He asked the Mes¬ 
siah, when shall come the Lord ? The Messiah answers, To¬ 
day!—W. Schickard, Jus Regium Hebr. Leipsic. 1674. p. 474. 

1 Luke, xxi. 9. 


910 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


See Isaiah, liii. 3-8, 10, 12. Thus in the third century after 
Christ we have the legend of the Messiah sitting at the Gate of 
Rome. I am thy Saviour (Mosia) and Redeemer.—Isa. xlix. 26. 
The Messiah will first reveal himself in Galilee and a Star in 
the East will become visible.—The Sohar, fol. 74. col. 293. The 
Jews never copied from the Gospels ; therefore a passage like 
this in the Sohar is older than the ‘ Star in the East ’ in Mat¬ 
thew, ii. 2. Simeon ben Iochai lived in the first quarter of the 
2nd century. “Look for your Shepherd . . . inf the End of the 
World.” This is the Messiah reserved for the End !—Esdras, 
IY. xii. 32. It is obvious that what Elxai called Messiah, and 
Saturninus called Salvator (Saviour) Unborn and Incorporeal, 
is the same vision of a man (visus homo) that was to come in 
the End of the world.—Luke, iv. 30; Matth. xiii. 40 ; Rev. xx. 
12; xxii. 7. Elxai said that he was a figure manlike but not 
seen ; Saturninus said that having no body he appeared to be a 
man. There must have been a Church already formed upon 
the Gospels, before there could be any schism.—1 Cor. iii. 4; 
Origen, vi. in Matthaeum; II. p. 39. The 1st Cor. i. 24, xii. 13, 
must then have been quite late.—1 Cor. xiv. 33; xv. 3-6; xvi. 
1, 5-7. The close of this Epistle has the word Adelplioi just 
as Matthew, xxviii. 10, has “tois Adelphois.” Origen, II. pp. 
40, 50 has the same word ‘ fratres, in hoc mundo,’ brethren in 
the faith. The Church evidently was fully formed when Mat¬ 
thew, Paul, and Origen wrote. The function of a Church (one 
that preaches) was to inculcate opinions without reflection or 
thought. 

“There were others, too, receiving Iesus and therefore 
boasting that they were Christians, but still keeping the Law 
and living in the customs of the Jews, to wit, Ebionites of both 
kinds whether confessing with us Iesus born of a virgin, or 
not so, but born like other men. What has that to do with the 
Ecclesia which Celsus denotes by the name of the commoner 
sort (vulgus)? He also mentions I know not what Sibylists , 
perhaps because he had heard from some that those who think 
the Sibyl a prophetess are disapproved, and are marked by 
the name Sibylists.”—Origen, II. p. 489. Paris. 1619. contra 
Cels. v. Origen dodges the point! For the Third Sibyl was, 
after Daniel, the earliest Messianist book, prophesying that 
God would send from the sun a King! This was too much in 
Elxai’s style to please the later Cliurchfathers, and the name 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 911 


Sibylists was early given to the Messianists or to such as put 
faith in the Sibyl’s prophesy of the Coming Messiah. The 
Apokalypse and others adhered to the expectation of a Com¬ 
ing Messiah to judge the' world. These Sibylists of course 
were no longer in vogue when the Ecclesia had advanced so 
far as to put out the able treatises of Luke and Matthew, which 
exhibit a great deal of talent in handling the same status that 
Rome had brought about, which the author of the third Sibyl 
knew, and which angered the author of the Apokalypse to the 
last degree. The Sibylists were Jewish Messianists like John 
of the Revelation. When Tacitus (112-115) speaks of Chris- 
tiani he means Messianists, who looked for a Messiah. So 
Suetonius says that the Christiani (i.e. Messianists) were se¬ 
verely punished in the time of Nero. There was a false Mes¬ 
siah in Judaea in 60-63, and another in a.d. 45. — Jahn, 368, 374. 
These like those mentioned by Josephus were merely political 
adventurers, not the subsequent Christians of A.D. 150-160. 
The followers of Judas the Galilean and the Jews of a.d. 64, 65, 
may possibly have been troublesome Messianists, but not 
Christians. It was easy to translate the word Messiah by the 
Greek word Christos (Anointed), but Messianists in the first 
century cannot be correctly described by the word Christians, 
as it was employed in a.d. 170; for the Messianists could and 
did follow false Messiahs, while the later Christians of 170 were 
followers of Iesus, called Nazarenes. There is a distinction 
between Baptists or x Nazarenes and Messianists or Robber 
Messiahs. Neither Pliny nor Tacitus could have made a dis¬ 
tinction between Jewish believers in a Messiah and those who 
held that Iesus was the Messiah. Pliny’s letter is entirely un¬ 
attested, and, like other suspicious circumstances, may be a 
pious fraud of early date. That there were Messianists from 
112 to 135 we can learn from the fate of Barcochebali; but 
these were Jews not Christians in the later sense of the word, 
they were Messianists in the sense of the immortal Judas and 
John’s Revelation. From 135 to 150 or 160 is fifteen and twenty 
five years ; and in that time many changes could occur, par¬ 
ticularly entire submission to Caesar! Matthew has it, but 
the Apokalypse is full of the Destruction of Rome! So that 
Jewish Messianism was one thing, and Romanism something 
different, as contradistinguished as the Rebellion of the Great 
Galilean and Jordan Baptism. The appointment of Marcus, a 


912 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Gentile, to be bishop to the Gentiles collected there in Aelia 
Capitolina (Euseb. H. E. iv. 6) could hardly have been made 
much before a.d. 145, ten years after Barcocheba’s fall. As 
the Ebionites continued to annoy Tertullian as late as the year 
207 it can hardly be supposed that there were many Ebionites 
in the Ecclesia of Marcus in Aelia, particularly as Eusebius 
calls it ‘ the Church of the Gentiles collected there ’ and the 
Ebionites adhered to the Law of Moses. ^Ve have pointed 
both to the Septuagint and the Diaspora as well as Iessaianism 
or Essenism, as united with the Kabalah and Two Targums, 
Messianism, the Sibyl, the book Hystaspes and the Apokalypse, 
to produce a beginning of Christianism ; moreover, the Ebion¬ 
ites adhered to the Law and rejected Pauline Christianism! 
Why then should not this “ Gentile ” Church at Aelia combined 
with the Greek Messianist feeling have furnished the com¬ 
mencement of the change from Messianism pure and simple to 
Christianism as it is described in Luke and Matthew, assum¬ 
ing always that the Yirginal birth and the Crucifixion idea 
were conceptions arrived at subsequent to the formation of the 
Church at Aelia-Jerusalem under Marcus the Gentile bishop ? 
If Jews were excluded from Aelia, how could a Circumcised 
Ebionite or Nazarene follower of Moses be permitted to enter 
Jerusalem ? Matthew v. 17 says that all the Law of Moses re¬ 
mains in force. Galatians, v. 3 says the same. How then 
could an Ebionite Messianist get into Aelia ? It would seem 
that Ebionite Communism and self-denial together with a de¬ 
sire to save their souls, coupled with the doctrines of the res¬ 
urrection, ‘spirit and matter,’ and the rules of the Didache, 
might have been enough to build up Ecclesias with the aid of 
the Gnosis ; and that the Narratives contained in the Gospels 
may have been later required as the Messianism melted into 
Episcopacy and the Greek and Boman Ecclesias were more 
expanded. While Essenism, Communism, celibacy and En- 
crateia based on self-denial and dualism could in themselves 
form a Church in expectation of a Jewish Messiah, it is prob¬ 
able that the narratives of Luke and Matthew have done more 
to impose a definite doctrine on the Christian body than any¬ 
thing else. Now the miracle of turning water into wfine is cer¬ 
tainly not an Encratite miracle, and although Josephus had his 
quarters at Cana of Galilee he seems not to have heard of the 
miracle, for he never mentions it. Then, too, Irenaeus states 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 913 


that the Ebionites used only the Gospel according to Matthew! 
But the Ebionites could not enter Jerusalem 1 as long as 
Hadrian’s decree of expulsion of the Jews from Aelia remained 
in force. Consequently Matthew’s Gospel could not have 
reached them until late. The remark of Irenaeus seems to be 
an attempt to bolster Matthew’s Gospel by the intimation that 
the Ebionites used it. Supernat. Beligion, I. 420, 423, says 
that it could not have been our Matthew.—Eusebius, H. E. iii. 
27. As the Jews could not enter Jerusalem after it became 
Aelia or even after the death of Barcochebah, they were ex¬ 
cluded while Hadrian lived and probably still longer. Hadrian 
died 138-139, and the change from Jewish Messianism to the 
Presbyterian and subsequent Episcopal organisation had to 
date later than the Apokalypse (which is fundamentally Jewish), 
later than Hadrian, and at least as late as Marcus in a.d. 145; 
probably later. As to the “ receiving Iesous,” it was so short 
a change in Messianism from the Jewish Angel-King Metatron- 
Iesoua , the Salvator of Saturninus, the Chaldaean Saviour of 
the souls in resurrection through abstinence and self-denial 
while in the flesh, to Iesous 2 that the name of the Unborn 
Saviour incorporeal and e sine figura ’ remains unchanged even 
when the Gospels proclaimed him as having Come in the flesh 
a century before Barcocheba’s rising at Betar (or Bitther). 
The vital foundation of Jewish Messianism in the first part of 
the Second Century was the power of ‘ Spirit; ’ it was 4 spirit 
against the flesh ; ’ as long as this was permanently retained in 
the usages and practice of Essaians, Iessaians, Baptists, Heal¬ 
ers, Elchasaites, Nazorenes or Ebionites, the main principle of 
religion, celibacy, denial of the flesh, continued with the peni¬ 
tent in religion, who felt that the flesh stood between him and 
the stars. He needed a Saviour so much that he would have 
accepted him even in the flesh! The Ecclesiastics knew that, 
and wrote the Evangel without fear of the result. This Syriac 
word Iesoua (meaning Saviour and Metatron) might have stood 
in the Apokalypse when it was first written as it stands to-day 
in the Syriac text of the Apokalypse; but then it meant the 

1 The Jews, besides the Septuagint, read hardly any books in Greek to give them a 
knowledge of the language, and got their Greek mostly in trade and intercourse with 
those that spoke that language.—Bleek, Einleit., 65. The Ebionites in the time of 
Irenaeus might have been able to read Matthew’s Gospel; but that -was in the last half 
of the 2nd century. Lucian apparently has not the word Icsus. 

2 Compare the doctrine of Kerinthus in Irenaeus, I. xxv. 

58 


914 


THE GHEBER8 OF HEBRON. 


Great Archangel, the Iesona Metatron, not a man! The name 
Iesoua in the Syriac copy stands thrice in the first chapter, 
thrice in the last, once in chapter xii., once in xvii. and twice 
in chapter xix. of Revelations. Consequently, there would 
have been no difficulty in inserting such a slight alteration of 
a manuscript. 1 As long as it was not explained to mean a hu¬ 
man being it could remain the appellation of the King of the 
Angels, as it stands to-day in Bodenschatz, Church Constitu¬ 
tion of the Jews, II. 191, 192. It is in German; Erlang 1748. 
The Name of Christos is not changed by the adjective Iesoua. 
The Jewish Archangel was the Logos , the Christos. Elxai and 
Saturninus knew of him as a phantasm, but not as flesh, al¬ 
though you would suppose him a man! The Messianists were 
a little Doketic, or rather, many of them were. There seems to 
have been no chance for Christianism to develop (except in 
embryo) until after the death of Barcochebah and Hadrian, 
and we may feel sure that such earnest Messianism as is seen 
in the Third Sibyl, the Book of Henoch and the Bev. xviii. 10, 
18, 21, xx. 11 ff. did not last long after the ruin at Bettar with¬ 
out the stimulant additional necessary to keep the hope alive. 
Nothing more in the way of Jewish Messianism, probably, w r as 
done until after the death of Hadrian in 138-139; this would 
have the effect of throwing over to about 145 any further agita¬ 
tion. New blood would then be infused into it with further 
changes. We have this succession, John’s Revelation prior to 
the death of Rabbi Akiba and Barcochebah’s destruction, the 
settlement of Aelia by Hadrian, excluding the Jews entirely, 
then his decease, and finally the establishment of a Messianist 
Ecclesia of Encratite Gentiles under bishop Marcus at Aelia. 
Then, still later, we have the three Synoptic Gospels and Paul- 
inism, last of all John’s Gospel, followed by the crusade of 

1 It would have been a slight matter to have copied the entire Book of Revelation, 
putting in the name Iesus ten times. Rev. xviii. 20 in Greek mentions Hagioi, apos- 
toloi and prophets, but, in the Syriac, it is read ‘Angels, Missionaries (Legates), and 
prophets; Malacha, Salicha wa Nabia. Salich means ‘misit,’ to send; so does apostello 
in Greek. Consequently the 12 Apostles are not meant, but missionaries generally, in 
Rev. xviii. 20. The reducing the wandering Iessaian missionaries of the Jordan to 12 is 
the work of a later period, when the Gospels of Luke and Matthew were composed. 
Philo who lived in the first half of the first century knows nothing of Iesus. Lucian 
(c. 120-190) mentions the worship of the great man who was crucified in Palestine, 
great, as having introduced a new mystery into life; is aware of Messianism, Chrestos, 
(does not name Iesus) but knows Philonism, the pneuma, and perhaps Rev. xx. 12. At 
least, he could have known them. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 915 


Irenaeus against everybody’s views except those of his Church. 
The Evangels began at the Jordan, and were based on John’s 
Askesis (Matth. iii. 1, 4, 5) which, under the name Nazoria, 
spread down the Euphrates to Bassora, on the east, but on the 
west it went through parts of Syria. Wandering teachers, 
saints, or dervish-like apostle-missionaries spread in towns and 
villages the Glad Tidings founded upon the doctrine of ‘ spirit 
vs. matter.’—John, i. 6, iii. 25, 26, iv. 2, 24, 25, vi. 63. But the 
real basis of the religion was the doctrine of ‘ spirit and mat¬ 
ter.’ Spirit comes from the sun.—Diodorus Sic. I. 11; Septua- 
gint Psalm, xviii. 6. Spirit was the God; and He placed His 
tabernacle in the sun. Therefore the Essenes never spoke be¬ 
fore the SuNrising anything but a prayer that the Deity would 
go up. Therefore the Baptist, the Essene, the Ebionite denied 
his body, abnegated himself, at the same time that, as Naza- 
renes, they believed only in the spirit that the Creator Sun had 
bestowed upon them as the Vital Element of their lives in the 
approaching End of the world. The resurrection idea, as con¬ 
nected with the Good Divinity or the Messiah, belonged to 
Persians, Chaldaeans, Jews, and probably the Egyptians. 
Mithra raises the souls (—Movers, I. 553) to the World percep¬ 
tible by mind. 

Ebionism was split into manifold parties and fractions, but 
these were not separated, independent sects. The Clementine 
Homilies and Kecognitions connect their respective views of 
the Old Testament with their views of Judaism in general. 
On the ground of falsifications of the Law, that the Prophets 
are false Prophets, the Homilies separate genuine Mosaicism 
from the false Judaism. The gnostic and judaising element 
predominates in the Homilies, and we find in Romans ii. the 
Jewish element referred to. The Clementine Homilies leave 
circumcision in force for born Jews without requiring other 
Christians to adopt it, because Peter is apostle to the Heathen 
(—Uhlhorn, 260-262) in the Homilies, but in the Recognitions 
it is different. The sources of Christianism are patent,—Chal- 
daism, Nabathaeanism, Hindu dualism, Mitliraism, Baptism of 
John, Essaism, Elkesaitism, Nazorian Ebionism (—Uhlhorn, 
p. 100), Iessaians, Judaism, Kabalah. All these factors were 
present in connection with Mithrabaptism and the theory of a 
Persian Messiah or a Jewish one. But, as we have already 
seen, Matthew, the Gospel Infantiae, and the Protevangel of 


916 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Iakobus alter the Jewish Messiah into a Healer, a worker of 
miracles, and a Iessaian teacher of Essaian, Communist doc¬ 
trines, particularly poverty, self-denial, Ebionism and the 
worship of Angels. The Jewish Messiah is gone. To keep up 
some connection with his shadow we find in the Gospels ex¬ 
citing references to the Robbers , mementos of the Roman War 
in Judaea and Judas the Galilean. But there was no Christian 
sect in the War against Rome. Josephus to the three sects of 
the Jews adds one more—and only one—the sect of Judas the 
Galilean! But the Jewish Messiah is departed, and we have 
the Four Gospels instead. It looks as if the writings of Jo¬ 
sephus had been laid under contribution. When Peter (Ho¬ 
mily, viii. 6, 7) explains that it suffices to have acknowledged 
either Moses or Christos although a higher degree consists in 
acknowledging both, what else is meant than that the being 
completely a Jew (and thus circumcised , for a merely theoreti¬ 
cal knowledge is far enough removed from the mode of the 
Homilies) confers a preference and a higher rank above all 
other Christians.—Uhlhorn, pp. 100, 160 (Rom. i. 16; ii. 11). 
But Justin Martyr (Trypho, 43, 47, 96) took the ground that 
Mosaicism was entirely abrogated by Christianism “for the 
circumcision itself is not necessary for all; ” and Acts, vii. 
53 says that the Jews received the Law unto divisions of the 
Angels (into ranks and orders).—Coloss. i. 16; Justin, Try¬ 
pho, p. 115. “ For every race of men will be found under 

a curse, being under the Law of Moses.”—Justin, Trypho, p. 
98. “ Abrahm was not testified by the God to be just on ac¬ 

count of the circumcision, but because of the faith.” For he 
believed in the God.—ibid. 96. Here we have the doctrine of 
Justification by faith. Where else did the Paulinist obtain 
his justification ? If w^e put the date of Justin’s Dialogue at 
about 164 (and Justin appears well informed in regard to the 
contents of the Evangel of the Hebrews) then Justin’s position 
agrees well enough with that of the Clementine Homilies, for, 
p. 44, he says that circumcision was necessary only for Jews. 
Coming from a land of the Samarians and Ebionites, Justin has 
the appearance of being one of the latest of the thorough-going 
believers in Christos Crucified, like Paulus Canonicus. That 
the Epistle of Peter, and the Clementine Homilies should 
agree with Justin Martyr in opposition to th q Echthros An- 
thropos (Hated Man) who saw no objection to eating food offer- 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 917 


ed to idols is just what was to be expected. As to Epist. Petri 
2, Horn. III. 51, and Matthew, v. 18, all are of one stamp ; and 
all three are Ebionite. The Kerugmata Petrou (the preach¬ 
ings of Peter) were written in Greek and were fictitious.— 
Uhlhorn, 94, 103, 104, 105, 112, 131. If these are fictitious, 
what must Matthew’s Gospel be which is built upon Peter ?— 
Matth. v. 18 ; xvi. 18. On this basis, assuming that there was 
a Paul and that the Epistles we have in his name are spurious, 
we find ourselves in the midst of a period full of spurious 
books ; and the Pauline doctrine of Justification by faith is as 
late as Justin’s, if not later. The Gospel of Matthew (that is, 
passages from it) is used in the Clementine Homilies.—Gerhard 
Uhlhorn, Horn. u. Recogn., 118-120, 133, 137. During the 
whole of the second century there must have been a large class 
of contemptible impostors abroad who made a traffic and com¬ 
merce of piety, who traded upon the itchings after the supernat¬ 
ural of the mass, and who were odious alike to cultivated men 
among the Greeks and Romans and to the godly and moral 
artisans of the Jewish Diaspora.—Antiqua Mater, 67. Her¬ 
nias had the Saviour Angel. When Hermas wrote that ‘ the 
Gate is the Son of the God, who alone is the access to the 
God ; otherwise therefore no one will enter in to the God,’ 
it is not improbable that this passage suggested Matthew, vii. 
13, 14; John, xiv. 6 ; for Hermas knows nothing about Jesus 
(—Ant. Mater, 151, 152) although he has the idea of * the Son 
of God ’ which the Ebionites, Nazoria and Hermetic Books 
have. Mithra in Babylon corresponded to this impersonation 
of the King. In the Homilies Peter remembers what the Lord 
said (notwithstanding the written gospels); he heard it himself. 
This is done to keep up the appearance of genuine Petrine 
speeches. Consequently, only free citations could be given. 
And they were imagined, feigned, in order thereby to win the 
appearance of authority for the Clementine Homilies.—Uhl¬ 
horn, 365. All the different evangel-scriptures that we find 
among Jewchristians and parties related to them point back at 
last to one source ; the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of 
the Nazarenes, of the Ebionites, the Evangel of the Egyptians 
and the one named after Peter appear finally only as different 
forms of the same written evangel worked over and over again, 
according to the necessities of the doctrines that were to be 
based on them. But the idea that the Gospel of the Hebrews, 


918 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


whether the Nazarene or Ebionite, has been the basis of a Ca¬ 
nonic Gospel must be regarded as disproved.—Uhlhorn, 136, 
137. Judging from the work of Hermas and numerous other 
writings of an early date, an unwritten evangelium of the 
Saviour was widely spread in the gnostic minds prior to any 
of the written evangels canonical or otherwise.—Irenaeus, I. 
xx.-xxii. xxiv. xxv. xxvi. (27); Antiqua Mater, p. 151; Hermes 
Trismeg.; Isaiah, lxiii. 9 ; Hermas, Yis. III. 8. The Monarchia 
of the Ebionites has been carried out in the Eoman papacy. 
Among the forty apostles we find Peter brought to the front 
in the Gospel of Matthew and the Clementine Homilies, with 
a claim to certain preachings (Kerugmata) of Peter that, as 
some have supposed, were wholly fictitious. It makes no dif¬ 
ference whether Peter preached or not. On that claim (or on 
that rock) Rome set up her monarchical claim ; and we find it 
in a very late gospel, the Gospel of Matthew; and it being 
there, we can date that Gospel near a.d. 150-160. Coming 
down to John, i. 21, 25 ; vi. 14 (the latest Evangelist) we find 
“ the Prophet ” mentioned ; and in Clementine Homily, II. 6, 
we find what prophet John has got hold of. It is Numbers, 
xviii. 15, “ the true prophet" referred to in the Homilies. The 
true Prophet is the one “who always knows all things” 
(6 7rarroT€ Trdvra eiSws).—Horn. iii. 11. Not learning, he alone 
knows more than all other men.—Horn. ii. 10. If the Gospel 
of John did not follow the Clementine Homilies, some things 
in his Gospel came very near doing so. The Gospel of the 
Hebrews agrees with Matthew, iii. 16 substantially, showing 
the prevalence of the doctrine of the Angel-King on whom the 
Spirit rests.—ib. iv. 11. 

The Book of Acts is clearly a late work, since it gives to 
Peter a knowledge of Matthew, xvi. 18 and xxviii. 19. Peter 
appears in the Homilies as a Jew, his pupils are represented 
as Jews ; in the Recognitions he is Christian, the Jews are 
punished. That shows how much stronger the Jewish element 
is in the Homilies.—Uhlhorn, p. 259, 261. Because life is too 
short, and error was frequent, and philosophy gave no satis¬ 
factory result, the Ebionites of the Homilies felt that sin was 
the source of error, the source of the impossibility to know 
what is true. It was less the researches concerning the Ebion¬ 
ites and the Nazarenes that built the way to the comprehen¬ 
sion of the Clementine Writings than it was the inquiries into 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 919 


the field of the gnosis. Still some had ascribed the Clementine 
writings to Ebionites or Nazorenes (Gerhard Uhlhorn, 9, 10); 
but Baur showed that the Simon Magus of the Homilies is not 
the Paul of the Book of Acts, but an idealised (character), and 
that in him not merely Paulinism but the ultra-paulinism of 
M'arkion is attacked. The tendency of the Homilies is deter¬ 
mined in general as Jew-christian, more closely defined as seek¬ 
ing to bring in Judaism in a new form. That points already 
ovpr to another side ; the new form is the gnostic (—Uhlhorn, 
13). In Bauer’s first form of the Gnosis we find Christianism 
nearer united with Judaism and Heathenism. In the second, 
Christianism is strongly distinct from Judaism and Heathen¬ 
ism (—Uhlhorn, p. 14). The third form is that of the gnosis, 
identifying Christianism and Judaism, and uniting them both 
together against heathenism (Compare Matthew, x. 5, 6 ; John, 
iv. 22). In the Pseudo-Clementine system the Ebionite ele¬ 
ment comes to its right, is recognised as belonging to the 
essence of the system (Luke, vi. 20; Matthew, xxv. 35-40). 
“ The Homilies, says Baur, connect so remarkably with what 
Epiphanius gives as the Ebionite doctrine that we can regard 
them as a further development and completion of the doctrine 
given in the sect of the Ebionites.” The Ebionites again rest 
upon an older form of Judaism, Essaism (Essenism).—Uhlhorn, 
Horn, und Becog. p. 15; Hermas, Yis. III. 8. It certainly 
looks as if the Gospel of Matthew (x. 5, 6), being contra-Sa- 
maritan, and holding decidedly gnostic views, corresponds 
closely with the period of the Clementine Homilies ; although 
preceding them. Matthew does not mention circumcision, but 
compare the genealogy, Mary as a child of Abram, John the 
Baptist’s baptism of the Iessaean, Jordan the beginning of the 
evangels, etc. Moreover, this view of the date of Matthew 
coincides with that given by the author of ‘ Supernatural Be- 
ligion.’ There was a difference of opinion among the Ebion¬ 
ites. It is probable that the Jews, Iessaians, Ebionites, 
Nazoraioi, and Nikolaitans about the years 135-149 believed 
in the King (psalm ii. 6, 7), the Angel Metatron, the Saviour 
Angel and Messiah, and that later a considerable part of the 
Ebionites abandoned such ideas as far as they were applied to 
a man (Iesu). The author of the article ‘ Ebionites,’ in the 
Library of Universal Knowledge, supposes that the Gentile 
Christians included under the name Ebionites (Bomans, xv. 


920 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


26 ; Galat. ii. 10) tlieir Jewish co-religionists who observed the 
Law of Moses. The Ebionites proper were a little different 
from Jews. 

The antinomist and antinational standpoint of Paulus 1 has 
in Palestine according to all indications for a long time had no 
representative.—Schmidt, 121, 169, 181. The Ebionites re¬ 
jected him, as an apostate from the Law; but in the time of 


1 A.D. Loman denies the genuineness of the chief epistles of Paul. In the ten 
Pauline epistles mentioned in Markion’s list are found unmistakable traces of Gnostic 
influences under which the writers of some of these treatises must have stood. Indeed 
among the Paulus-letters of which the post-pauline origin was not generally accepted, 
even in the so-called ‘ undeniably genuine ’ epistles of the Apostle, are found utter¬ 
ances that prove that the writer calling himself Paulus had to arm himself against per¬ 
sons who under his name address themselves in writing to the believers. If one gives 
the necessary attention to the unmistakable fact that the theology of Paulus canonicus 
has an Alexandrian tint, if one moreover bears in mind how small the positive influ¬ 
ence was which the Alexandrian scholars exercised upon the literary consideration 
(schriftbeschouwing) of the Palestine theologians, if one considers further that Alex¬ 
andrine theology, just as it is represented through Philo, did not receive the Messianic 
expectations into the circle of its contemplation, if one further notes that the oldest 
document of Christian gnosis of which both the date and derivation from Alexandria 
is satisfactorily settled, I mean the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, which was written 
under Hadrian, then first becomes completely intelligible for us when we place it be¬ 
fore the Paul of the canon ;—then, it seems to me, is there indeed some ground for as¬ 
suming that the combination of all these facts has been simplified through the rejec¬ 
tion of the now received hypothesis that we possess in our canon epistles from the time 
and from the hand of the Paul of history (Paulus historicus).—A.D. Loman. In the 
Epistle to the Romans, ii. 25, circumcision stands as in Galatians, ii. 12,14 or in the Clem¬ 
entine Homilies. Rom. iii. 21, 22, 28-31 seems to agree with the Clementine Homilies. 
It seems based on the Homilies.—Rom. iii. 31. Abrahm’s belief in God (Rom. iv. 3, 
5-8), closely resembles the Gnosis (perception doctrine) of the Homilies.—Uhlhorn, 
257, 258. Nevertheless, the Ep. to the Romans leans away from Moses to Iesu Christos. 
—Rom. v. 1, 13, 17-21; vi. 8, 9; vii. 5, 6. Perhaps it is a work of the Roman Ebion¬ 
ites, later than A.D. 150.—Rom. ix. 7. Taking into consideration that Justin Martyr 
does not mention the Pauline author and that the Recognitions accept the prophets 
as true prophets (Uhlhorn, 270), it looks as if the Roman “ Paulus ’’ was quite as late 
as the Clementine Recognitions. He certainly quotes the prophets. The Homilies re¬ 
ject the prophets.—Uhlhorn, 270, 271. To the Homilies real Judaism and Christianism 
are identical, to the Recognitions true Judaism is but an incomplete preparation for 
Christianism ; to the Homilies Moses and Christus are the same thing, it is sufficient 
to adopt one; the Recognitions require the belief in both.—Uhlhorn, 258. Simon is 
first himself, next, Paul, third, Markion; here we have the clear outline of the entire 
antignostic polemic. The false gnosis is attacked in the shape of Simon. Paul pro¬ 
claims his vision of the Christos as a personal revelation to himself. In Simon (as 
Markion) we find the doctrine of the distinction between the Superior Good God and 
the Jewish Just God. This is the meaning of the form of Simon in the Homilies. In 
his person the slippery gnosis is attacked.—Uhlhorn, 297-299. But Simon belongs to 
the first of the three works; and that groundwork Uhlhorn, p. 429, traces to Syria; 
and, in his opinion, to East Syria. The Epistle to the Romans seems to follow the 
route that others were taking, away from Judaism, and towards Christ. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 921 


Irenaeus they used the Gospel according to Matthew and were 
circumcised and persevered in the customs according to Moses. 
They paid great attention to the explanation of the propheti¬ 
cal writings. As the Gospel of Matthew was at least as late as 
a.d. 150, the Ebionites may have used in the time of Irenaeus 
in Syrian or Aramean some such work as the ‘ oracles of the 
Lord.’ And while they may have been able to speak a lit¬ 
tle in Greek it would be too much to expect those near Pella 
to read Greek. Those at Beroia or Antioch may have read 
Greek. But the Ebionites used only the Gospel according to 
the Hebrews, which resembled the Gospel of Matthew at one 
time.—Supernat. Bel. I. 420-423. The ‘ logia kuriaka ’ may 
possibly have resembled the maxims in the Didache or Essene 
maxims adopted by the Ebionites, and in that case they would 
probably not be written in Greek, but in the native language, 
Aramean. Comp. Sup. Bel. I. 444, 446, 464, 470, 482-3. There 
were scribes and volumes enough in the 2nd century for us to ex¬ 
pect to discover the existence of a body of the ‘ Lord’s maxims ’ 
or * rules of conduct ’ among the Ebionites beyond Jordan, 
neighbors of the Essenes and, practically, of the Diaspora. 
The title ‘According to Matthew,’ indicates that Matthew’s 
name was used, but that he did not compose the Gospel bear¬ 
ing his name. Suppose then that Matthew’s name was at¬ 
tached to a body of maxims, like those in the Didache or some 
other collection, would it not have been desirable to attach a 
well-known name to our first Gospel to give it a currency ? 
It was not unusual to write under a famous name,—Enoch’s 
for instance. If Enoch used the native language, the author of 
the logia kuriaka did the same. Then, again, in Bev. xi. the 
word kurios is not applied to the Christ. Origen contra Cels, 
v. declares that the writings of Enoch are not a great author¬ 
ity in the churches. Nearly a century had changed the Chris¬ 
tian religion. 

Supposing that the oriental monastic orders, Essenes, 
Therapeutae, Iessaians and Ebionites crucified the flesh. In 
the Apokalypse the Lamb is slain, but the Lord is not cruci¬ 
fied except at Borne (Sodom, Egypt). In Daniel, ix. 25, 26, the 
Messiah is not crucified, nor is Simon Magus crucified in Hip- 
polytus vi. 20, nor is Iesua crucified in Bev. xi. 8, 9; but in 
Basileides (c. 130-147) after the Jewish nation has been over¬ 
thrown, according to Irenaeus, the Crucifixion and Simon of 


922 


THE GHEBEBS OF HEBRON. 


Kurene are declared by Irenaeus to have been mentioned by 
Basileides. Now we can believe either of two tliing-s: that 
Basileides lived as late as 145-147, or that he has been charged 
with the ideas of the later Basilidians. It is not probable that 
any one held, in the time when the Apokalypse was first 
written, that Iesoua had been crucified (because it is the Jews 
that have been referred to as crucified ip Borne); and the name 
of Simon of Cyrene is mentioned in Matthew, xxvii. 32 as 
bearing the cross : when we find this repeated in Irenaeus (on 
Basileides) I. xxiii. (xxiv.), we know that Irenaeus follows the 
later account instead of the earlier one. Thus there is nothing 
to prevent our finding the earliest idea suggesting the Cruci¬ 
fixion in Bev. xi. 8,—prior to the Gospel of Matthew. We can¬ 
not fail to observe that Matthew, xxvii. 32, is the source of the 
crucifixion story in Irenaeus’ reference to Basileides, or else 
he took it from an evangel somewhat earlier. From the ori¬ 
ental habit of employing sacred myths (the hieros logos) in 
regard to their sacred ceremonies and from a myth of the sort 
regarding the loss of sex when the Adon enters the moon (I 
refer to the myth in Lucian’s de Dea Syria) it seems not un¬ 
reasonable to infer that Matthew may have followed the usual 
habit in describing the annual death of Mithra on Dec. 22nd in 
a hieros logos, where the hated Bomans are brought in as the 
slayers of the Sungod and Logos, the Christos, and the de¬ 
stroyers of the Temple. Adonis dies, Adonis lives again! The 
death of Herakles has been described ; and the third day 
Adonis annually rises from the dead. The lament for the 
death of the Lord (the Sun) was still sung as late as the 4th 
century of our era. The 12 Apostles, corresponding to the 12 
months of the Sun’s course and the 12 Gates of the New Jeru¬ 
salem on high seem to point to the Solar Myth; for the sun 
was the emblem of the Logos. The Essenes adored the Sun. 
If any one should say to you See, here is the Christos, or here, 
dont believe! For pseudochrists and pseudoprophets shall 
be stirred up and shall give signs and miracles (—Matthew, 
xxiv. 23, 24) so that, if possible, even the elect would be de¬ 
ceived. Matthew, writing about 160, seems here to have in 
view Simon Magus, Markion and Paulus of our canon. That 
Simon with his doctrine of the visions plays the part of Paulus 
can, if we take into account Homily xvii. 19, not be doubtful. 
It is equally clear that Simon, as an apparent supporter of the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 923 


entire Gnosis, is Markion. The Clementines attack the false 
gnosis in the person of Simon. He is made to support parts 
of the Paulinist and Markionite systems : in Paulus the theory 
of the Revelation of Christ to him, on which he based his 
claim to be apostle; in Markion the foundation of his entire 
system, the distinction between the Good God above and the 
Just Creator (the Jewish God).—Uhlhorn, pp. 286, 297. But in 
the original tract over which the Clementines were superposed 
later, Uhlhorn, p. 286, thinks that Simon was not representa¬ 
tive of a Gnostic system. At all events, Matthew writing not 
far from 160 (or later) could not well have been indifferent to 
the views of either Markion or Paulus Canonicus. After the 
Evangel of Matthew came out, it is to be presumed (as the 
Gospels seem to have been a new departure) that some works 
would be written in support of this line of operation, among 
others the ‘ Evangel of the Infancy.’ St. Jerome most diplo¬ 
matically assumes that because it was sealed up in Hebrew 
letters, therefore St. Matthew never meant it to be translated; 
but as Matthew’s Gospel was written in Greek , the question 
comes up who put the Gospel Infantiae into Hebrew letters ? 
And was it not done to support the hypothesis of a Hebrew 
Evangel of Matthew ? 1 Because Jerome puts a forced con- 

1 The book which Matthew did not mean to be read except by the most religious 
(he says) “that book I do not superadd to the canonical scriptures ; but, to expose the 
fallacy of haeresy, I translate writings of the apostle and evangelist. ’ ’—Hieronymus, 
Opera, v. 445. Jerome here means the book on ‘ the Infancy of the Saviour.* Observe 
the expressions : “ arduum opus quod nec ipse sanctus Matthaeus apostolus et evange- 
lista voluit in aperto scribi. Si enim hoc secretius non egisset, evangelio quoque suo 
quod edidit addidisset. Sed fecit hunc libellum hebraicis litteris obsignatum, quern 
usque adeo non edidit, ut hodie raanu ipsius liber scriptus hebraicis litteris a viris re- 
ligiosissimis habeatur qui eum per successus temporum a suis prioribus susceperunt. 
Hunc autem librum ipsum turn nunquam alicui transferendum tradiderunt.—St. Je¬ 
rome’s reply to bishops Chromatius and Eliodorus ; Tischendorf, Evang. Apocrypha* 
pp. 51, 52. This very book they never at that time gave to any one to be translated ; 
and its text they related some one way and some another (aliter atque aliter).—Jerome, 
v. 445. That there was a Gospel written in Hebrew is probable ; but this possibly was 
the ‘ Gospel according to the Hebrews.’—Supernat. Rel. I. 470, 472. Putting together 
gnostic self-denial, eastern monachism, crucifixion of the flesh and the destruction of 
Jerusalem, you at once depress the character of Messianism. The Messiah will die.— 
Dan. ix. 26 ; Isa. liii. 3, 4. The psalms and the parts of the 3d Sibylline Book in some 
sense express the Messianism of the first century before our era, according to Schiirer. 
But however great the depression, we see no such idea (as yet) of a crucifixion of the 
Messiah. For that, we must wait until after a.d. 70 or 130. St. Jerome, therefore, in 
375-380 might live with the monks beyond Jordan, and yet know less about the Ebio- 
nites from 134-140 than his own contemporary Epiphanius perhaps. We need not 
think much of St. Jerome’s argument that, because a work was written in Hebrew let- 


924 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


struction on the matter, one favoring- Roman interests, we are 
not governed by his views. There was nothing to prevent 
clerical adroitness in Hebrew as well as in Greek, with an un¬ 
critical public. St. Jerome assumes that the book had been 
handed down from one to another ever since the first century. 
But could he prove this ? How in the middle of the 4th cen¬ 
tury could he have found it out ? » 

We have, first, Mithrabaptism. Then follow Essaioi, Na- 
zoria, Baptists, Ebionim, Iessaioi. The Nazoria and Ebionites 
bathed, like the Essaioi. When the Nazoria (Saibis) of St. 
John considered themselves soiled they washed in the river. 
So did the Ebionites, according to Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 
In the time of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus the Christian Church 
seems to have been in a state of complete ignorance respect¬ 
ing Christian origins, and to have given itself to superstition. 
Whereas in the time of Hermas and before the Evangels we 
find all the Essene virtues.—Hermas, Yis. III. 8. The idea of 
the Roman Crucifixion of the Salvator betrays the Oriental’s 
hatred of Rome, and the hatred of the Pharisees marks the 
Transjordan Ebionite, as do the Essene doctrines in the 
Gospel according to Matthew. No Hellenist could feel the 
hatred thus manifested. The Hellenist might go to Arabia as 
to the Transjordan fountains of the new faith and return to 
Damaskus without visiting Jerusalem. The Hellenist might 
to some extent sympathise with the Oriental’s horror of idols, 
but he was used to them at home. The Hellenist was not 
prepared for circumcision and all the beggarly elements of 
Judaism which Justin Martyr refused to submit to; but he 
might believe in a Messiah come, and preach him as the 
Crucified “ Great Power ” of the God, the Divine Power and 
Wisdom. There may have been a Hellenised Jew of Tarsus, 
opposed to circumcision, keeping the Lord’s Day. The Pauline 

ters in the Aramean language, therefore Matthew did not wish it generally read ; for if 
Jerome could read it, certainly the natives of Israel could have read the Aramean as 
well as he could who was only an Italian. But perhaps Jerome took the idea from 
Matthew, v. 18 ; x. 6, where Matthew restricts the advantages of “Kingdom come ” to 
the Ebionites,—the lost sheep of the house of Israel; for if they were Iessaeans, as 
Epiphanius said, then they belonged to the third sect of Israel. We want the testimony 
not of the fourth century ascetics, but that of the 2nd, between a.d. 130 and 150. If 
spirit and matter, the resurrection, Essenism, Ebionism, and Turkish ideas constitute 
the basis of “Good Tidings,” at least give us a correct chronology. In the midst of 
so much oriental theory and so little heed paid to nature, to the natural world and 
natural sources of existence, give us a few facts. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 925 


Author represents a Jewish notion of Christianism, the idea of 
the Christos and his death as an Atonement for human sin. 
Justin has this idea, regarding the Christos as the Logos. 
Justin represents the latest sort of an Ebionite, such a one as 
has cast aw~ay the Judaist observances. The Hellenist goes to 
the Transjordan or Nabathaean district as his Mecca; Justin 
adheres to the Gospel Narrative and the parables of the 
Evangels. Neither of them knew the Messianic ‘ beginnings ’ 
except so far as they could find certain (or rather) uncertain 
evidences in the Old Testament books. Or if the Hellenist 
picked up considerable of what we read in the Gospels, the 
Pauline Author, such as we now have him, said little about 
anything but the Crucifixion of the Christos, utterly neglect¬ 
ing the narrative of the Gospels, merely mentioning some of 
the Apostles. The Crucifixion of the Great Archangel King 
is his theme. The Jewish and Essene virtues are not wholly 
lost upon him ! The parables have not caught his fancy. 
He has lost nearly every sermon of the Gospels; but keeps 
sight of the Chief Figure and his Atonement. Such a writer 
follows Justin Martyr. If the Paulinist had preceded Justin, 
Justin would have taken some notice of him as he does of 
Markion, Saturninus, Simon, Basileides and Oualentinus. And 
he would have mentioned the great Jew of Tarsus if he had 
ever heard of him. The Hellenists are mentioned in Acts, vi. 
1, where the Hellenists and Hebrews are at variance. “ It is 
not easy to find a place on the earth which is not under Jewish 
domination.”—Havet, III. 455; Bev. ii. 26, 27 ; Strabo, Hist. 
The writer of Galatians, iii. 27, v. 2, was a very decided Hel¬ 
lenist. Irenaeus favors him. 

If the writer of the ‘ Preaching of Peter ’ had heard of 
Paulus apostolus he disdained to own him, and deliberately 
identified him with Simon Magus. If he had not heard of 
Paulus, then we must conclude that this name was of quite 
late origin.—Ant. Mater, 236, 241. At the close of the reign 
of Trajan the Antinomian and Antitempelian movement breaks 
out, and continues under the teaching of the historical Gnostics 
from Kerinthus down to Markion and his followers through 
the whole of the second century. Of this movement Paul is 
the last ideal expression. We can find no proof of his historic 
reality—ibid. 240. Lucian, whose glance embraced the great 
seats of supposed Pauline activity, betrays no knowledge of 


926 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


any such vigorous personality as having left his mark upon 
the Christian communities from a century before his time.— 
ib. 254. But those watchwords that we have been so long wont 
to consider Pauline—Grace and Faith and Freedom—are Mark- 
ion’s watchwords. So too is the ascetic which guarded his 
doctrine against licentious abuse. He absolutely forbade mar¬ 
riage.—ib. 294. See 1 Cor. vii. From Markion we learn the 
meaning of the text, ‘ I came not to call the righteous but 
sinneks to repentance; ’ and again, ‘ Fear not them that kill 
the body.’ Tertullian’s statement about the mutilation of 
‘ Luke ’ means that Markion’s Evangelion was the substratum 
of our ‘ Luke.’ And if we follow the Fathers’ comments on 
that Gospel, we may learn how much of its power and pathos 
is due to the great mystic or his followers; while the study 
of the Epistles in the light of Gnostic ideas may ultimately 
enable us to give a clearer account of that complex which has 
hitherto passed by the name of Paulinism. Tertullian writes 
against him as if he were living, apparently from the year 
207; and in this interval of forty or fifty years the whole 
legend of Peter and the other apostles must have sprung up; 
a<nd the opposed representations of ‘ Galatians ’ and the ‘ Acts ’ 
have been produced by writers who had their eyes, upon each 
other. The former is Markionite, the latter anti-Markionite 
or < apostolic,’ in the new and fictitious sense. Markion criti¬ 
cised Tradition from a dogmatic standpoint, but how could he 
have done it if the Gospel accounts were considered trust¬ 
worthy t —Antiqua Mater, 297-301. The Essaian (and the Ies- 
saian) had supplied, for over two hundred years, a standpoint 
that rejected the body ; Saturninus, Kerinthus, and Markion 
adhered to it, and “ Paulus ” said that the flesh lusts against 
the spirit . . . “ have crucified the flesh,” “ sinful flesh ! ” 
His doctrine and that of Markion are based on the ‘ spirit and 
matter ’ theory. The original Ebionites like the Essenes took 
a solemn oath ; which was called eVi/xaprupao-dcu, to make a solemn 
declaration or affirmation. Justin may have been a martur 
(witness) in this sense. 

It is as well, however, to bear in mind that the Pauline 
writer had access to the Old Testament, to Daniel, ix. 26, 
Isaiah, liii. and, very likely, to the targum of Jonathan ben 
Usiel, so that in preaching “ the Slain Bedeemer ” and the 
Kesurrection he was in some degree independent of the five 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 927 

or more gospels.—1 Cor. xv. 3, 4. He could preach against 
circumcision and be indifferent as regards food offered to 
idols, notwithstanding the Palestine excitement on the subject. 
Moreover he seems to have had some idea of Essene self- 
denial (Galatians, v. 17 ; 1 Cor. xvi. 1-3).—1 Cor. vii. That he 
or others could become apostles, see 1 Cor. ix. 5 ; xii. 28; Rev. 
ii. 2 ; xviii. 20. That he came after the evangelium, see 1 Cor. 
ix. 18, x. 11, xi. 19, 23-30, xiv. 33, xv. 5, 7, xvi. 22, 23. Maran-ata 
= Our Lord cometh ! This is like Rev. xxii.: Ta Maria Iesua ! 
Come Lord Saviour ! Rev. ii. 27, xi. 2, mentions ‘ the Gentiles/ 
and is very Jewish. In fact, Christianism was only a separated 
tendency of Judaism, and the Syriac text of the Apokalypse 
begins : The Revelation of Iesoua Messiacha; which might be 
read the ‘ Saviour Anointed.’ There can be no doubt that the 
narrative and Essenism in the Evangel of Matthew gave a 
new impetus to Messianism. It is impossible to say when 
the religious action of the Jews upon the other peoples began ; 
it is at least as ancient as the Dispersion. If we consider 
only the Hellenic world (for it is that which has become the 
Christian world) the Jews themselves have marked the date 
of its conversion, as much as these moral dates can do it, at 
the reign of Ptolemy Philometor, when a temple of mm was 
erected in Egypt and when the sacred books were translated 
into Greek.—Havet, le Chr. et ses Origines, III. 453. The Mar 
or Marna at Gaza was probably Bel-Mithra, Zeus, Zeus-Belus, 
Helios Noetos, Logos, Monogenes.—See Movers, I. 172, 553, 
663; Numb. xxv. 4; Sept. Psalm, xix. 6. 

If Paul wrote later than Matthew he would have quoted 
his Gospel; but if a Paulinist wrote for the Greeks alone in 
Asia Minor and the pashalik of Antioch he would have avoided 
Matthew, x. 5. Regarding the Epistle to the Galatians it has 
the appearance of being a work written for a theological pur¬ 
pose without much claim to historical correctness, and not a 
genuine work of Paul. It is not (according to Volter) simply 
a parallel to the original Epistle to the Romans. It connects 
with it now and then, but connects itself yet more with the 
first and especially with the second Interpolator of the Epis¬ 
tle to the Romans, also in part with the two Epistles to the 
Corinthians, and its relation to these writings is undeniably 
that of dependence. The author of the Galatians-epistle has 
before him the Epistle to the Romans at any rate with its 


928 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


first and second Interpolation and also the two Epistles to the 
Corinthians, and chiefly out of the diverse circles of thought 
belonging to the first makes for himself a theological system 
peculiar in a certain respect. Regarding the “ historical nar¬ 
ration ” Prof. Volter gives a full demonstration of the depen¬ 
dence, posteriority, and the tendentious character of the 
Epistle to the Galatians. See i. 15 ; Rom. i. 1; 1 Cor. xv. 8. 
The conversion of Paul on the ground of an inward revelation 
(“ in me.”—i. 15, 16) in contrast to the external one of Acts and 
Corinthians is brought into connection with the effort, out of 
the occurrence at Damaskus, to deduce not only the call but 
also the instruction of the apostle “ excluding all human in¬ 
terposition.” The going to Arabia (among the Ebionites) 
without any consultation with flesh and blood nor with the 
Apostles at Jerusalem is a protest against the intermediation 
of Ananias (Acts, ix. 17, 27). The lapse of three years between 
the ‘ conversion ’ and his visit to the “ Pillars ” served to make 
harmless what could not be denied.—Acts, xv. 2, 4, 12, 26, 29. 
The shortness of that visit (15 days) served to exclude in future 
any questions concerning the Paulinist gospel and all meeting 
with others, such as any intermediation by Barnabas. The 
order of succession, Syria and Kilikia, and that Paul is said 
to travel to Jerusalem without mention of the result of this 
journey means to suppose such accounts as those of Acts or 
their source. The revelation (Gal. ii. 2) as motive for going 
up to the apostle-convention is given for the purpose of pre¬ 
venting the thought that Paul had surrendered his indepen¬ 
dence of the earlier apostles. The description of the conven¬ 
tion itself (Gal. ii. 1-12) is purposely written (tendentieuse) as 
a companion to Acts, xi. 27-30 and xv. 1-4, 22, 23, which ac- « 
counts in their turn are a duplicating of one single journey. 
Observe merely the role which Barnabas here plays, the Anti- 
nomist Evangel (contra-Ebionite) of which Paulus Theologicus 
claims to have gotten the acknowledgment from the earlier 
Apostles, and how definitely an ethnographical division of the 
field of labor is settled notwithstanding the difficulty at An¬ 
tioch. Volter regards the narrative of Galatians as unliistor- 
ical and no authentic statement by Paul. The author is a 
later Paulinist wdio, for the history of Paul, has made use of 
historical reports related to or identical with the sources used 
in writing the 4 Acts,’ while the author of Acts in their present 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 929 


form has perhaps known the Epistle to the Galatians.—Volter. 
H. U. Meyboom proceeds to say that Volter treads in a 
new path, following- the conjecture of A. D. Loman.—Theol. 
Tijdschr. 1891. pp. 256, 257. 

Coming back to “ Galatians ” itself, the first aspect of the 
epistle produces the impression that it was written for a pur¬ 
pose, at a late period, by one author, and has not been inter¬ 
polated. It seems intended to magnify Paul and to sustain 
Peter in the interest of those who managed the Church in the 
second half of the 2nd century, and with a similar apologetic 
purpose to that found in Acts,—a work for edification, and 
for the purposes of the Church. For this object the exact 
truth might not have been always desired. The real Paul 
(Romans, xiii. 9, 10, 12, 14, according to Volter, in Theol. 
Tijdschr. 1889) seems to have been a good Jew and a good 
Nazorene of the Essene-Nazorene Matthew persuasion. Con¬ 
sequently the original Epistle to the Romans has received 
subsequent additions.—Theol. Tijdsch. 1889. p. 289, 290, 291, 
324. Romans, viii. 3-7, 8, is Essene and Ebionite doctrine, 
therefore the old inference from the theory of spirit and mat¬ 
ter. So 1 Cor. vii. 1, 8. Romans, viii. 3, is very near Doketism 
and supports the view of Kerinthus.—Irenaeus, I. xxvi.; Theol. 
Tijdschrift, 1889. p. 292. 

Prof. Volter holds that Galatians, like Romans, contains 
antijewish and antinomist discussions ; and that, as these can¬ 
not be taken away without destroying the whole book, the en¬ 
tire Epistle is spurious (not genuine). Volter and Steck hold 
that ‘ Galatians,’ without regard to the two Epistles to the 
Corinthians, is specially dependent on the Epistle to the Ro¬ 
mans. Volter adheres to the substantial genuineness of the two 
Corinthian-epistles except the interpolated parts and parts of 
Romans ; but declares that Paul himself never wrote Galatians, 
and that the evidences to this effect are all sufficient.—ibid. 
294. Volter p. 309, 303, 306, regards 2 Cor. xii. 11 as connected 
also with the contention against the Petrine party and the 
“ excessively apostles.” All this business wears a late aspect, 
see p. 322, 324; and, p. 301, Volter claims to have separated 
the original 2nd Corinthians from subsequent additions. The 
self-denial and abstinence of 1 Cor. ix. 4, 5; 2 Cor. vi. 10, x. 2, 
3, xi. 20, are Ebionite, if not Essene.—Matth. v. 5, 37, x. 22. And 
like the Apokalypse, Paul has a care for the saints.—1 Cor. 

59 


930 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


xvi. 15; 2 Cor. i. 1; ix. 1. The Ebionites were in home, Cy¬ 
prus, Asia Minor, Bashan, Nabatliaea, and consequently in 
Antioch ; where Paul was.—Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 18. 

Which was the Gy nosophist ? Tarried he only in India ? 
There was a sect opposed to the scribes and Pharisees, yet be¬ 
lieving in the Law.—Matthew, v. 17 ; vii. 12. These were the 
Ebionites.—ibid. v. 3, 20. Naked having destroyed every bond 
of passion and necessity of the body.—Philo, legal alleg. II. 
15. The body having been stripped off like an oyster shell, 
but the soul being stripped bare and desiring the natural 
change hence.—Philo, de humanitate, 4. A little piece of a 
written gospel was recovered from the sands of the Eayum in 
Egypt (New York Times, July 5th, 1885) which leaves out the 
passage Matthew, xxvi. 32, Mark, xiv. 28, where the Resurrec¬ 
tion of Iesus is asserted. According to Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 
2, the Ebionites regarded Iesus merely as a man, very much as 
Irenaeus, I. xxv. relates of Kerinthus. Kerinthus agreed with 
the Ebionites in adhering to the Jewish Law. It was then to 
be expected that he would join them in thinking Iesus the son 
of Joseph. Irenaeus further adds that Kerinthus believed in 
the resurrection of Iesus from the dead. But these four verses 
rescued from the sands of the Eayum make it clear that the 
Ebionites who used that copy could not have held the preced¬ 
ing existence of Iesu and his resurection according to the Gos¬ 
pel of Matthew. According therefore to Hippolytus, vii. 34 (as 
a guide to the reading of Irenaeus, I. xxv.) there is no reason 
to suppose that Kerinthus differed much from the Ebionites, 
since both adhered to the Jewish Law and both agreed in 
considering Iesu the son of Joseph. Lipsius, zur Quellen- 
kritik des Epiphanios, p. 119, says that Irenaeus under the 
influence of later gnostic systems has altered the real doctrine 
of Kerinthus, while Hyppolytus who is therefore here inde¬ 
pendent of Irenaeus, gives the right representation of their 
common source. The Sabians on the peninsula of Mt. Sinai 
practised abstinence ; the same was true of the Essenes, Tlier- 
apeutae, Ebionites, and Nazorenes. Kerinthus not only held 
that the Law was given by one of the angels who made the 
world but that this angel was not good ; to which the reply of 
Epiphanius is, How then has the bad given the Good Law! 
Kerinthus must therefore have held a tinge of Kerdonism and 
Markionism, if Epiphanius is correct. Taking Philo and the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 931 


various sects of self-denial, Essenes and all the rest, and not 
forgetting the Angel-gnosis and Markion, there were enough 
of such far-sighted visionaries to give a tolerable picture of 
the status of early Christian gnosis. Irenaeus was not inclined 
to give too much space to the Ebionites who did not receive 
Matthew, i. 18; iii. 16, 17 ; perhaps he felt that he had given 
an instance of their view in the brief curt notices of Kerinthus : 
but he specially mentions one Ebionite association that used 
only the Gospel according to Matthew! He stumbles over 
Kerinthus as Epiphanius does. The only reason for it would 
seem to have been that he was the opponent of Kerinthus and 
the Ebionites generally, and preferred to say as little of them 
as he could, in the interest of his party that claimed in the 
Gospels a monopoly of the right to discover truth, or to think 
it. What else was the word Revelation coined for, except to 
make for one set of men exclusive claims to the possession of 
truth ? Go not into the direction of the Gentiles and enter no 
city of the Samaritans.—Matth. x. 5, 6. This does not look 
like a disposition to convert the Gentiles, such as we see in 
Paulinist writings. 

According to nationality the Sabians (at a late period) were 
Syrians who were descended in part from Greek colonists, but 
in course of time became Syrianised, exactly like the Syrian 
Christians, who likewise were in part descended from Greek 
colonists, among whom however, still, especially at the time of 
Islam, the Syrian type preponderated.—Chwolsohn, I. 159. 
The Greeks were conquerors in Babylonia, Syria, and Egypt 
since 300 before our era. The above statement regarding the 
people of Harran in Mesopotamia seems to explain the status 
of Justin Martyr in Samaria. He wrote in Greek. He may 
have been one of the Syrianised in the colony of Elavia 
Neapolis. What Chwolsohn describes as the status of a period 
in Babylonia later than the time of Justin throws a light on 
the position of Justin himself, for he adopts Syrian Christian- 
ism of the Philonian school and the Jordan type, modified by 
some gospel or other agreeing very well with the Gospel of 
Matthew. 

Kerinthus and the Paulinist author, Antioch knew them 
both. The author of the Gospel according to Matthew was late, 
writing like the rest in Greek, as did Justin of Samaria, where 
Iessaean-Nazoria were at hand. Irenaeus, a professed advo- 


932 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


cate of the later Church (c. 180-184) was hardly the man to de¬ 
scribe in detail the doctrines of Kerinthus, and loth to give an 
account of any Ebionites except such as used the Gospel ac¬ 
cording to Matthew. The Paulinist writer seems to have 
recognized (1 Cor. xv. 6 ; 2 Cor. xi. 13; Gal. i. 18, 19 ; ii. 9, 11) 
the apostles of the “King,” to have been Hellenist Hebrew 
(1 Cor. xii. 13; Rom. iii. 1, 28, 29 ; ii. 17 ; xv. 16), but not to 
have espoused Matthew’s doctrine that the Christos was born 
of a virgin. It is true that the Paulinist says (Gal. iv. 4 ; 2 Cor. 
y. 16) that the Son of God is born of woman, but, as he does 
not say which, the haeretical Ebionites did not deny that. Ke¬ 
rinthus w T as a Hellenist-Judaist not hostile to the Law, who 
may perhaps have never heard of Matthew’s Gospel, but whom 
Irenaeus 1 seems to have regarded as a sort of Judaist-Ebion- 
ite. Most Gnostics saw only an allegory in Matthew’s view of 
the Christos clothed with flesh, born of a virgin, dead, and 
resuscitated (which the spirits educated in Hellenism could 
not take literally). The Gnostics supposed that the Logos was 
enveloped in the man who has lived, but that only the man 
was born, suffered and died, not the Logos.—Havet, III. p. 
434. This is not remote from the view that Irenaeus, I. xxv. 
ascribes to Kerinthus. The Pauline preaching is therefore 
not in harmony with Matthew’s or Justin’s. Perhaps the 
Paulinist was a contemporary of Justin, perhaps a little later, 
but prior to the work of Irenaeus. He claims that he is a 
Hebrew, an Israelite.—2 Cor. xi. 22. No Hebrew was likely to 
believe in a virginal birth ; but if the Paulinist did, why 
didn’t he say so ? But as to the date of 1st Corinthians, see 
the expression at e/c/cA^aiai rov Seov, ‘the Churches of the God.’ 
It took time to create and organise them. First of Timothy, 
iv. 3, refers to Markion’s precept not to marry or eat meat, and 

1 Irenaeus was a complete partisan (comp. Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. p. 255) for the 
Four Gospels, St. Paul, and the divinity of Iesus. So was Tertullian, excepting the 
Paul. It may be that neither knew much about the earliest Nazoria and Ebionites. 
Migrating from the western shore of Asia Minor to Gaul, Irenaeus seems to have been 
partly ignorant of what had been going on in Arabia, east, southeast, and south of the 
Jordan a hundred years before. His curt account of the Ebionites (I. xxvi.) exhibits 
Ebionites who “use the Gospel of Matthew.” Since a considerable portion of the 
Ebionites regarded Iesus as a man, they could only have used Matthew, i. 18-20 by 
disbelieving it and agreeing that he was the son of Ioseph. Coming from Asia Minor 
(Smyrna) the sympathies of Irenaeus were more likely to be with the Hellenists and 
Paulinists than with transjordan Ebionism, with the Revelation from Smyrna rather 
than with that from Beroea. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 933 


general asceticism, while iii. 1, 2, mentions being made a 
bishop. Markion dates 158-180, and the Church of the Pres¬ 
byters preceded the bishops, according to the Essene style. 
1 Timothy, vi. 20 mentions the antitheses of the falsely-named 
Gnosis. Markion produced his “Antitheses.” If, then, 1 
Timothy, vi. 20 refers to Markion’s Antitheses, these last date 
not earlier, probably, than a.d. 158-164. Moreover, when we 
reconsider Revelation, vii. 4, 13, 14, xi. 8, where, under the 
names Sodom and Egypt, Rome is mentioned, it must be re¬ 
membered that, while Jewish rage under persecution is appar¬ 
ently uppermost, the Christian Ekklesia (l’Eglise, qui s’etait 
elevee malgre les Romains et contre eux.—Havet, le Christian- 
isme, II. 52) had the deaths of its own martyrs to lay at the 
door of Rome. Thus the Apokalypse, like the Paulinist, 
\ exhibits the traits of Jew and Messianist united, just as the 
Sohar exhibits Messianism in union solely with Judaism, when 
it speaks of “ Malka Messiacha ” and “ Metatron malach malka 
malachim,” and the appearance of the Messiah in the lands 
Sebulon and Nephthaleim. It did not follow that the Sohar- 
ists could not think (as Arabs, Sabians, Syrians), because they 
were not Christians ; neither does it follow that, when Markion 
used the words “ Iesous said to him that this day is salvation 
come to this house,” he did not mean Iesua the Soter or Sal¬ 
vator. He must have meant so, because Markion considered 
the Ieshua a divine being, asserted the incredibility of an 
incarnate God, and denied the corporeal reality of the flesh of 
the Christos.—Supernat. Rel. II. 104, 107. 

Judaism in the period from Augustus to Diocletian exhibits 
a decided transformation of its nature as well as of its attitude. 
It enters into this epoch as a national and religious power 
firmly embracing the confined native land, which faces in arms 
the Imperial Government in and outside Judaea, and in the 
department of religion develops a great power of propagand- 
ism. The Roman Government would tolerate the Religion of 
Moses just to the same extent and no otherwise than it had 
tolerated the Worship of Mithra and the Religion of Zoroaster. 
The reaction against this exclusive and self-dependent Juda¬ 
ism under the crushing blows delivered against the land of the 
Jews by Vespasian and Hadrian, by Trajan against the Jews 
of the Diaspora, produced an effect reaching far beyond the im¬ 
mediate destruction of the existing community and the prestige 


934 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and power of Judaism. In fact the later Cliristianism and the 
later Judaism are the results of this reaction of the West against 
the East. The great propagandist movement which the deeper 
religious contemplation carried from the East into the West 
was in this way freed from the narrow limits of Jewish nation¬ 
alism ; if it did not surrender its dependence upon Moses and 
the Prophets it yet necessarily cut loose from the rule of the 
Pharisees which had collapsed. Since there was no longer a 
Jerusalem on earth 1 the Christian future-ideals became ex¬ 
tended so as to embrace all (compare Matthew, xxviii. 19). But 
as the enlarged and advanced new faith, which with its nature 
changed its name too, came forth out of these catastrophes, so 
nevertheless the restricted and obstinate orthodoxy came out, 
which met together, if no longer in Jerusalem, yet in the 
hatred against those who had destroyed it, and still more in 
hatred against the freer and higher spiritual movement that 
was developing Cliristianism out of Judaism. [Justin Mar¬ 
tyr shows this return feeling against the Jew, and Irenaeus, 
I. xxiii. in delivering his account of the theory of Basileides, 
exhibits the feeling of the Goiim against the Jews protected 
and aided by their own Angel (Iudaeorum Deus) : reliquae 
resiluerunt gentes eius genti.] Judaism not merely remained, 
but it changed. A deep abyss lay between the Judaism of the 
olden time that made propaganda for its religion, whose 
Temple’s Court the heathen crowd, whose priests daily offer 
offerings for Kaisar Augustus, and the rigid unbending Rab- 
binism that excepting Abrahm’s bosom and Moses’ Law knows 
naught of the world and will know nothing. Foreign the Jews 
had ever been and wished to be; but the feeling of estrange¬ 
ment was now heightened in them as well as against them in 
a terrible manner, and on both sides odious and injurious con¬ 
clusions were roughly drawn. The Jews now turned away 
from the Hellenic literature and opposed the use of the Greek 
translation of the Old Testament.—Theodor Mommsen, Rom. 
Gsch. v. 550, 551. They were against the half-Jews of Sama¬ 
ria, where Justin Martyr was born.—ib. 551. Strangely enough 
Matthew, x. 5, says Enter not a city of the Samaritans! So 
that Matthew seems to have been a politician,—that is, a little 
of an Ebionite, and some things else. He has two sides, one 
turned against the Pharisees, the other turned toward the 

1 Then the Apokalypse, xxi. 10, 11, had to make one in heaven. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 935 


lost sheep of the House of Israel. Benevolent, but antiphari¬ 
see ! Eunuchist and yet well acquainted with Jewish history 
(Matthew, xxiv. 5, 6, 11, 15, 16, 24), well enough to know that 
the mountains beyond the Jordan had been places of safety in 
previous commotions in Judaea. He clearly gives the ordi¬ 
nary conception of the Coming of “the Son of the Man” 
(Matth. xxiv. 3, 30, 31) in all the fulness of the Messianist 
imagination.—1 Thess. iv. 16, 17. But the Persian dualism 
was strong in Ebionites, Matthew, Rev. xx. 2, 3, and the Cle¬ 
mentine Homilies. 1 

In the time of Epiphanius (about 367-390) the Ebionites 
baptized, and they used an altered edition of the Periodoi 
(travels, circuits) of Peter. They were ascetics (like the Es- 
saeans) refraining from the use of animal food. And they re¬ 
ceive a baptism separate from those who are washed every 
day. And they initiate in mysteries in imitation of the saints 
in the Ecclesia from year to year at the festival of Unleavened 
Bread, and the other part of the mystery through water only. 
And they bring forward two, as I said, ordained from God, 
one the Christos, and one the Adversary (see Rev. xx. 2, 4), and 
the Christos, they say, inherits the world to come, but the 
Devil is believed to have this present world (or time) accord¬ 
ing to the command, to be sure, of the Ruler of all at the re¬ 
quest of both of them, and on this account they say that Iesu 
was begotten from the seed of a man and chosen, called God’s 
Son by election, Christos coming down from on high into him 
in the form of a dove. But they do not say that he was be¬ 
gotten by God Father, but was made, like one of the Archan¬ 
gels, and, still, more excellently, and that he is Lord both of 
angels and of all that have been made by the Governor of all; 
and coming and teaching, as what they call Evangel contains, 
that he came to abolish the sacrifices, and if you do not stop 
sacrificing his wrath will not cease from you.—Epiphanius, 
contra Ebionitas, xxx. 15, 16. The Ebionites lived in Basan- 
tis, Paneadis (the neighborhood of Caesarea Philippi), Moab, 
Batanea, and in Cyprus. They retained circumcision, sab¬ 
baths, and the Law of Moses. Moreover they were connected 
with Elxai and the Elchasites, and with Ossaians,—retaining 

1 Peter plainly says, Horn. xx. 9 : The Evil (One) does nothing bad in this respect 
since he carries out the law given to him.—Uhlhorn, p. 199. This is even more true of 
the natural man or animal than it is of the Diable. But see 2 Thessalon. ii. 8. 


936 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


the name synagogue instead of ecclesia. This connects them 
with Sabians and Jews ; but they reject the Prophets and re¬ 
gard the Christos as prophet of truth, considering him alone 
to be prophet, and man, and God’s Son, and Christos and 
mere man, as we said previously, coming to be called Son 
of God on account of the virtue of his life.—ibid. xxx. 18. 
Now although these are the Ebionites of the 4th century of 
our era, Irenaeus and Tertullian found, in the last quarter 
of the second century, the same idea prevalent among the 
Ebionites that Irenaeus notes as an opinion of Kerinthus (that 
Iesu was a mere man). We find Essenist doctrines in Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel, in and among the Ebionites and Nazorine Bap¬ 
tists and in the Codex Nazoria; so that the Essaians were dis¬ 
tinctly the source of Matthew’s Ebionism and the other forms 
of Ebionism. The writer of Matthew’s Gospel followed in his 
own way the Messianist views of the Sohar, the Psalms and 
the Prophetical Books; but all the Ebionites do not appear to 
have been of his way of thinking. The Ebionites were asso¬ 
ciated with the Ossaians (—Epiphanius, Kata Ossaion, 1, 2, 5. 
Kata Herodianon, 3) and the Nazorenes with the Iessaians be¬ 
fore they were called Christians at Antioch (■—Epiph. xxix. 1). 
The Nasarians also abstained from the food of the children of 
the world, neither eating things that have life, nor sacrificing 
them. Eor they say that the bibles are fabricated and that 
none of these was produced by the fathers. With these the 
opinion of the Ossaians is connected, who came from the Na- 
bathaean country and Iturea, Moab and Arielitis and the Dead 
Sea. Elxai was connected with them afterwards in times of 
king Trajan after the appearance of the Saviour, which Elxai 
was a false prophet. Elxai sprung from the Jews, thinking 
as they did, but not in his policy according to law. And he 
wrote a book according to prophesy, or as if according to in¬ 
spired wisdom. He hates virginity, hates continence, and 
compels marriage. He was joined to the Opinion of the Os¬ 
saians, remnants of which sect still exist (in 380-390) in the 
same Nabathean land and Peraia towards the Moabitis ; which 
people are now called Sampsaioi. Elxai confessed the Chris¬ 
tos in name, that he was the Great King, but Epiphanius 
admits that he has “not altogether discovered if Elxai in¬ 
structed about our Lord Iesou Christos: for regarding this 
he is not definite, but simply says Christos, as if, from what 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 937 


we liave comprehended, indicating or looking for some one 
else.”—Epiphanius, against the Ossaians, 3. This is testi¬ 
mony that in the year 90 of our era Elxai had never spoken 
of Iesu, but had some idea of a Christos. This agrees with 
the suggestion that the name Iesu was a late addition to 
Cliristianism, subsequent to the death of Barcochebali. In an 
age of unbounded Messianist folly among the Jews and Chris¬ 
tians, an age of which Lucian has left a specimen in his ac¬ 
count of the Christian admiration of the fraud Peregrinus 
Proteus, Messianism had to run its course until some writer, 
catering to popular imagination, lets the Christos die a sacri¬ 
fice to the favorite doctrine of spirit and matter in the East 
that destroyed the body in the expectation of the immortality 
of the vital principle, the soul. “ There was God and Matter, 
light and darkness, good and evil, entire opposites the one to 
the other.” 

Non enim esse Hulicura capacem salutis.'—Irenaeus, I. i. p. 27. 

“ We can hardly suppose, from anything that is known of the 
Messianic ideal of the Jews, that the idea of a Messiah suffer¬ 
ing actual death could have gained much ground among them 
until the days of horror and despair which followed upon the 
defeat of Barcochebas, the flight to Bettar, the abandonment 
of the holy city to the Bomans and the £ abomination of deso- 

1 The wisdom among the perfect, not the wisdom of this world.—1 Cor. ii. 6. In 

the religions of the orient the seasons of fasting and self-denial were followed by fes¬ 
tivals of unrestrained debauch. It was in honor of external nature. When the grass 
withered and the flower faded, then was the time for ascetic self-denial ; but when 
spring returned then abandonment to excess. This is the reason why demons eagerly 
desire to enter into the bodies of men. Being spirits and having the desire for food 
and drinks and . . . , 2 and not being able to enjoy these on account of being spirits 
and the want of the necessary organs for use, they enter into the bodies of men ; in or¬ 
der that having obtained the ministering organs they may be able to have what they 
want; whether food by means of man’s teeth or . . . 3 Therefore to expel the 

demons abstinence and fasting and the affliction of the flesh are a most suitable help. 
For if they enter into man’s body for the sake of enjoyment it is clear that by affliction 
of the flesh they are driven out. But since some more troublesome spirits, contending, 
although chastised, continue in the castigated body, therefore it is necessary to resort 
to prayers and entreaties to God, refraining from all impure pretexts, that the hand of 
God may attain to a cure of him as being a holy and believing person.—Clementine 
Homily, ix. 10. Calcare enim libidinem, fugere luxuriam, omnesque voluptates corporis 
premere ac fraenare, hoc est principatum gerere totius Aegypti. — Origen in Gen. xlv. 
Horn. xv. 

2 Sunousia. 

3 Sunousia.—Clementine Homily, ix. 10. 


938 


TEE GEEBERS OF EEBRON . 


lation; ’ when the illusions respecting the king in Jerusalem 
must have passed away. Nay (to quote Havet), 4 le regne de 
Jehova etait fini.’ ”—Antiqua Mater, 202, 203, see too 88, 89, 
90. 

The King in his beauty thine eyes shall see !—Isaiah, xxxiii. 17. 


The dislike shown (Rev. ii. 6, 14) to the Nikolaitans, as also 
to the Karpokratians and a part of the Ebionites, seems to have 
been caused by their immorality; and indicates the resem¬ 
blance of the Iessaians to the Essaians in continence; but 
Elxai hated virginity and commanded marriage, while the 
Gospel of Matthew (with some Essene traits) allowed wine at 
Cana of Galilee : showing that if Matthew is Iessaian, Ebion- 
ite, and Nazoraios, he is not necessarily a complete Essene. 
His sect is the sect of the Poor (—Luke xvi. 25, 29, 31), the 
Ebionites of a certain sort. 

The Epistle of Barnabas refers to Ebionite or kindred 
opinions, and is probably a forgery ; at least according to An¬ 
tiqua Mater, 72, 88, 90, 91 (he names Iesu 12 times), 93, 94, 95, 
96, 107-109, 166, 197, 202, 203. The idea is, that this Epistle is 
a late work,—posterior to 135, mentioning the name Iesus.— 
ibid. 72, 200-203. It is to the time immediately following the 
destruction of Barchochebas at Bettar that we must refer (ac¬ 
cording to all indications) the polemic of such men as the au¬ 
thor of £ Barnabas ’ against Jewish rites and institutions. The 
old enmity of the Greeks and Jews was intensified by the fact 
that the latter had now to deal with foes of their own house¬ 
hold. Men of Jewish blood must have conspired to cast the 
odium of the murder of the Messiah upon the ancestors of the 
afflicted race.—Antiqua Mater, 203. Add to that the Hellen¬ 
ists ; and furor was certain to arise. Had Barnabas possessed 
the accounts that we possess of the crucifixion then he cer¬ 
tainly would have used them.—Antiqua Mater, 203-4. Justin 
possessed such accounts, and certainly used them ; but he got 
them from a Gospel. But the quarrel began between Hellen¬ 
ists and Judaisers,—followed up in the entire Transjordan. 
All goes to show that our Gospels followed in writing, in the 
middle of the Second Century, the preceding rumor, and 
made as much use of it as possible. It paid from the first, 
to start a sensation. The author of ‘Antiqua Mater’sup¬ 
poses that the explanation of a crucified Iesua is the use of 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 939 


the sign of the cross at Baptism in the Mithraworsliip. From 
the first Epistle of Peter, iii. 22, iv. 2, 3, 6, v. 13, it could be 
inferred that the Ebionites had spread over the East as far as 
Babylon in the time of Hadrian’s successor a.d. 138-161. 

In an age that was full of idealism, platonism, and igno¬ 
rance of real causes , except the influences of the sun, moon, fire, 
air, and water, when astrology was more in vogue than astron¬ 
omy, when truth was believed to lie in mystery, the influence 
first of the priest, next of the rabbi, teacher, philosopher, ma¬ 
gus, goes and cheat, was paramount in the East. Where most 
persons could not read, the influence of the “ scripta ” was un¬ 
bounded with those who “ knew not the Law.” Mark how 
great was the extent of the Kabalist writings that are now 
contained in the Sulzbach edition of the Sohar, some of whose 
doctrines go back to an antiquity earlier than the beginning 
of the Second Century. With this mass of idealism in the 
Books of Hermes, the Old Testament, and the teachings of 
Simeon ben Iochai and his predecessors in the Kabalist tradi¬ 
tions, as suggestions, can we wonder that gnostic haeresies were 
even older than the time of Simon Magus and that the Gnosis 
or pretended Science of his followers was spread abroad on 
the wings of fame ? But the gnosis of fire and dualism was 
already in the Hebrew scriptures, the Kabalah had made the 
most of Angelology and asarkos messianisin, and as one Gnos¬ 
tic system after another came to the front the number of them 
was greater perhaps than the absolute demand. There was 
nothing substantial in the gnosis, and one theory might be ex¬ 
pected to replace another. The Messianic theory may have 
been less potent after R. Akiba and Barcochebah fell. Still, 
there was enough belief in it, if properly managed, to last a 
time longer. It had to be supported by something besides 
idealism to stand on a firm basis. It required history to back 
it up, real events, or a narrative adequate to produce the same 
effect as vera historia. The effect of the narrative would be 
that of a petitio principii, that is, to withdraw the attention 
from the point of merely theoretical Messianism and concen¬ 
trate it upon the story of the life of the Logos. The Hebrew 
Bible, Isaiah and Daniel were at hand to testify to the truth of 
the narrative by foretelling the events narrated. To secure 
the confidence of an oriental it was not always necessary to 
produce absolute facts, but only probabilities that he could 


940 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


not well dispute. Compare the dialogue between Justin and 
Tryplio. If the facts are once admitted, the rest is merely an 
affair of dialectics. To confute Justin, the Jew had to annihi¬ 
late Philo’s theory of the logos and to prove a negative as to 
the alleged facts. 

The glory of the Essene self-denial 1 has thrown a search 
light upon the conscience of succeeding generations of Nazo- 
renes, Ebionites, and Christians. Irenaeus says that the fol¬ 
lowers and successors of Simon Magus have dropped his name 
but teach his doctrine, putting forward indeed the name of 
Iesu Christos as an inducement. From Saturninus and Mar- 
kion those who are called the Encratites (the Continent) pro¬ 
claimed abstinence from nuptials, frustrating the ancient for¬ 
mation of God and indirectly accusing him who made the 
male and the female for the generation of men: and their 
latest invention is to deny the salvation of the first-created.— 
Irenaeus, I. xxx. We cannot afford here to overlook the direct 
descent of Saturninus and Markion from Essene, Ebionite, and 
Nazorene self-denial and the practice of the Philonian Ther- 
apeutae. 

The tradition from c the apostles ’ is first Linus, next Ana- 
kletus, then Klemes takes the pontificate ; then Euaristus, Alex¬ 
ander, Xustus, Telesphorus, Huginus, Pius, Aniketus, Soter. 
Kerdon came to Pome under Huginus. Markion, following 
Kerdon, grew in strength under Aniketus, who was tenth in 
the episcopate (a.d. 154-166). 

Apparently Justin, the writer of Matthew’s Gospel, and 
Irenaeus were laboring to spread a new form of Messianism.— 
Pev. xxii. 12, 20. When we remember that the Essenes and 
Ebionites or Nazorenes were supervised by their presbyters, 
that the “ Church ” came later, that the Ebionites were a rapidly 
growing body in the second century extending from Moab and 
Bashan to Antioch and Cyprus, that Matthew, xvi. 18, already 
dreams of founding a “ Church ” a Petrine-Ebionite Church, 
that the “ Acts ” is Petrine, that Galatians is Petrine, that 
Justin is Petrine but knows no Paul, the question comes up, 
on the theory that Peter and Paul died at Pome in the year 


1 Know you not that your body is a temple of the holy pneuma in you, which you 
have from God, and youdont belong to yourselves? For you were purchased for an 
equivalent; glorify the God in your body.—1 Cor. vi. 19, 20; vii. 1, 2. This looks like 
a genuine product of a Jewchristian of the Diaspora. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 941 


66, how it could be that before a.d. 65 the Christian Diaspora 
could have made such astonishing progress at Antioch, in 
Asia Minor and at Corinth; and, if it had done so, how it is 
that Matthew with all his Ebionism (Matth. x. 6, 41; v. 17), 
with all his exclusiveness, should not have once raised the 
question of circumcision, not even spoken the word , while in the 
Epistle to the “Galatians” we behold the Petrine and Greek 
elements in full controversy. Could all this fulness and ripe¬ 
ness of time have been attained before Nero surveyed the 
spectacle of burning Rome, or was it not the fruits of the whole 
half of the second century! When in the Greek-Ebionite dis¬ 
pute we see the “ beggarly elements ” of the Law made most 
prominent, when Matthew, x. 6 turns his back upon the Samar¬ 
itans and bids the wandering “ apostles ” (x. 40, 41) attend only 
to the necessities of “ the house of Israel ” (even as Paul is 
represented as beginning first with the synagogues of the 
Dispersion), declaring that he is not “come to destroy the 
Law and the Prophets ” as the Pauline writings were doing, 
but to sustain and preserve the institutions of Moses from the 
Pharisee interpretations, what other consideration could have 
caused the silence of this Greek writer in reference to the main 
topic, circumcision , except, like Justin Martyr after the year 
150, he saw that circumcision had to be abandoned for the sake 
of the “ Church ” in the case of the Gentiles! There is a re¬ 
markable agreement of Matthew, x. 6, with Justin Martyr, 
Irenaeus and Epiphanius in their hostility to the people of 
Samaria. Justin states that they were led astray by Simon 
Magus, while Irenaeus puts him at the head of all the haere- 
sies. 

The Roman free city was the framework of the Church. 
The Great City alone had a veritable Church with a bishop ; 
the little town was in ecclesiastical dependance on the large 
one. This primacy of the great cities was the great point. The 
great city once converted , the small ones and the country fol¬ 
lowed suit. The ecclesiastical province corresponded to the 
Roman province ; the divisions of the cultus of Rome and 
Augustus were here the secret law that regulated all. The 
cities that had a flamen or archiereus were those that, later, 
had an archbishop ; the flamen civitatis became the bishop. 1 
Rome was the spot where this great idea of catholicity prepared 

i Renan, Conferences d’Angleterre, 168, 169. 


942 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


itself ! 1 Constantine saw the internal force of the Church, the 
populations of Asia Minor, of Syria, of Thrake, of Makedonia, 
in a word of the eastern part of the empire, already more than 
half of them Christians. His mother held up before his eyes 
the conception of an empire of the Orient, having- its centre 
about Nicea or Nicomedia, of which the bishops and the mul¬ 
titudes of poor matriculates of the Church, who manufactured 
opinion in the great cities, should be the ligaments. Constan¬ 
tine made the empire Christian . 2 The earliest Church was 
founded in a belief in the Messia’h and the End of the world, 
which was expected immediately . 3 But as successive years 
proved the fallacy of this idea the congregation would have 
dissolved in anarchy if Borne had not made it over again, sub¬ 
stituting for the community the power of the bishop or chief 
presbyter . 4 The apostolical title is all, the right of the people 
is reduced to nothing. We can then say that Catholicism has 
really had its origin at Borne, since the Church of Borne has 
laid down its first outline. The free church of St. Paul was a 
utopia of no particular benefit for the future. With evangelic 
liberty there was disorder; they did not see that with the 
hierarchy there would be at length uniformity and death . 5 
Borne has propagated Judaism in its Christian form ; 6 but it 
was Judaism with its fruitful principles of alms and charity, 
with its absolute confidence in the future of humanity, with 
this joy of the heart of which it has always had the secret— 
Judaism, howe ver, freed from the observances and the distinc¬ 
tive traits which had been invented to characterise the religion 
proper of the children of Israel . 7 It is from the synagogues 
that the Church started ; 8 and it would have perished but for 
the posthumous fusion of the Petrine and Pauline parties by 
the efforts of Clemens Bomanus. 9 —Benan, 125, 127. 

1 ibid. 170. 

2 ib. 195. 

3 ibid. 159 ; Rev. xxii. 12, 20 : I come quickly. 

4 Renan, 157-159. 

6 ibid. 133. 

6 ibid. 20. 

7 ib. 21. 

8 ib. 52. 

9 In Clemens, c. 38, faith alone justifies, and justification is purely a work of the gra¬ 
cious will of God in opposition to all that man himself does, and to this grace of God even 
the Christian virtues must be referred as gifts of grace.—Hilgenfeld, Apost. Vater, 86. 

Klemes, Klemens, is possibly not the Clemens mentioned in Philippesians, iv. 3. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 943 


The victory of Rome was complete. A captain, of the Latin 
race, destroyed the fortress of Semiticism, and on the Law, 
regarded as Revelation, inflicted the greatest defeat it had ever 
received. It was the triumph of the Roman law over the Jew¬ 
ish Thor a, which was assumed to have been divinely revealed. 1 
If Christianism had not carried the day we may be certain that 
the religion of Mitlira would have carried it, for in point of 
doctrine they were much alike. 2 When in the 2nd century two 
classes of idea (the Oriental and the Greek) came into collision, 
the Oriental (being the most thought out, the most thoroughly 
rooted and profound, at least for that time) bore away the 
palm, especially in Rome and Western Asia where the ancient 

Encyclopaedia Brittanica Art. ‘ Apostolic Fathers ’ p. 195. Dionysius of Corinth, 
a.d. 166 is the first to mention Clemens Romanus as the author of an epistle from the 
Roman Church to the Corinthian Church. Accordingly, some critics have refused to 
recognize Clemens as the author and they have put the letter well on into the 2nd cen¬ 
tury.—ibid. p. 196. The Homilies ascribed to Clemens Romanus originated in the 
2nd century, according to the usual acceptation.—Chwolsohn, Ssabier, I. 400. The 
Clementines are a fiction, dating about the end of the 2nd or the beginning of the 3d 
century.—Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 196, 197. The 1st Epistle of Clemens of Rome has 
as factors the doctrine of the Epistle to the Hebrews and Petrine Jew-Christianism, it 
has justification by faith, and the genuine Pauline basis of its theology.—Hilgenfeld, 
Apostol. Viiter, 88. 

A material cause contributed much to the preeminence of the Roman Church. It 
was extremely rich. Its property ably administered served as a fund for assistance and 
propagandism to the other churches. The common treasure of Christianity was in 
some sort at Rome.—Renan, 172, 173. The Pauline Epistles were not exceptions from 
the pseudepigraphic character of second century literature. —Antiqua Mater, 35. The 
conclusion is probable that in the gnostic movement we see the real beginning of the 
conquests of the Christiani (Antiqua Mater, 51) ;—except that there was much pre¬ 
existing gnosis in the Old Testament (Isaiah, lxiii. 8) and Iesua the Angel was a name 
of Metatron and Mithra, King of all angels, Sar haphanim, and wept for the destroyed 
Temple.—Bodenschatz, II. 192. 

1 Renan, 117. 

2 Renan, 44. According to Massey, Christ, as the Ram, (or Young Lamb), dates 
from B. C. 2410. Christas Tchthus , the fish, dates from B.C. 255. Christ however in 
the human form dates from the second century of our era. The Gnostic Christ is the 
Egyptian Horus, represented Logos-like with the head of Leo. He is also represented 
standing on a crocodile, holding a fish over his head, Horus the cross, redeemer and 
freer (from Hades), in the sign Pisces, crushing the Darkness in its crocodile emblem. 
So Apollo and Krishna crush the Serpent! And Apollo is Mithra. The Little Mys¬ 
teries were celebrated when sol pervades Aries. Herakles is termed Saviour.—Julian 
Orat. vii. 220 ; Movers, 389 ; Munk, Palest. 522. Metatron was called Saviour Angel, 
Angel Iesua.—Bodenschatz, II. 191, 192. Hermes is Saviour and best Angel.—Diodor, 
v. 341; Aeschylus, Choeph. 1. With mythology at the bottom and Ebionism (and dem¬ 
ocratic communism) on top, the legitimate result was Paulinism and Romanism. 
Clemens Romanus stands as to Justification by faith, just where Paulinism stands.— 
Hilgenfeld, Ap. Vat. 86; Gen. xii. 1 f; xiii. 14, 15 f. Genuinely Pauline is the refer¬ 
ence of this faith to the death of the Redeemer (Clemens, c. 10).—Hilgenf. 86. 


( 


044 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


religion could no longer continue to flourish. The monuments 
of Mithra were on the Danube, and existed in England at some 
period in the first centuries of our era, supposed to have been 
carried there by troops that were ordered to that station. 
Julian, himself a scholar, could not have remained in igno¬ 
rance of that religion; and as to Budhism, Christianity proved 
able to duplicate it. 

The Mithra Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, was an ancient 
Myth of the Besurrection of Bol, Apollo (for Apollo too serves 
Adamatos or Admetus in Hades), Adonis, Osiris. The pecul¬ 
iarity of the Orientals was that they must invent a ‘ holy nar¬ 
rative ’ about the death of the Sun at the time of the shortest 
day, and at other seasons. This peculiarity is marked in the 
case of Adon (the Sun) in two instances, the entrance of Sin or 
Adon into the moon, when Adonis loses sex. They were in¬ 
spired to narrate the holy story of the unfortunate history of 
Kombab and the eunuchs ! This was told in Lucian’s time at 
Byblus, about a.d. 161-165 ; in connection with the bisex mys¬ 
tery of Adon and Alohim. 1 Another instance of loquacity is 
the myth of Adonis slain by a Boar (Winter, or the dry scorch¬ 
ing Summer Heat, sometimes) who revives and comes to lif6 
again the third day. It is true that it took time to create 
among the learned and cultivated Sadukeans a disbelief in the 
doctrine of resurrection, and Genesis shows their influence in 
the exclusion of the subject altogether; but the Hoi Adon, 
Alas Adonis, appears in the Prophets. 2 This inclination to 
emphasise the periods of natural events by myth and narrative 
was ingrained in Syria, Jerusalem, 3 and the Egyptian Delta, 
and the connection of the Iesoua with the Sun (—Matthew, 
xvii. 2 ; xiii. 43) was sustained for several centuries among the 
Arabians later than a.d. 150. Not only this, but a church- 
father in the fourth century 4 heard a woman, in the cave where 
the Salvator was born, still singing the Adonimaoidos. 5 Jus¬ 
tin finds and recognises the myth of Mithra, as applied to the 
Iesoua.—Justin, Dial. p. 87. So much for the Syrian tendency 
to get up the hieros logos or ‘ holy narrative.’ As, then, the 

1 Compare Gen. ii. 21, 23; Hippolytus, vi. 17, 18 ; Lucian, Dea Syria, 15, 27, 28, 51. 

2 Jeremiah, xxii. 18, xxxiv. 5 ; Abel Mizraim.—Gen. L. 10, 11. 

3 Ezekiel, viii. 12, 14. 

4 Hieronymus, ep. 49 ; ad Paulinum. 

5 Mourning the Lord (the Lover of Vena, the Moon) just as in Ezekiel, viii. 12, 14 : 
“ for the Lord has forsaken the earth.” 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 945 


Adonis-myth was still in full sway in a.d. 154, there was an 
inducement for Matthew, or even for Luke, to adhere to the 
custom of the country in using the “ sacred story ” in his nar¬ 
rative. The birth and death of Mithra, the Virginal birth, the 
Death of the Unconquered Sun, the Slain Messiah, the risen 
Lord, Adon’s Resurrection, all rushed with full force on the 
mind of the follower of the Apostle to the Heathen. Salvation 
is to Iahoh!—Ionah, ii. 9. 

To the bottom of mountains I descended, the bars of the earth were upon 
me to eternity. 

The Abyss of the waters (of Hades) surrounded me! 

Yet thou hast made my soul ascend from the Pit,—Ia’hoh, my Alah !— 
Ionah, ii. 6, 7. 

The Jews were particularly numerous at Antioch. “ Com¬ 
bining as far as we can the representations of Lucian with 
what is known of the mixed religious life of Sj^rian Palestine, 
it appears to us that he has his eye upon that form of Chris¬ 
tianity which was earlier than the orthodox Christianity of 
Justin and the Fathers, a Hellenic, Gnostic, Gentile Chris¬ 
tianity, in which there was little but the mere name Christus 
to remind of the current beliefs of Judaism. Originating 
amidst heathen and Jews, the new doctrine contemned the 
faith of both, and aimed at the establishment of a new Mystery. 
It spread through Samaria and Galilee, the Decapolis, to the 
coasts of Tyre and Sidon ; and at the time of Lucian, Antioch 
was the great centre of its propagandist activity, whence it 
had spread through Asia Minor. So bold an innovation must 
have been accompanied with many extravagancies and with a 
boundless enthusiasm which sufficiently explains the strictures 
of Lucian. It is, we must believe, Gnostic apostleship that he 
had in view in his description, that apostleship which was to 
be dignified with the name of Paul, and from which that of 
Simon Magus was finally dissociated.”—Antiqua Mater, p. 260. 
If the Petrine element in Matthew, xvi. 18, is obviously late, it 
follows that the same element in Galatians, i. ii. is late. Mat¬ 
thew makes Peter (Kephas) the rock on which he founds the 
Nazoraian Church; but Galatians, too, “ inquires for Peter,” 
makes him out (as does Acts, xv. 7) to be the “ Apostle of the 
Circumcised people,” “blames Peter,” acknowledges the 
Apostles, of whom Paulus Canonicus is one, goes beyond Mat- 
60 


946 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


thew on the question of circumcision in Galatians, ii. 7, 8,16 ; v. 
2 ; vi. 15. This all looks like a change of base. The anticircum¬ 
cision naturally interested the Greek Christians, and would of 
course claim mention. In the case of the Ebionites, perhaps, 
there was no need of lugging the subject in ; but as Matthew’s 
Gospel was written in Greek, for such as could read Greek, 
we have to assume that in a.d. 150, among the Greeks, circum¬ 
cision would have been out of place. Justin of Elavia Neapo- 
lis knows Greek well, and from the time of the Seleucidae it 
had been more or less known in Samaria. If Galatians, ii. 
7-17, be an interpolation (and the Epistle to the Romans looks 
interpolated.—Daniel Volter, Theol. Tijdschrift, 1889, pp. 274- 
292) then it might be as late as 152-160. At any rate, in that 
case the circumcision dispute in Galatians ii. would not tend to 
carry Paulus of our canon back to any earlier period. But D. 
Volter, p. 293, 294, regards the whole epistle to the Galatians 
as not genuine. The Epistle may not have been the work of 
the Historical Paul, but the writer of it may been correct so 
far as that there was a difference in the 2nd century between 
Jew-Christians and Hellenists over circumcision.—Acts, vii. 
8 ; x. 45 ; xi. 2 ; xv. 1, 2. As this subject is treated in Acts, is 
there any reason, why, if Galatians be not a genuine work of 
Paul and busies itself, like Acts, with the question of circumci¬ 
sion, it should not be considered nearly as late as the Book of 
Acts ? Justin knows nothing of Paul, but after Simon Magus 
and Menander he at once names Markion next.—Justin, Apol. I. 
p. 145 ; Antiqua Mater, 215. Some one has said that in a contro¬ 
versy each side borrows from the other. Then Christianism 
could have taken something from Markion ; and this is the 
view of the author of ‘ Antiqua Mater.’ 

The writer of the Gospel according to John must have 
known the writings or dogmas of Philo Judaeus and Hermes 
Trismegistus as well as the Nazorene and Ebionite theory of 
the Great Archangel before he could assume that the Father 
and Son (both mentioned by Hermes Trism. and almost named 
in Philo’s writings) were one.—John, i. 1, viii. 42, vii. 31, x. 24, 
30, 33, 36. As Philo knew the Logos-theology and precedes 
John without mentioning a lesu, room is left after Philo and 
before John for the Ebionite-Nazarene Gospel of Matthew to 
come upon the scene with a new Glad Tidings. 

Mommsen, v. 546, 550, attests the depopulated land of the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 947 


Jews as also the reliance of the Diaspora on Moses, and de¬ 
scribes the broken sway of the Pharisees. It was probably at 
this time when the Pharisees were powerless that the Gospels 
of Matthew and Luke were written.—Matthew, x. 5, 6, xvi. 6, 
12, xviii. 8, xxiii. 2. After Adrian’s war against Bar Cocheba 
the transjordan Ebionites, Nazorenes, and the Diaspora were 
left. In about a.d. 133-134 Judaea’s male population was 
everywhere cut down.—Mommsen, v. p. 546. The Gospel ac¬ 
cording to Matthew stands on Ebionism (—Mattli. x. 5, 6) and 
Judaism ; it tells mankind to listen to Moses and the Prophets 
(—Mattli. xvi. 29, 31) but is politic in saying nothing about 
Circumcision. In fact, the description of the holy ghost (in 
Luke and Matthew) as descending into a virgin of the race of 
Abrahm is a thoroughly gnostic conception in itself; and 
coupled with the very gnostic expression “the Son of the 
Man ” (Irenaeus, I. xxxiv.; Ezekiel, I. 26, 27), for Iesu is (ac¬ 
cording to Matthew, i. 20,23) rather the son of the woman than 
of man, and with the absence of all mention of circumcision, 
points to a very late date for the Gospel of Matthew,—a date 
posterior to that of the gnostics mentioned in Irenaeus, I. vii. 
xx.-xxv., xxxiv. In the Ionian cities and in Greece the Jewish 
Diaspora spoke Greek.—Mommsen, Bom. Gesch. v. 490. 2nd 
ed. We can now see why the Gospel of Matthew was written 
in Greek. The Jews of Borne used Greek during the first 
three centuries.—ibid. v. 547. 

The Ebionites were gnostics 1 and the New Testament has 
its gnosis. The Ebionites were Judaists (Titus, i. 10, 14) not 
Pharisees, although they kept the laws of Moses and followed 
Essene customs, rejecting the Pauline Epistles. The New 
Birth was joined to the practice of the Essene system.—Titus, 
iii. 4, 6; Acts, ii. 42-47. The word Lord which Micah applied 
to the Hebrew God the Ebionites applied to the Son, the 
Christos. The renegades referred to in Matthew, xxiv. 10, 11, 
can have lived during the Second Century persecutions of the 
Christians. Compare Bev. ii. 10 ; vi. 10; vii. 14. Epiphanius, 
xxx. 2. p. 245, ed. Oehler, tells us that the commencement of 
the Ebionite faction began after the ruin of the City Jerusalem ; 

1 Dan. vii. 13,14 ; Micah, v. 2 ; Irenaeus, ed. 1677. pp. 67, 137; Hippolytus, v. 19; 
Dunlap, Sod, II. p. 28. Kerinthus is closely related to the Ebionites.—Hippolytus. 
vii. 34, 35; x. 22. Duncker. The Ebionites were gnostics and believed in Aeons.— 
Norberg, Codex Nazoria, I. p. v. Preface. So were the Nazoraioi and Nazoria. Kerin¬ 
thus, a.d. 115, taught circumcision and to keep the sabbath. 


948 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


and the Clementine Homily, XL 17, says : “ First a false evan¬ 
gel by a certain impostor must come, and then in like man¬ 
ner, after the Destruction of the Holy Place a true evangel be 
secretly sent.”—A. D. Loman, p. 83. Some of the later Ebionites 
did not deny the miraculous birth of Iesua. To these Irenaeus 
devotes some seven lines, affirming that they use only that 
evangel which is according to Matthew, solo autem eo quod est 
secundum Matthaeum Euangelio utuntur; observe the pres¬ 
ent tense, “ use : ” as Irenaeus wrote circa 185-187, the present 
tense shows that he is speaking of some Ebionites in the last 
part of the 2nd century, subsequent to a.d. 150. There is no 
doubt that, by that time (a.d. 180), they could have used Mat¬ 
thew’s Gospel and perhaps sooner if so disposed. The most 
serious reason for a hesitation to believe that Kerinthus ad¬ 
mitted the crucifixion of Iesu and his resurrection, is the ap¬ 
parently late period when the Gospel according to Matthew 
was produced.—See Supernat. Religion, I. 397,424,425, 427, 428. 
In psalm, ii. we have a King upon Sion, but of enormous an¬ 
tiquity. 1 —Micah, v. 2. “ The rational direction which Chris- 

tianism takes through the qualified gnosticism, through the 
tardy triumph of the school of Paul, and, above all, through 
the ascendant of men such as Klement of Alexandria and Ori- 
gen, ought not to make us forget its true origin. The chi¬ 
meras, the impossibilities, the materialist conceptions, the para¬ 
doxes, the enormities, which tired the patience of Eusebius 
when he read these ancient and millenarist authors, such as 
Papias, were the true primitive Christianism. It needed that 
men of good sense and fine talents, like the Greeks who be¬ 
came Christians to start from the third century, should have 
taken up the work of the old visionaries and in beginning 
again should have singularly modified, corrected and dimin¬ 
ished it, in order that the dreams of these sublime illuminati 
should become a religion 2 capable of living.—Renan, l’Ante- 
christ, 2nd ed. pp. xxxix. 89. 

In the attempt to establish a cultus of the Roman State 
Rome ultimately spread throughout the world Judaism in its 
Christian form. 3 The unity of the Empire was the condition 

1 Mi-kedem, mi-iomi oulom, ab antiquo a diebus aeternitatis. 

2 The Christian Ebionites had not forgotten the Jewish Law (—Romans, ii. 17) and 
could hate Rome.—Rev. xi. 2 ; xii. 3, 9 ; xiii. 18 ; xiv. 8, 12 ; xvi. 19 ; xvii. 1-18 ; xviii. 
2, 5, 10,-17. 

3 Franck has pointed to instances of the Kabalah in the Old Testament, and we have 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 949 


precedent of all religious proselytism on a grand scale, if it 
was to place itself above tlie nationalities. The Empire felt 
this in the fourth century. It saw that Christianity was the 
religion which it had engendered without knowing it. By the 
creation, then, of its vast empire Rome furnished the material 
condition of the propagation of Christianity. 1 So that Chris¬ 
tianity was based on the success of the Homan policy. Hence 
its name, Romanism. The earliest Church was founded in a 
belief in the Messiah and the End of the world 2 which was ex¬ 
pected immediately. 3 But, as succeeding years proved the 
fallacy of this idea, the congregation of Iesus would have dis¬ 
solved in anarchy if Rome had not formed it anew, substituting 
for the community the power of the chief £>resbyter, the epis- 
kopos. 4 The Jews expected a Messiah. Therefore he either 
had come or was to come. 

Then if some one should say to you : See, here is the Christos, or here, 
believe not. For pseudoclirists and pseudoprophets shall be raised up.—Mat¬ 
thew, xxiv. 23, 24. 

You believe that Iesus whom neither you nor your fathers have ever seen 
must be the god Logos ; but the great Sun, the living 5 endued with soul and 
mind, and beneficent image of the Father whom the mind alone can recognize, 
him all the race of men looks on from eternity and sees and worships, and 
comes off well when he is worshipped. — Julian the Emperor, Epistle 51. p. 
434. 

In the sun He set His tabernacle.—Ps. xix. Greek and Latin Versions. 


referred to the subject earlier in this work. There is Messianism enough in the Old 
Testament, and of a Kabalist form, in psalm ii. Gen. xlix. 10 and Micah, v. 1, 2. The 
original Messianism, the ultimate source of Jewish Messianism, may be seen in the 
Old Testament, the Sohar and the two oldest Targums ; moreover, the Sohar, like 
Matthew, is acquainted with the form of Messianic tradition which is read in Isaiah, ix. 
xi. xxxii. From one root at first were developed Jewish Messianism and Christianism 
and they separated in the 2nd century, Simeon ben Iochai living in the earlier part of 
that century, while the Gospel according to Matthew appeared later than 150.—Matthew', 
iv. 12-18 ; x. 5, 9-11. Some of the Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament as well as 
the Evangels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Talmud offer numerous traces of the 
Kabalah—Munk, p. 520. Matthew represents the usage of the Apostles who perigri- 
nated among the towns and villages in the 2nd century of our era as is seen in the Di- 
dachg. In this respect the Gospel according to Matthew stands intermediate between 
the Travels of the Essaioi in the first century before our era and the wandering Apos¬ 
tles of the DidachS in the third century A.D. 

1 Renan, April 23d. 1881. London Times, p. 13. 

2 Renan, Conferences d’Angleterre, p. 159. 

3 Rev. xxii. 7. 

4 Renan, 157-159. 

6 Chion, the Living Sun. 


950 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Julian, after stating that the souls proceed not only from the Sun 
but also from the other Gods, proceeds to use the expression 
JepuTraa toi> Seo-Trorov, applying it to the Sun 1 (Apollo). Those 
who were “ Therapeutae ” in Philo’s time could likewise have 
called themselves Sun-worshippers, Servants of the Sun, the 
Lord. It has already been shown that Philo’s Therapeutae 
adored the Sun and lived in a monastic way. The Mourning 
for Tamus (Adonis.—Ezekiel, viii. 14) is described by Lucian 
(born 120) in the middle of the second centum at Byblus be¬ 
tween Antioch and Sidon. What then was the connection be¬ 
tween Adonis and the Anointed ? The pneuma liagion, the 
spirit, was the essential element in both cases. It is the spirit 
that is worshipped. 

Irenaeus altered the order of names in Justin’s suntagma.— 
Adolf Harnack, Zur Quellenkritik d. Gesch. d. Gnosticismus, 
pp. 33, 49, 55, 56. The most probable hypothesis is that Ire¬ 
naeus first transferred the name of Kerinthus from Asia Minor 
to the West.—ib. p. 46. Irenaeus does not follow a chrono¬ 
logical order but puts Saturninus and Basileides next after 
Simon and Menander, while in Book III. cap. 2 he mentions 
Valentinus, Markion, Kerinthus, and “ after them ” Basileides. 
Consequently Harnack, pp. 50, 52, 53, 56, holds that Irenaeus 
considered Basileides younger (later) than the three first 
named, and that only an interest of regard to the substance 
decided him to place Basileides earlier than the others in his 
account.—ibid. 52, 55. Harnack’s remark (p. 46) taken together 
with other evidences that we have, seen does not allay the sus¬ 
picion that there was something concealed regarding the his¬ 
tory of the Gospels and Church measures and conflicts in the 
2nd century, or even before. 

Taking now the Books of Hermes Trismegistus with their 
conception of the 4 Son of God,’ and Irenaeus’ description of 
the Gnosis of Basileides with its “ Sonship ” and its mention 
of Iesus, considering also that the Gospel of Matthew (accord¬ 
ing to the author of ‘ Supernatural Religion ’) is of later date 
than a.d. 150, and that Irenaeus in his partisanship has prob¬ 
ably placed c Basileides ’ earlier in the order of succession of 
subjects that Irenaeus adopts than the actual date of his 
Haereses (or opinions) would justify, and assuming, further, 
that various gospels were put in circulation between a.d. 140 

1 Julian, in Solem, p. 131. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 951 

and a.d. 160, if Basileides wrote about the c sonsliip ’ before 
Matthew’s Gospel was issued, he probably had reference to the 
Angel Iesoua as the Divine Son and Angel-King (the Malka di 
Nahura or the Malka Messiacha of the Sohar and psalm ii.); 
but if he wrote after (later than) any gospel, then he of course 
got the idea of the crucifixion from that gospel. Irenaeus, 
too, mutilates the original form of the Basilidian system (Hil- 
genfeld, Jud. Apokalyptik, 288, 289) and although an opponent 
of the Gnostics, seems to have been quite familiar with their 
application of their peculiar views to the Gospel of Luke (see 
further on, about the Ogdoad). This shows that the Gnostics 
continued the contest against their Gospel antagonists, after 
4 the Gospel according to Matthew ’ was published. In fact 
the word 4 Euaggelion * (Good Tidings.—Bev. xiv. 6) may have 
been employed about a.d. 100 by gnostic Messianists. 4 Let 
not any of you say that this flesh is not judged; nor rises 
again. Know! In what were ye saved, in what did ye 
receive sight, if not while ye were in this flesh ? We must 
therefore guard the flesh as God’s temple. For in what man¬ 
ner ye were called in the flesh ye shall also come in the flesh.’ 
—Antiqua Mater, 177; quotes 2nd Epistle of Clem. 9. 1 ff. 
The Jews expected the resurrection of the body. The impor¬ 
tance of the earthly reign of the Messiah gives way entirely 
before the future reign (see Rev. xx. 4-6) through the complete 
destruction of the previously existing world. Also the Mes¬ 
siah must die with this whole period of the world (Weltalter) 
so that the imperishable world may be brought into being,— 
Hilgenfeld, Jud. Apok. p. 15 ; Dan. ix. 26 ; vii. 13,14,22 ; Rev. 
vi. 10, vii. 14, xi. 15, 18, xii. 10, xiv. 4, 6, xx. 12, xxi. 1, 6, 10, 
xxii. 5. Come (Angel) Iesua, Lord!—Rev. xxii. 20. The 
Archangel Lord.—Philo, Dreams, I. 25. If the Logos of the 
God should come to our earthly system he brings salvation 
(soteria).—ib. I. 15. The Gospels are, like 1 Corinthians and 
Revelations, Messianist! Since the Jewish Sohar expanded 
its imagination greatly on the Messiah (as King of the angels) 
there was nothing to prevent Basileides doing something of 
the sort in regard to his own gnosis. If Basileides held (as 
Irenaeus writes, to support the Gospel party) that the Unborn 
Father (Unknown Father, perhaps) sent his Firstborn Mind , 
the Christos, to free those believing on him from the power of 
the angels that made the world, and that he appeared on earth 


952 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


to be a man and performed miracles, and did not suffer (on the 
cross) haying’ assumed the aspect of Simon of Cyrene, and as¬ 
cended to Him who sent him being invisible to all, and that 
those that know these things are freed from the Angel-princes 
that made the world, and that the crucified (Simon) ought not 
to be confessed, but (to confess) him who came in the form of 
a man and was supposed to have been crucified, and was called 
Iesus and sent by the Father, Irenaeus tells what would con¬ 
nect Basileides with the doctrine of Saturninus (as Irenaeus 
gives it) and convict him of getting the story of the crucifixion 
out of some Gospel or somewhere else, a Gospel (Matthew, 
xxvii. 32) being the most likely place to get such details about 
Simon of Kurene. It is therefore reasonable to assume that 
the views of Basileides (as Irenaeus gives them mutilated to 
the world) were made up and delivered after the Gospel ac¬ 
cording to Matthew, or some Gospel or memoir, had appeared. 
If Irenaeus wanted to make it appear that some of the details 
of the Matthew-Gospel (written after a.d. 150, according to 
‘ Supernatural Beligion ’) were made public in the first century 
instead of the second, he would have been obliged to find some 
testimony to show that the Gospel mention of the name Iesu 
(or Iesoua) had been anticipated between a.d. 100 and 138. 
He, curiously, selected a set of Gnostics for the purpose. 
Who knows that one of them ever heard the name of the Sav¬ 
iour Angel applied as a name of any but a supposed immortal 
Archangel Power on high, whom some regarded as.the Son 
of the God of the Jews! At all events, Hippolytus, vii. 20, 
tells us that Basileides and his son Isidore 1 say that Matthias 
spoke to them apocryphal sermons which he, privately in¬ 
structed, heard from the Saviour. Basileides begins with the 
God that is No thing, the Ayin, the ovk o>v 3eo's. Then the 
Word 2 * the Logos, is born from what are not. It is the seed 
of the world. 4 In this very seed was a tripartite Sonship in 
every respect of the same essence (or nature) as the God who 
is not, generated out of what are not.’ Arrived at this point, 
we see that Basileides has an idea of Philo’s Logos as the Son 


1 If Basileides and Isidore said so, perhaps that is the best evidence that it was not 
so. Evidently a late use of the name Iesus. 

2 If the Archangel Logos brings a refuge and salvation, when he comes on earth 

(—Philo, Somn., I. 15), would not the appearance on earth of Budha, Christna, or 

Christos have been expected to work a like result ? 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 953 


or Sonship. The 1st Evangel came from the Sonship. Light 
finally comes down into Iesu son of Maria and he was illu¬ 
mined. Next Basileides is represented as quoting Luke, i. 35. 
It seems clear, therefore, that Basileides is later than a Gospel 
if Hippolytus, vii. 20-27 is of any authority ; notwithstanding 
Irenaeus puts him the fourth, following Simon Magus, Menan¬ 
der and Saturninus. Plato, the noeton or noeta (mind-per¬ 
ceived entities), the Poimander of Hermes, Genesis, i. and the 
method of Aristotle caused Basileides to overlook the fact 
that human minds are limited, by nature, to observation and 
experience ; and that there is no intuitive insight into the hid¬ 
den causes in the universe. Consequently he indulged in a 
bewildering flight among non-ens, ousia, anoeta, hule, Angel- 
princes, archons, and angels of all sorts, like Judaism, the 
Kabalah, the Old and New Scriptures of Babylonians, Jews 
and Persians and the Gnosis in general. The authors of the 
evangels and Justin could find no special documents earlier 
than their own statements in the Euangelion or what was in 
the Sibyl, the Apocryphal Gospels and the Apokalypse of 
John, else they would have referred to them instead of to the 
Greek Old Testament. What advantage in this respect could 
Basileides have had over the Evangelists in getting information 
in regard to the crucifixion ? In Hermas there is no hint of 
the ‘ Son of God * having suffered an ignominious death or 
having risen again.—Antiqua Mater, 166. Mark’s Gospel be¬ 
gins with the Baptism of John in the Desert, and Matthew, v. 
vi. vii. x. begins theNazorian and Ebionite Gospel with John’s 
baptism. 

Antiqua Mater, 303, doubts if the passages in Tacitus, An¬ 
nals, 2.85 and 15.44 are authentic. Eusebius, H. E. III. 27, 
says that the Ebionites considered Christos (he means Iesus) 
a plain and common man. See Mark, vi. 3, 5, 6, 10. Moses 
points to a great prophet, Isaiah both to an Angel and a man, 
psalms, Daniel, and Micah to an Angel from on high, a super¬ 
human spirit-essence (as Persians, Chaldaeans, and Markion 
held), the Lord of the Powers according to the will of the 
Father (—Justin Martyr, p. 91), the Son of the Chaldaean 
Father (according to the Hermetic Books; Cory, Ancient 
Fragments, 60, 61, 242, 254, 283; Proclus in Timaeum, iv. 242, 
251; the Emperor Julian, Orat. iv. 132; Movers, I. 186, 264, 
265, 266, 268, 269; Damaskius, de principiis (in Cory, 253); and 


954 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Dunlap, Vestiges, 179-182), the Creator of the Powers (—Co- 
lossians, i. 16). Some did not deny that the Lord was born of 
the virgin by the Holy Spirit, but denied his preexistence 
(—Euseb., H. E. III. 27) which last the Book of Henoch stoutly 
affirms. The Ebionites after 150-155 (or later, after the Gospel 
of Matthew appeared) considered Iesu a plain common man, 
and justified only by his exalted virtue. But this meant that 
they were influenced by the views in Matthew’s gospel, but 
unwilling to go quite so far as that does. The point was to 
prove that the man Iesu ever lived. Now in stating that Ke- 
rinthus admitted the existence of this man , Irenaeus, Hippol- 
ytus, and Epiphanius were making Kerinthus do their own 
work, for if they had had any evidence they would have pro¬ 
duced it themselves ! The point in question was whether Mat¬ 
thew’s statements were to be relied on. In such a case they 
had got to prove Matthew , not to stuff the mouth of Kerinthus 
with their own views, for Kerinthus (no matter what he 
thought) was no witness ; he could not bring the missing tes¬ 
timony from a hundred years before. The Church, to bolster 
up Matthew, had to prove the existence of Iesu in a human 
body. When Irenaeus, I. xxvi. (according to the author’s 
copy) says that the Ebionites, in what refers to the Lord , dif¬ 
fer from Kerinthus and Karpokrates, he refers to .those that 
in 180-185 had read the Gospel and believed it. But Tertul- 
lian was scandalized by the number that did nothing of the 
sort. Epiphanius in 365-390 tells us that the Ebionites regard 
Iesu as Joseph’s son. When Epiphanius wrote that ‘the 
Ebionites decided that Iesu was of the seed of a man ’ they 
had had about two hundred years’ drill in the Messianic theo¬ 
ries of Justin and Matthew. Plutarch, learned in Greek and 
Roman religion, died in about a.d. 125, touches on Jewish ab¬ 
stinence in food and on the ‘ mysteries of the Hebrews,’ but is 
silent as to Christians.—Antiqua Mater, 1, 9. Epiphanius 
knows them to have been Nazarene Iessaeans (of Essene 
morals) who have not eaten the food of the Children of this 
world, like the Nikolaitans ; and the name Iesou seems to have 
been intended to signify Iessene or Iessaian Healers, Essene 
self-denial, baptism of John, Ebionite self-denial and a de¬ 
scendant of Iesi or Jesse.—Matthew, i. 5, 6; Epiphanius, I. 
117, 120, 121, ed. Petau. Iesua was the Throneangel Meta- 
tron. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 955 


Kerdon says Tertullian, denied tliat the Christos came in 
the substance of flesh.—Irenaeus, I. xxvii. p. 128, note. That 
was what Irenaeus disliked most. He found the same fault in 
Kerintlius and Markion. The gnostics were before and after 
Matthew’s Gospel came out. The Nikolaitans said that the 
son of the creator is one, but the "Christos another of the 
Supernals on high who descended into Iesu son of the creator, 
stayed there without suffering and flew back into his own 
pleroma : and indeed is the beginning of the Onlybegotten; 
but the Logos true son of the Onlybegotton.—Irenaeus, III. 
xi. 13. 257. The falsifying gnostics say that these Angels 
(Luke, ii. 13) came from the Ogdoad and made manifest the 
Descent of the Superior Christos: but they err again when 
they say that He who is up on high the Christos and Saviour 
was not born, but that, after the Baptism of Him who is by 
appointment Iesu, the Spirit like a dove descended on him. 
Therefore the Angels of the Ogdoad lie, saying, according to 
them, that to-day the Saviour is 'born to us who is Christos 
the Lord in Dauid’s city. For neither the Christos nor the 
Saviour was then born, according to them, but he who is by 
appointment (i.e. foreordained) Iesus who is creator of the 
world, he on whom truly the Descent was made after the 
Baptism, that is, after 30 years of the Supernal Saviour, they 
say.—Irenaeus, III. xi. p. 256. The connection between Ker¬ 
don, Markion, and the Nikolaitans is apparent here ; even if 
Irenaeus makes the Nikolaitans appear inconsequent. This 
whole account, by Irenaeus, of the gnostic Messianists and 
Christians wears a most suspicious look, as if he did not care 
what he said against them, and the talk against Simon Magus 
and the Nikolaitans is in one case distrusted, in the other, the 
Nikolaitans are hated because they agreed with Markion about 
Iesua appearing as flesh without having been born.—Bev. ii. 
6, 15, 16. Kerintlius could hardly have written Rev. ii, and 
expressed his hatred of them, if they and he were both gnos¬ 
tics and had the same error, as Irenaeus declares.—III. xi. p. 
257. 

Matthew, x. 5, forbids the Iessaean apostles approaching 
the Gentiles or the Samaritans, but they were to seek the lost 
sheep beyond the Jordan, the Israelites. The Essenes had a 
secret doctrine regarding the Angels.—Colossians, ii. 18. The 
Ebionites (1 Tim. vi. 17) were poor (James, ii. 5, 6) and Naz- 


956 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


arenes. The Iessaeans of Epiphanius were very much in the 
same condition.—See Acts, iv. 34, 37. If they were Ebionites 
and Communists they must have been Essenian or Iessaian.— 
1 Cor. vii. 1, 7, 32-34; xiii. 3; Hebrews xiii. 16, 17 ; Acts, ii. 44, 
45. The Essenes were a sect of the Jews given to going on 
“ travels ” according to Josephus, and (whether directly con¬ 
nected with India, or not) from about b.c. 143 had left a great 
record. Therefore there must have been portions of the Dias¬ 
pora more or less under their influence. Ernest de Bunsen 
asserts that Paul was an Essenian in doctrine.—Gal. i. 17. 
Now the c Son of Dauid ’ (Acts, ii. 30) must have been born 
of a woman according to the Old Testament history. Hence 
the idea of a woman-born Saviour or Iesua.—Matthew, i. 16 ; 
Luke, i. 35 ; iii. 31; Gal. iv. 4. As the fervor of the Messias- 
idea increased, the woman-born Messiah (who had been already 
previously regarded as the Angel-King and the Angel-Mes*- 
siah) would no longer satisfy all the gnostic Logos-worship¬ 
pers or the adorers of the Son or Great Archangel, the Angel 
King; and a human father of the Angel-Saviour might not 
satisfy every oriental. Hence from the woman-born Messiah 
of the Paulinist the “ Euaggelion kata Matthaion ” advances 
to the conception of a Virgin-born Iesua or Saviour. Kerin- 
thus and Karpokrates who admitted that Joseph was the 
father of Iesua were met with abuse from gnostics of the 
Eastern and Western Church. There seems to be no doubt 
that the death of the Salvator was propounded previous to the 
Gospels.—Dan. ix. 26 ; Bev. i. 18: compare Tacitus, Annals, 
xv. 44; Antiqua Mater, 3, 5, 6, 8-11, 17, 18. The idea of 
Ernest de Bunsen is that “even the view of Cerinthus that 
Christ, because a 4 spiritual being,’ departed from Iesou before 
he suffered, is not excluded by the doctrine of Christ in the 
Apocalypse.” Kerintlius was connected with the Ebionites.— 
Ernest de Bunsen, p. 319, 320. Kerinthus held that Iesua was 
not 4 born of a virgin,’ and the 4 Ebionite-Christian ’ Paulinist 
does not use this expression. The Nikolaitans were Gnostics 
charged with fornication probably because they made no dis¬ 
tinction between Jews and Gentiles.—ibid. 322, 323. But com¬ 
pare Romans, x. 12, Galatians, vi. 15, where all distinction is 
abolished. The Cliristology of Kerinthus is clearly included 
in that of the Apokalypse.—ibid. 324. Ernest de Bunsen sug¬ 
gests the idea of a double Messianic personality like the 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 957 


doctrine of Kerinthus. The Philonian-Essene conception of 
an Angel-Messiah and Son of God is combined with a Hebrew 
conception of a human Messiah and Son of Dauid.—Ernest de 
Bunsen, p. 100. 

In the first part of the first century Philo Judaeus told us 
that the Great Archangel had many names, and speaks of the 
Logos coming on earth (—like Krishna). At the end of that 
century Elchasai taught that he appeared at different times in 
the world. The kabalah of Simon ben Iochai at the beginning 
of the second century called him Metatron and King of the 
Angels. The writer Bodenschatz (Kirchliche Yerfassung der 
Juden, II. p. 191) says that Metatron was called the Angel 
Iesua. After a.d. 150, Matthew’s Gospel, i. 21, iii. 16, iv. 11, 
xxv. 34, 40, recognises him as the Angel-King and Saviour, 
and (xxiv. 5, 11, 15) knows very likely Elxai’s view that this 
King had been born many times, changing his births, having 
been transmigrated, that the King Messiah is from God, that 
(as the Elchasaites said) there was not one Christ, but one 
above and the other below, and that this last formerly dwelt 
in many, but later descended. Here we see the source of the 
view of Kerinthus and perhaps the Ebionites. So Matthew, 
ii. 18, iii. 13, 16, 17; Dunlap, Sod, II. 21, 34, 35, note ; Theod- 
oret, Haer. Fab. II. vii. Such a view could only be countered 
by Gospels. The preachings of Elxai among the Arabs and 
psalm, ii, bore fruit, and the Arab conception of the Great 
Archangel King was carried along the north border of Africa 
nearly to the Atlantic Ocean. Now the doctrine that Budha 
an incarnation of Yishnu was born of a virgin, that “ the 
Christos was born man in common with all, not for the first 
time from a virgin but also previously and many times ” lay 
before the writers of the “ Gospel according to the Hebrews ” 
and “ the Gospel according to Matthew ” in all its historical 
distinctness, although Daniel apparently has it not. The 
Elchasaites had it in the first third of the second century ; and 
all Matthew had to do was to start from the doctrines of the 
Baptist Essenes and Elchasaites across the Jordan, and to 
write one of the lives and incarnations.of the Angel King, end¬ 
ing with the Crucifixion by the Romans, who were hated. The 
Apokalypse follows the general idea of the Slain Messiah 
(according to Daniel the prophet) and combines Philo’s idea 
of the Angel King (many-named) as the Logos and the Saviour. 


958 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


—Rev. xxii. 7, 20. But while Daniel and the Apokalypse 
mention the Messiah’s death and the Slain Lamb (the last 
referring to the Woman and Her Son.—Rev. xii. 5) the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews and Matthew must have duplicated 
the Budhist and Hindu plan or originated the idea of describ¬ 
ing the miracles, the teachings, the crucifixion and resurrection 
of the Angel King, the Great Archangel and Divine Son,—and 
this too after the Temple was destroyed and Adrian’s temple 
of Jupiter Capitolinus replaced in the Holy City the Temple 
and people of God about a.d. 137-138. Then Jordan and the 
Transjordan rose up against the Pharisees with the religion of 
the Arabs and Sabians, and with the Gospel of the last trans¬ 
migration of the Angel Iesua. Rev. xvii. 3, 6, refers to the 
Desert and the blood of the saints (Messiaqists) shed for a 
witnessing in testimony of Iesua the Saviour and Angel King. 
Compare the reign of the Messianist saints with the Christos 
for a thousand years.—Rev. xi. 15, 16 ; xix. 4. Rev. xix. 11, is 
a prophecy of the Jewish Messiah on the White Horse, the 
Word of the God, come to judge the world and to send down 
from heaven a New Jerusalem in place of the one that Titus 
and Adrian rendered uninhabitable by the Jews. The Fire 
came down from the God from the heaven and ate them u^).—• 
Rev. xx. 9. The God and the Lamb, the Angel Iesua, the 
Saviour Angel Metatron, are always a unit, like the Gnostic 
‘ Man ’ and Philo’s Logos. 

First, we find in the Old Testament the ‘ Son of David ’ 
idea (1 Kings, v. 7); next, the King (of the Angels) a divine 
person, the Son (Micah, v. 2; psalm, ii. 6, 7, 12; Isa. ix. 6, 
xlvii. 4). Third, we have the post-Titus Messianism, from a.d. 
80 to 134 (the Great Archangel, or Logos Messiah—Gabariel). 
—Rev. vii. 10; xix. 11-13. Here we have the Persian Logos 
(Mithra), the ‘ Word ’ of the Edessan Diaspora, the Chaldaean 
God of the Seven Rays of Light.—Rev. i. 16; iii. 1; iv. 5 ; v. 
6 ; vi. 16, 17; vii. 17; xi. 15. Here we have the Chaldaeo- 
Persian Logos as Sabaoth; but yet two references to the 
Jewish conception, the ‘ Son of David ’: moreover, Rev. xviii. 
18-22 distinctly presages the total destruction of Rome 
(Babylon having been long before destroyed and become a 
marsh). Consequently a considerable part of the Apokalypse 
must have been written previous to Hadrian’s destruction of 
Bar Cocheba’s army in 134-5. After this final overthrow, a 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 959 


prophecy of Home’s destruction, under the disguised name 
Babylon , would scarcely be received; owing to the logic of 
events. Since the Apokalypse neither mentions 4 the Son of 
the Man,’ nor the Baptist nor the Nazorenes nor the names of 
the 12 apostles (although there might have been seventy), it 
follows that it is a Syrian-Chaldaean Messianist work written 
in Greek prior to the Gospel according to Matthew and prior 
to a.d. 133. The name Iesoua (meaning Saviour) could easily 
have been written Iesous in Greek, and very few insertions 
were needed to transform the Book of Revelation for it to be 
admitted into the New Testament canon ; according to which 
Iesoua appears not asarlcos, but a man with real flesh. The 
first symptoms of this transformation of the asarkos idea into 
real flesh are seen in the Gospel of Peter, the ‘Gospel accord¬ 
ing to the Hebrews,’ in Luke, and in the ‘ Gospel according to 
Matthew,’ which hoist the flag of the Baptist Nazoria and the 
Ebionites. But there are four passages (Rev. ii. 9, 26, vii. 2- 
10, xi. 8, 9) that show the writer of the Apokalypse to have 
been a Jew of the Diaspora: such expressions as “the evil¬ 
speaking of those that say they are Jews , but are not, but the 
Synagogue of the Devil,” “power over the Gentiles” the seal¬ 
ing the Jews of the 12 Tribes , and “ the City, the Great One, 
that is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt ” would be out 
of place in the mouth of a Christian ; a Jew writes them ! He 
represents the Jewish people calling Rome Sodom and Egypt, 
expressions indicative of detestation of the Gentile City, and 
speaks of the Hebrew Lord as crucified (figuratively) in Rome ; 
whereas a Christian would have appointed Jerusalem as the 
locality of the Crucifixion, as Matthew’s Gospel is careful to 
point out. To have made out that Jerusalem was not the spot 
where the Crucifixion must have taken place would have 
divorced from Matthew’s Gospel all the feeling that was con¬ 
nected with the War against Rome, all the natural patriotism 
that had been cruelly outraged in the destruction of Jerusalem, 
the fall of Betar, the prohibition against a Jew’s entering the 
Holy City, and the erection of the temple of the Roman Jupiter 
on the ruins of that of the Gheber God. Jew of the Disper¬ 
sion ! Rev. i. 11 alone proves that. And Betar perhaps had 
not yet fallen! For the ‘ Great Babylon is fallen ’ instead!—Rev. 
xvii. 5, 6; xviii. 10, 11, 19-21. Therefore the original form of 
the Apokalypse may be dated not long before Betar was taken. 


960 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Philo was a Therapeute, a worshipper of God alone : i) Veov 
jaovov Sepa-nFia .—De Profugis, 7. He also mentions the Logos 
(Word) of the Governor and His Creative and Kingly Power. 
Again, he mentions the Logos or 6 the Being in activity. 
Philo preaches of the abstract entity to ’'O (primal being) and 
of the Great Archangel, His Logos, His Word. Saturninus 
of Antioch held that there was One God Unknown to all, 
who made the Angels, Archangels, Powers and Rulers above, 
and that there was one Messiah, Christos, who came to the 
aid of the Father against the God of the Jews and the Rebel 
Angels. Basileides regarded the 4 Nous 5 (Mind, Logos) as the 
Christos.—Irenaeus, I. xxii, xxiii, pp. 118, 119. Basileides 
argued that the ‘ Nous ’ (Mind) was first born from the Un¬ 
born Father.—ib. p. 119. The Gnostics held that the Mind 
and Logos were with the God (—John, i. 1), and Markion, 
founding himself on the doctrine of Saturninus,—holding the 
theory that there was a “ Superior God,” not the God of the 
Jews, that the Christos was the Son of the “ Superior God,” 
—denied that the Christos became flesh. All that Irenaeus 
could say of Kerinthus only leaves him in an Ebionite or 
Markionite predicament, for Kerinthus admits (according to 
Irenaeus) that the Christos descending to earth performs 
miracles through Iesu but flies back again to that First (the 
Unknown Father) whence he descended. Consequently the 
split between the Christians and the Messianists must have 
occurred but little earlier than 148-150. There was some 
gospel, like Matthew’s, 1 which Justin quotes from in his 1st 
Apologia and in Trypho, p. 38. So Bleek, Einleit., p. 284. 
Markion would not eat flesh, decried marriage with it, and 
denied the resurrection of the flesh. Flesh and blood cannot 
inherit the Kingdom of God.—1 Cor. xv. 50. The early 
Encratites did not drink wine; but Matthew describes the 
miracle of water turned into wine. Was Matthew’s Gospel an 
opponent of Markion! They that are of the Lord Christos 
Iesou have crucified the flesh with the passions and desires!— 
Galatians, v. 24. 

Nork said that the authors of the Canonical Books are as 

1 Bleek, Einleitung, 107-109, regards Matthew’s Greek Gospel as the original, and 
the Gospel of the Hebrews as copied from it and translated into Aramean with addi¬ 
tions. This translation he supposes to have been made for such Hebrew Christians as 
could not read Greek.—ib. 287. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 961 


little known as the writers of the apocryphal works that pre¬ 
ceded them.—Nork, Bibl. Mythol. II. 371. The mythology, 
gnosis, kabalah, supernal mysteries, were not truths, but base¬ 
less human erroneous conceptions. Their leading philosophy 
was the untrue dualist postulate, spirits and matter. They 
knew nothing at all about heaven, the heavens, or supernal 
entities ; and imagined a kingdom of the heavens. The basis 
of their mental operations being the body and brain, they 
founded all their fancies on the doctrine of spirit and matter 
as contained in Hindu, Babylonian, Sabian, Egyptian, and 
Jewish gnosis. Instead of confining their investigations pri¬ 
marily to the nature of the practical planet on which they lived 
they overlooked its wonderfully varied materializations and 
organisms and soared up aloft to other spheres, like Sol or 
Saturn, for the undefined cause of causation. “ Spirit and 
Matter! ” Spirit was everything! Material organisations un¬ 
real ; non-existent! All that lives had a Mother.—Gen. iii. 20. 
This is one of the Mysteries of the gnosis ; and Simon Magus 
acknowledged the Kuria, the Mother 1 of all living things. 
This is the gnosis,—this is the Kabalah. The gnostics shared 
the name Christiani, as Justin bears witness, and were teachers 
of the new Revelation 2 long before him.—Antiqua Mater, 
214 ; Justin, Apologia, i. 26; Orig. c. Cels. 5. The Mysteries 
of the Gnostics aimed at the purification of the soul from the 
fleshly nature as a condition of future blessedness.—Ant. Ma¬ 
ter, 219. We see how near this is to the Essaism of Saint 
Matthew, ch. v, vi, vii, x; xviii. 8, 15-17 ; xix. 9-12 ; xxii. 21; 
John, iii. 27. Eastern saints put forth that gnosis of self-de¬ 
nial, righteousness and communism which finally appeared as 
Iessaian Gnosis,—the word “ Iessaian ” almost sticking in 
Epiphanius’s throat, so uncomfortable to him was its delivery, 
for it was ‘ letting the cat out of the bag.’ The real Gospel, 
says 4 Antiqua Mater,’ was in the Gnosis itself. 3 For the Gnos- 


1 the Ennoia, the Conception of his Mind.—Iren. I. xx. 

2 Since the gnostics (Philo and others earlier) had the idea of the Christos (psalm, 
ii) they also (in the kabalah) created the conception of Metatron (Iesua) the Angel- 
King. The use of the name Iesua to indicate a Iessaean would naturally be laid to the 
account of a Nazorene Iessaian. Papias mentions the Lord’s Oracles which Matthew 
composed, and which are supposed in Supernat. Rel. I. 461, 466, to be perhaps the 
Kerugma Petrou. But these indicate no narrative of the life and crucifixion, being 
sayings only. 

3 Antiqua Mater, 221. The Didache says nothing of Apostles of Christ.—ibid. 60. 

61 


962 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


tics it meant complete redemption of the soul.—Irenaeus, I. 
xxiv; Jos. Wars, II. "viii. 10, 11. The author of Antiqua Ma¬ 
ter, p. 52-57, 64, 66, finds Saints and Apostles, and little else in 
the Didaclie to carry us back to the beginning’ of the Evangel¬ 
ical narrative except positive evidence that the Apostles made 
the ‘ travels ’ like the Essaioi and Iessaeans. The Apostles 
and Prophets were Iessaian Hagioi.—Matthew, x ; Ant. Mater, 
59 ; Euseb. H. E. iii. 37. Strifes occurred, and the expression 
‘ false prophets ’ appears in Justin Martyr as also in Matthew, 
vii. 15 ; xxiv. 11. “ We see in the preachers of the Gnosis the 

most powerful spirits among those who passed as Christiani 
or Galilaei in the second century. . . . Justin of Neapolis ad¬ 
mits that the followers of Simon Magus and of Markion are 
Christiani , while he denounces them and boastingly seeks to 
arrogate the name with the system of belief built on the anti- 
Gnostic premises of the infallible truth of ‘ the prophets ’ to 
himself and his fellows.”—Ant. Mater, 232, 233. The ‘ Apos¬ 
tles ’ were very shadowy in their outline to Justin.—ibid. 56, 
228. Havet (quoted in Antiqua Mater, 234) says that about 
the beginning of the principate of Claudius (?) the rumor 
spread that the Christos was come, that it Avas Iesu, crucified 
under Tiberius! This new faith, as far as it had any connec¬ 
tion with the story of the crucifixion, is not fully accounted 
for, except by reference to Messianic hopes 1 among the Jews 
from a.d. 85 to 120. The date 41 or 42 was selected per¬ 
haps because Claudius had been known in connection Avith 
the Jews for his severity toAvards them; otherAvise it would 
seem that there was no reason to expect the Messiah’s coming 

The Iessaioi are the Essenes. They used exorcisms and performed magic cures.—Gratz, 
Gesch. d. Juden, III. p. 526. 

1 The Jews and Judaisers (according to Havet) expected an Anointed or Christos 
who was to descend from heaven to open the kingdom of God of the Jews, in place of 
the Romans.—Ant. Mater, 234. The primitive gospels have entirely disappeared, sup¬ 
planted by the later and amplified versions.—Supernat. Relig. I. 459, 460. Is it not, 
then, evident that the mention of Iesu as a Iessaean dates from a time subsequent to 
the destruction of Jerusalem,— a period when the priests were dead and the Pharisees 
had lost power ? Eusebius considered the Therapeutae to have been the former Chris¬ 
tians. AVhy not Epiphanius’s Iessaioi ? Both names mean the same thing, Healers, 
and Gnostics ! A mighty effort at spiritual innovation had been going on at Antioch, 
in Asia Minor, and Samaria, says Antiqua Mater, p. 50. Was not this gnostic revival 
helped on by adding to the Kabalist Gnosis the interest of the Iesu’s teachings, mir¬ 
acles, sufferings, and crucifixion,— dramatising the Gnosis , so to speak, in the person 
of the Iessaian Healer ? The Therapeutae could not mention Iesu, but some Iessaian 
could invent the hypostasis; basing himself on Daniel, ix. 26. 


* 

THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 963 

so soon. Claudius reigned a.d. 41-54. Iesoua being the name 
of the Messiah, the King, perhaps there might have been some 
hope of his Coming; but the date assigned seems all to early 
to set the story agoing in a.d. 41 or 42. Besides, the statement 
that he had come looks like the invention of a period much 
later than the time of Judas the Galilean. His destruction 
might put off an immediate expectation of the Coming of the 
Messiah, but was not very likely so soon to set agoing a rumor 
that the Messiah had already appeared during Pilate’s re¬ 
gency. The Jews could hope for the Coming of the Messiah 
while their Temple stood, and more than fifty years later. It 
was too soon to find the Messiah in one deceased. After the 
year 120-125 seems a period when hope of a Messiah to come 
might be so far reduced in many minds that such a story could 
be written, but hardly be generally believed, for some years at 
least. But with Nazarene Hagioi and Iessaian Missionaries 
always on their travels the time was certain to come when the 
crucifixion part of the rumor, whenever started, would at last 
be accepted by many. It seems just possible that the tra¬ 
dition of the crucifixion under Pilate (the place of which is 
never mentioned by Justin) came from a Samaritan source. 1 It 
is quite soon enough to find it in the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews; after Daniel, ix. 26; which is as direct as most of 
the supposed Messianic prophesies taken from the Hebrew 
Bible. The gnostics of the half heathen Samaria seem to the 
author of Antiqua Mater (p. 256) to have very likely been the 
first Christiani, and Simon Magus the legendary represen¬ 
tative of their mysteries and their theosophy. 

Once the theory of Daniel became established, that the 
Messiah must die by violence, the vast mass of Dispersed Jew¬ 
ish Messianists connected Christos as to his fatal end with 
the Roman War. Messiah was regarded as sitting at the 
gates of Borne, unknown, unrecognised, until Elias should 
appear. Matthew knew how to read the Septuagint, to trans¬ 
late the Aramaean idiom into Greek, retaining the original 
idiomatic oriental turn of thought; Luke had his Hebraisms, 
could write Greek in a Hebraising style.—Bleek, pp. 277, 278. 
Here we have a Greek Diaspora on an oriental scriptural 
basis, like the Paulinist writer himself. The Apokalyptic 

1 Antiqua Mater, 257-259 : the Kuthim and the Messiah ben Ioseph. 


964 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


John talks of home’s crucifixion 1 of the Lord (Rev. xi. 8), and 
the author of some earliest evangelium seizes the point, but 
changes the scene from Rome to Jerusalem, Galilee, the Bap¬ 
tism of the Jordan, and the £ walks ’ of the Iessaeans. Mes- 
sianism has changed its front, has produced an evangel and a 
narrative ; and the Gospel of Matthew takes shape in Pilate, 
Titus, Barcocheba, and Hadrian, after a Baptist, Ebionite or 
Iessaean has first told the story ; after Philo, the Hebrew Script¬ 
ures, and an evangel. When Matthew wrote (about 160 ?) the 
Ebionites were perhaps in Beroea, east of Antioch.—Compare 
Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 2, 18. Matthew, xix. 21, 23, marks the 
Ebionite, and his gospel was essentially Hebrew.—Epiplian. 
Haer. xxx. 6. 

Our vitality belongs only to the term that antecedents have 
set for it and that circumstances permit. Those persons who 
held from ecclesiastical doctrine that the earth is a flat surface 
with a flat expansion over it (the firmamentum) were know- 
nothings in the time of Columbus. No astronomer has ever 
seen the firmament and no sane man believes in it. But they 
belonged to that party in the Church which follows Irenaeus, 
Tertullian, Clemens Alexandrinus, and is to-day made up of 
the advocates of the doctrine of £< final causes.” Physical 
causation is the result of a direct action of the constituents 
introducing changes of condition. They must be actually 
operative ; else there is no causation. 2 They must be definite, 

1 Sodom, Egypt, Babylon were euphemisms denoting Rome. 

2 Immediate causation springs from the present social state of man and the efforts 

of nature. ‘ We see the things come one after another into being, some out of the 
mother, others out of a seed. We must therefore conclude that there is a succession 
of causes, and not that a God is the only cause,’ said the Budhist. A stream of being 
circulates through all animals and things that have life. If there be a power in man 
and other animals, in the growth and propagation of plants, this power is exhibited in 
the world alongside of and coordinate with heat, the lightning, electricity and gravita¬ 
tion. It is difficult to account for the origin of this singular display of force (which 
Cicero attributed to Nature and the clergy to God) on the ground of remote causation. 
Life is not spirit, but is exhibited in parental succession, and in the vegetable or ani¬ 
mal kingdom is subject to immediate causes. Remote Causation (as in Genesis, ii. 7 ; 
psalm, xxxvi. 9 ; Wagenseil, Sota, Excerpta Gemara, pp. 72, 73) is opposed to what ex¬ 
perience teaches, is not in fact a cause , but merely a naturalised theory.—Lucretius, I. 
170. Nothing in human or animal nature has been accomplished except by the force, 
will, or proprio motu of man or animal or its environment. But the theory of remote 
causation makes responsible for the fiendish acts of the Apaches a primal Evil Genius 
like the Persian Angromainjus or the Satan ben Elohim who stood before Ia’hoh.—Job, 
i. 6. ‘ Final causes ’ is a very ancient doctrine. Teleology implies the Devil, the Sepoy 

Massacres, the massacres in Egypt, tigers, lunatics, the cholera, etc. Everything must, 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 965 


not supposed causes. They must be fixed (like causes in his¬ 
tory) beyond a hypothesis or conjecture. To go outside of 
this in search of a final cause is to take away all causal proper¬ 
ties from the supposed final cause, since a cause to be a cause at 
all has got to be a direct one, one whose action can be traced, 
a proximate operative cause! A succession of causes is at 
variance with the theory of a primal “ fiat.” Final Cause is 
therefore a mental fiction, because it cannot be shown to act, 
nor is it known to be a factor. Markion raised the question 
whether the Jewish God or his * Superior God’ was supreme. 
What kind of causation is an unknown cause ? 1 The system of 
dualism has been a real cause, for it became (like the Oriental 
gnosis, the Old Testament, Platonism, Philonism) a factor in 
many creations of public sentiment which have exerted their in¬ 
fluence upon the Eastern and Western hemispheres down to the 
present time. The system of dualism to-day is maintained by 
the same ecclesiastical party that in the fifteenth century main¬ 
tained the theory of a fiat planet instead of a round globe. 
But if any thing is Unknown, how can it be known to be a 
cause ? When the Gnostics declared an Unknown Father the 
Cause, they confessed ignorance. 

Those who supposed that the ancient peoples had no great 
civilisation have made a usual mistake. The ancient priests, 
scholars, and sophists had their own civilisation in their own 
gnostic way, and this is apparent, most prominent, in their phi¬ 
losophy,—a doctrine that underlies all that is found in India, 


in accordance with this view, have its primal preordained source,—fatalism. Assaji the 
ascetic, one of the disciples of Budha, said that one saying exhibits Budha’s teaching, 
thus : All things proceed from the connection of cause and effect. The destruction of 
things results from the same. I, Budha, the Great Shaman, always make this the 
principle of my teaching. Sariputra, hearing this, understood the mode of deliverance 
and became a believer.—S. Beal, Travels, 57. That is, the visible succession of effect to 
cause leads us limited beings to apply the same rule to the only Unlimited being we 
can think of, and to assert that He is the first Cause, the final cause of all. The 
human mind could of itself invent this theory. It is another thing to sustain its ap¬ 
plication. 

1 In the period succeeding our era it was forbidden that places struck by lightning 
(where the flashes are repeated) should be trodden or even looked upon. This being 
the case when Jovianus was struck and killed by lightning.—Ammian, xxiii. v. 12, 13. 
a.d. 365. The inference drawn by the skilled interpreters of signs was that this event 
(being what is called monitory lightning) forbade the campaign of Julian. Zeus was 
thought to throw the bolts. In the works of Tarquitius on divine affairs it was laid 
down that when shooting stars are seen no battle should be commenced.—ibid. xxv. 
ii. 7. 


966 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Egypt, Syria, Greece, Karthage or Eome. We have thus pro¬ 
duced the evidence for the proposition with which we started, 
that the sources of Judaism are in the oriental philosophy. 

But now, says Cicero, N. D. I. 13, 14, it is a long matter to 
tell about the inconsistency of Plato, who in the ‘ Timaeus ’ 
denies that God can be a part of this world; but in the 
‘ Laws 5 objects to an inquiry into the nature of God. But 
since he means that God is without body (asomatos, asarkos) 
how that can be is unintelligible, for, of necessity, he must 
then be deprived of perception (sensus) and forethought too 
and have no pleasure, all which is comprehended in our idea 
of Gods. He also says in the ‘ Timaeus * and ‘ Laws ’ that 
God is the world and heaven and stars and minds and those 
whom we accept according to the institutes of our ancestors : 
which are plainly false per se and discordant with themselves. 
Cicero, N. D. I. 19-21, tells us that Epikurus held that all the 
Gods are contemplated by logos (reason, mind) on account of 
the fineness of the nature of the eidola (eternal forms, types). 
He held these four other natures elementally incorruptible 
(Kara yeVos), atoms, void, the airtipov (the unlimited, infinite), like 
particles (the natural constituents, elementary particles, par¬ 
ticles of the same sort): and these are called Homomereiai 
and Stoicheia. The same (Epikurus) who taught the other 
matters has taught us that the world is the result of nature, 
that there was no need of a ‘ Creation ’; and so that 4 that 
thing ’ is easy which you assert cannot be produced except by 
divine skill, that nature will produce innumerable worlds, does 
do it, has done it. Because you do not see in what manner 
nature can bring this about without any mind, you flee to God 
like the Tragic Poets when they cannot explain the result of 
any thing. Whose work you truly would not require if you 
would see into the immense and in every direction boundless 
magnitude of regions into which mind casting itself and, 
stretching out, wanders so widely and remotely that still it 
sees no shore of limit where it can stop. In this, then, im¬ 
mensity of breadths, lengths, heights the infinite power of 
atoms innumerable is active, which, empty space lying between 
them, nevertheless cohere together and continue in affinity 
one for one and another for another; whereby are produced 
these forms of things and figures which you think cannot be 
produced without bellows and anvils. Therefore you have 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 967 


laid upon your necks an eternal Lord whom day and night we 
must fear: For who would not fear a God foreseeing and 
thinking and perceiving all things, inquisitive and full of 
business and thinking that of all things He is the Author. 
Hence you have first that fatal necessity that you call Fate, 1 
so that, whatever happens, you say that has flowed out from 
eternal truth and the continuation of causes (the Hermetic 
chain, the endless chain of existences or forms. In nature as 
in chemistry we see only the operation of proximate causes). 
But of how great value is this philosophy to which, as to silly 
old women and those indeed ignorant ones, all things seem to 
have been made by Fate. Your Divination follows whereby 
we were imbued with so great Superstition, that, if you will 
hear us, haruspices, angurs, liarioli, vates and conjectores were 
honored by us. Freed from these terrors by Epikurus and re¬ 
deemed into liberty we fear not those that we think neither 
frame any trouble for themselves nor seek to make any for 
another ; and piously and holily we revere Nature [La nature 
telle que la congoivent les Stoiciens n’est pas une puissance 
aveugle ; c’est une force qui a en elle-meme la mesure et la 
loi de son developpement; c’est une raison en meme temps 
qu’un principe de vie] excellent and surpassing.—Cicero, N. D. 
I. 21. In the tenth Orphic hymn, verse 18, Nature is invoked 
as Father, Mother, Nurse and rearer. Creative Fire, enclosing 
all the spermatic causes according to which everything comes 
into existence according to fate.—Plutarch, placit. pliil. I. 7. 
Compare Minerva as Primal Mother, rerum naturae parens, at 
the gate of Hades, attended by Herakles,—the source of all, 
attended by Fire ! 

The absurd idea that man must deny that he sprung from a 
natural system of combination of particles which has been go¬ 
ing on for an endless succession of years, and must ascribe his 
origin to the Sun or Moloch, or Apollo, as creator of men, is 
the result of a union of ancient ignorance with the oriental 
philosophy. It is a fact that the Emperor Julian, in the fourth 
century, quoting Aristotle, stated that “ by man and the Sun 
man is generated;” but the germination of plants, animals, 
men, elephants, and monsters starts from small beginnings in 
Nature’s own time and within Her bosom. Some idea of sexes 
the oriental philosophy had conceived; but the infinitely 

1 John, iii. 27. 


968 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


minute sources and resources in nature’s vitality and nature’s 
growth the East left to the scientist, the chemist, the natu¬ 
ralist and the biologist in later ages to estimate and discover. 
Hence the conception of a single original primal source of vi¬ 
tality; while nature was manufacturing vitality in the earth 
unobserved, right under their Semitic noses. Between the 
final cause, that they guessed at, and themselves lay an inter¬ 
mediate myriad of proximate causes that it had never occurred 
to them to conceive of. The entire germ theory is of recent 
growth. “ The place around earth holds existence (to dvai) in 
the state of being born”(—Julian, Oratio, iv. 137); Julian 
thought that the vitality came down from the realm imme¬ 
diately over and round the earth (ttc pi rrjv yfjv). The Deity, 
Alolura, was of double-gender; man w T as an emanation from 
this masculo-feminine final cause; consequently the first hu¬ 
man, being an emanation, was also of two genders and was 
born from heaven above.—Gen. ii. 22-24; i. 26; iv. 1, 2. This 
is the meaning of the w r ords (Alohim spoke, Let there be light, 
and it was light). That is, it becomes light on the side of the 
Father, and it was light on the side of the Mother. What kind 
of a Matter and Mother of men is born, or from what sort of a 
seed ?— Hermes Trismegistus, xiv. 4. The mind-perceived 
Sophia (the Divine Wisdom) is in stillness, and the seed is the 
true good. 1 —Hermes, xiv. 5. Adam Kadmon is called Wis¬ 
dom.—Kabbala Denudata, II. p. 297. Job asks whence will 
the Wisdom come, and what is the place of the Yinali (the 
feminine Wisdom, the Mother of all that has life.—Genesis, 
iii. 20; Aeschylus, Septem vs. Theb. 140, 141). Alohim knows 
its way, He knows its place.—Job, xxviii. 20, 23. Here we 
find the Kabbala, as far back as B.c. 400, accepted by Aeschy¬ 
lus, Job, and Genesis, so that it is rightly named tradition re¬ 
ceived ! Next we find this Supernal Adam regarded as Her- 
mathena and Hermaphrodite, as Wisdom in two genders. 

1 The One is the beginning of all things, ■which Plato calls the Good, Philo, to ov, and 
the Emperor Julian calls to ev (the unit).—Julian, Oratio iv. p. 132. None Good but 
One.—Matthew, xitf. 17. The Sun is the Son of the Good.—Julian, 132, 133. By the 
intermediation of the Pater and Mater the spirit of the Ancient of the ancient de¬ 
scends on the Short Pace (the Sun).—Kabbala Denudata, II. 355, 375. See Rev. xii. 1. 
The Short Face is the King.—ibid. II. 391; Matthew, xxv. 34, 40. The Short Face in 
Genesis is probably Seth, the Semite Sun. Genesis, ii. 23, evidently is part and parcel 
of Kabala doctrine. 

The 10th Way is called the Shining Wisdom, because he mounts up and sits on the 
throne of the Vinah and shines in the splendor of all lights.—Meyer’s Jezirah, p. 2. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 969 


Third, we find its place in Aloliim. Fourth, as Venus is the 
Original Mother of us all (—Aeschylus, 140, 141) Venus is 
Eua (Eve, feminine Life). Fifth, from this Wisdom-Hermaph¬ 
rodite springs the human race, from Alohim above in heav¬ 
en, who is the Source of all life. Sixth, the Sun nurtures 
earth’s nature.—Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 633. This all contra¬ 
venes modern knowledge,—the science of astronomy, chem¬ 
istry, the growth of animal life from nature’s store, and the at¬ 
traction of molecular forces. It contravenes the action of 
particles of oxygen and the minimised forces of atoms of elec¬ 
tric power. The sun may indeed nurture the forces within the 
earth and exert its powerful influences upon the forces that 
earth contains within the circumference of her atmosphere ; 
but we would not now consent to say, with Julian, that man 
and the sun perform (to the exclusion of everything else in nat¬ 
ure) the work of the generation of any living being whether 
animal or man, or that the spiritus (the breath of life) falling 
into the seed alters it, and being altered, it receives growth 
and greatness (—Hermes, xvi. 13), or that the origin of the vi¬ 
tality and growth from seed in man, animals, plants, and grain 
was not mainly to be sought within this planet and its atmos¬ 
phere, subject to the chemical and electric influences which 
the sun and the atmosphere impart. Yet the sages of the 
East (with no exceptions that we remember), led by the Jewish 
tradition and by Aeschylus, have agreed with the Emperor 
Julian in his derivation of human life from solar force. 1 

An ignorant generation reposed in a paradise of illusions, 
says the Duke of Somerset, pp. 146,147. St. Paul, although he 
released Christianity from the bondage of the law bound it up 
and blended it with the traditions of the Jewish schools.—p. 
165. If the Gospels and the Epistles are discolored by human 
error, whether that error be legendary tradition or Eastern 
philosophy, the whole character of religious thought and of 
religious discussion must be changed.—ib. p. 168. When 
Christianity entered into the mind of man it acquired the taint 
of humanity.—ib. p. 170. All creeds are of human origin, and 
the endeavor to construct a precise creed on matters which are 
beyond the scope of the human intellect has been the stum¬ 
bling-block of Christians from the first century to the present 
day.—p. 171. 

i The immortal light of fire.—Aeschylus, Choephorae, 1035. 


970 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


The doctrine of the purusha, the spirit, is the foundation 
of Hindu and Semitic gnosis. Spirit is the God.—John, iv. 
24. All that exists, all that the Ancient has formed, can only 
have existence by reason of a male and a female.—The Soliar, 
III. 290 a. Here the Semite philosophy, older than Chris- 
tianism, teaches combination in severalty, and later further 
conjugation. Pneuma estin to zoopoioun, the spirit gives life. 
—John, vi. 63 ; Gen. ii. 7. Spirit (pneuma) has not flesh and 
bones.—Luke, xxiv. 39. Macaulay says it is significant “ that 
no large society, of which the tongue is not Teutonic, has ever 
turned Protestant, and that, wherever a language derived from 
that of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Borne 
to this day prevails.”—Somerset, Christian Theol. and Mod. 
Scepticism, 62. 

The egg-shell admits the air to the germ, being porous. 
But combinations with oxygen, carbon and electricity (as in 
the case of gunpowder) must have force. Starting with the 
agreement of the chemical bases in man and nature, organi¬ 
zation into cell life has a remote chemical basis to begin with. 
The process by which the vital status is reached is of no par¬ 
ticular importance in this question, since the translation of 
matter into an organised condition occurs to us all as a daily 
happening in connection with the food we digest, the air we 
breathe, the water we drink and the electric and nervous ener¬ 
gies at work within us. Matter reaches the vital stage every 
day in animals and human beings. The process of vitalising 
Matter has been reached continually ; w r hether we understand 
it is of no consequence. It is reasonable to conclude that the 
earliest process must have borne an analogy to what goes on 
within us; and if men had not been tied down by the inven¬ 
tions of the ancient Semites to an artificial theory of creation 
of the world and source of generation of mankind, men would 
to-day have decided that its origin was primarily in the forces 
of nature. There is no known beginning of history, nor is 
there yet a science of creation. Mankind are as to facts very 
much in the position of newly arrived emigrants, liable to be 
cheated by classes of men whose interest lies in false systems 
and in deceiving others. Of course, these people point to a 
book as infallible ; but ancient Semites could have made a 
much more infallible book if they had known more, and it 
had been their interest to impart truth. They managed, how- 


THE GUEAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 971 


ever, to excite enough human fears and credulousness to sup¬ 
port vast systems of organised priests with autocratic High 
Priests presiding over both priests and temples. What the 
priests needed most was to be supported ; truth was a second¬ 
ary consideration. 1 The main point was to derive a benefit 
from the stupidity, ignorance, and necessities of others. They 
were partly civilised ; but civilisation does not always supply 
charity, heart, conscience or wisdom. Wrong systems are 
easier made than correct ones. Generation consists, in part, 
in the severance of special qualities to form a part of the con¬ 
stituents of a germ ; which severance, when carried out to its 
full dimensions, is exposed to other natural forces; then, 
under favoring conditions, the vital stage ensues. It is of no 
more importance to know the causes of natural action than to 
know what originally caused gravitation, or what intermediate, 
classes of animals have perished leaving the gaps between the 
classes of animals referred to on plates xi. and xii. of Ernst 
Haeckel’s “Anthropogenic,” Leipsic. 1874. We see the gaps 
made by death in society, what more potent source of gaps is 
seen in the progressive stages of animal life than the extinc¬ 
tion of genera and species in the wear and tear of time and 
eternity! Changes, pestilences, famines, volcanic disturbances 
and the carnivora must have done their work, and a natural 
death always awaited the survivors, if any were left. “ Long 
before a human being had appeared upon earth, millions of 
individuals—nay, more, thousands of species and even genera 
—had died ; those which remain with us are an insignificant 
fraction of the vast hosts that have passed away.”—John W. 
Draper, Conflict between Religion and Science, p. 57. 

There is no form of life (animal or vegetable) without its 
own peculiar form of organisation,—which we call its consti¬ 
tution. Among the chemical elements of which animal or 
vegetable bodies are constituted we find nothing that we can 
denominate as a separate entity called spirit except the breath ; 
and this is merely a form of air chemically varied according 
to its constituents. Life is the result of the organisation 
(whether we understand it, or not). The Church lays down, 
postulates, a soul, a spirit, which nature does not confirm; and, 
without an investigation of the grounds for this hypothesis, 
lays claim to influence and power. Science requires that the 

1 Hence the Kabalah in the Old Testament. 


972 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


cart shall not be put before the horse, that a proper investiga¬ 
tion shall be carried out before religion makes any claims at 
all. 

The consciousness of an organism results from its perfect 
condition. There was an existing animate nature from which 
man was drawn out. He sprung from previously existent ani- 
mated flesh in some of its forms of multiplication. He must 
have lived among his nutrients, and these taken into the ani¬ 
mal’s system supplied the material for further animation first, 
of his own organs, and, second, for the vivification of others of 
his species. He stands on the same footing as the larger ani¬ 
mals in respect to life merely. Like them, he receives obser¬ 
vation and perception with life ; and mind, not in infancy, but 
only when the body has reached its full strength, and he be¬ 
comes adult. The reason this view is reached is that there is 
no other mode of animal formation known than the growth 
from nutrients that have been organised so far as the vital 
stage. We see that from preexisting vitality life is continually 
manifested, according to the great law of nature. The oriental 
idea of the creation of man is contrary to human experience. 
The doctrine, ‘spirit and matter,’ appears to have been the 
theologico-philosophical theory of Magna Asia, not of the Jor¬ 
dan alone; and it has been shown to be without evidence in 
its favor. Spirit cannot be shown by reliable evidence to be a 
factor, or even to exist anywhere except in the oriental imagi¬ 
nation. 

Oxygen, electricity, and food perform functions essential to 
vitality. Electric-animation is the last stage (or nearly so) in 
the direction of vital animation, contributing directly to its 
sensation and motion. What is the evidence of vitality except 
sensation and action ? Its promoter being a junction of two 
sources, vitality has supervened in organised bodies in con¬ 
nection with oxygen and electricity; consequently we cannot 
deny that in the workings of Nature at a former period or un¬ 
der different environment the same thing may have taken 
place in the formation of microscopic germs. Every egg is the 
result of two main composite forces (at least) brought into 
juxtaposition and kept under certain conditions as to suste¬ 
nance, oxygen, temperature, etc. As currents move in plants 
so we find in the human body the oxvgenised blood-current 
and the nerve-current (Nerven-Strom). “ The life of the flesh 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 973 

is the blood thereof.” Vitality is a result of composites. It 
cannot exist without food and air; consequently it is not a 
spirit, or immortal entity. A sound organism has been put 
together, it is still mortal; but presents the appearance of life. 
It makes no difference that in the microscopic world of germs 
we know not the formula of growth, that we cannot see the 
processes. They are there , as much so as the cholera bacillus 
that eats away our life, or the trichinae that perform a similar 
function. All the ignorant gnosis in the orient two thousand 
years ago cannot get rid of the facts of life. Without oxygen 
in air or water no complex organism of any size can exist, or 
(as the Greeks supposed) have a soul (life). Soul is the com¬ 
pleteness of an organised physical body. 1 The vital action of 
oxygenated blood upon the brain after death has been shown 
by others beside Dr. Brown-Seqard; and its action, in life, is 
seen, in the recovery from a fainting fit, when the blood re¬ 
turns to the brain. Regarding the phenomenon of force in the 
human body, is it not accompanied by a certain degree of 
heat ? Take water, and heat it to steam or vapor, and you get 
its force. Why is there a great frequency of thunder storms 
on the edge of the Gulf Stream, if not from the heat applied to 
the cold water ? So with the mighty winds on the Atlantic, is 
not their force obtained from the heat that issues from the 
warm water or from the hot tropical regions ? And man, like 
the plants and the invisible germs, is a part of the Nature of 
things on this planet. To this he owes his allegiance first! 
To this he is tied by nature, life being a combination 2 of 

1 Physical fatigue exhausts the very last powers of the body and renders all think¬ 
ing and head work extremely difficult, if not impossible.—J. Janssen, Ascension of Mt. 
Blanc. Here was a soul that could not even think until nerves, brain, electricity, 
oxygen, and blood came to its aid to rescue it from oblivion. 

2 In the ‘Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen,’ 4th ed. Coblenz, 1844, by Dr. 
Johannes Muller, voL I. p. 1, this author, in speaking of the Chemical Composition of 
organic matter, says: Feeling, Nourishment, Procreation have no analogon in the other 
physical phenomena, and yet the elements of the organised bodies are those that enter 
into the composition of the inorganic bodies. The organic bodies indeed contain as 
nearest component parts matters that are peculiar to them only, and which cannot be 
artificially produced by any chemical process, as albumen, fibrine (Faserstoff) etc. 
But in the chemical analysis all these bodies fall apart into elements of the inorganic 
bodies. The component parts that are most important in the composition of plants are 
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, more seldom nitrogen ; further are found more seldom, 
more frequently, phosphorus, and sulphur (both especially in the albumen of plants 
and in gluten (Kleber), then particularly in the Tetradynamisten with nitrogen), 
potassa (Kalium) nearly generally, natrium (chiefly in marine plants) calcium (almost 


974 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


forces, elements, and circumstances. If Arabian religions are 
as untrue as those of the Mound-builders, they are not suited 
to modern thinkers. If Jewish gnosis knew nothing about 
gunpowder or electricity, what was it likely to know about the 
seven heavens ? There is no reason to assume that there is 
being without body. Nor is there thought and sensation with¬ 
out a brain and nervous system. Oriental errors at an ancient 
period have been embodied in our system of modern belief. 
There is no preexistence of germs.—C. Dareste, Production 
Artificielle des Monstruosites, 19, 20. Vitality is the result of 
favorable conditions. Dareste, p. 20, says that life is the cause 
that produces this machine itself. This is obvious in the 
movements within the egg, and in the workings of the machine 
after its birth. But without food and oxygen the life of the 
germ dies. So there must have been a combination, a compo¬ 
sition of forces to create in either parent the sources of life; 
and the life of the parent creates the source (within itself) of 
future vitality. Then comes in Dareste’s dictum, that life pro¬ 
duces this machine. When the conditions, under which life 
continues, cease, we have the phenomenon of dissolution. 

Bichat held that life is nothing but a number of functions 
or powers which resist death. Inorganic bodies, he observes, 
are incessantly acting upon organic bodies, so that if there 
were no principle of reaction they would soon cease to exist. 


universally), alumium (seldom), silicium, magnium (rarely), iron and manganium fre¬ 
quently, chlorine, iodine and brom (both in sea plants). 

In the animal world these substances are again found, except Alumium; Natrium 
is more frequent, Kalium more seldom than in plants, iodine and Brom in some marine 
animals. The component parts of the human body and the higher animals are : oxygen, 
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur (especially in the hairs, in the albumen and brain), 
phosphorus (especially in the bones, teeth, and in the brain) chlorine, fluorine (especi¬ 
ally in the teeth and bones), magnium (especially in the bones and teeth), manganium 
(in the hairs), silicium (in the hairs), iron (especially in the blood, in the dark pigment 
and the Krystallinse). The first difference between organic and inorganic bodies is 
then in the number of the elements that enter into them. Not all elements enter into 
the composition of the organic bodies, several are injurious to their life. The second 
distinction, following Fourcroy and Berzelius has been sought in the manner of the 
combination. 

Dr. Peter Bryce of Alabama held (June 27,1889, in Alabama) that man came from 
primordial germs and that he was a development of the lower order of beings, that 
mind was but a development of the instinct of animals, and that it differed from ani¬ 
mal reason only in degree, and not in kind. Mind he held, was the result of organic 
forces, and when these stopped mind was gone. It has no entity of its own. When 
man dies his mind dies with him.—New York Herald, June 28. 1889. Dr. Bryce is an 
expert on insanity of national reputation. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 975 


In childhood there is an exuberance of life, because the 
reaction is greater than the action. As life attains its prime 
an equilibrium is established between the two, while as old 
age draws on reaction decreases, the action of external forces 
remaining the same, and death takes place when reaction has 
wholly ceased. Our lives, he says, are double. The one we 
possess in common with the vegetable and the animal, the 
other belongs exclusively to the latter. 1 2 The vegetable life is, 
as it were, the rough sketch of the animal, the difference being 
that the latter is provided with external organs which are suit¬ 
able for bringing it into communication with the external 
world. The first life is called organic, the second animal life. 
The mental faculties, which, taken in the aggregate, we call our 
souls, begin to decay before the body. All that we know is 
that the kinds of matter in which the mental qualities manifest 
themselves uniformly live, and that when they cease to exist 
(in a vital condition) the mental qualities cease also. Our 
mental faculties cannot act independently of an organism, but 
many of the physical faculties can and do constantly operate 
independently of the mental. The organism is, therefore, 
after all, the one thing indispensable, and the mind is but an 
attribute of matter. . . . Nature carries in herself the prin¬ 
ciple and the determining cause of her life. . . . There is no 
principle of vitality. 3 —Mankind, 750, 752. The Greeks re¬ 
garded life as the soul. Psuche means life and soul. But the 
mental faculties, taken in the aggregate, we call soul; and 
these mental faculties die out first. Memory is the first to 
depart. So that the mind disappears before the body dies. 
The only inference from this is that the soul has no mind, or 
else that the mental faculties (soul) cannot exist independently 
of an animal organism. The fact is that man is limited in life, 
body, and in mind, as regards the past and future of the uni¬ 
verse, its origin, and government. Certain of its modes of 
existence, such as gravitation, chemical affinity, etc. he can 
learn ; but the oriental efforts of Hermes, the Babylonians and 
Jews to describe Creation, when they did not know the half 


1 Man dies because he is a natural product; if he were what is called a soul, a 
spirit, he might not live at all; or he might live forever. Nature’s products in animal 
life were made to last but a certain period. 

2 Nature is animated being. There is no one principle of vitality. Life is not a 

thing, but a status, a condition, a result of antecedents in nature. 


976 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


of it, were ultra vires. 1 And an examination of what are called 
the Sacred Books of the Egyptians, Sabians, Babylonians, 
Persians, Hindus and Jews shows how quick their sages got 
off the track as soon as they set to work, because they started 
on wrong principles. If man is limited in his knowledge of 
the world he can at least love truth ; and, if he does, he will 
follow nature, and not prescribe his own nonsense as the path 
the Divine Mind has pursued amid the waters of primaeval 
chaos or the endless spaces of infinity. The reason why we 
do not know T how the world was created is that nature works 
through infinitely small particles, by chemical affinity and on 
an enormous scale, through vast periods of time. 

It is the organisation of contained and acquired elements. 
Through chemistry, says Haeckel, we can divide all known 
bodies into their indissoluble elements, carbon, oxygen, nitro¬ 
gen, sulphur, further the different metals : kalium, natrium, 
iron, gold, etc. About seventy such elements (Grundstoffe) 
are enumerated. In bodies of animals and plants no element, 
no Grundstoff, appears which is not found in the lifeless ex¬ 
ternal nature. There are no special organic elements or Grund¬ 
stoffe (original elements). The chemical and physical dis¬ 
tinctions which exist between organisms and the inorganic 
(materials) have thus their actual foundation not in a dif¬ 
ferent nature of the elements of which they are made up, but 
in the different way and mode in which the last are combined 
in chemical compounds. This different manner of combina¬ 
tion primarily affects (conditions) certain physical peculiarities, 
especially in the thickness of the matter, which at first sight 
seem to establish a deep gulf between the two groups of bodies. 
But every inorganic body can by heat be changed into a fluid 
or molten state and then into a gaseous condition, while these 
three conditions may be reversed from the gas to the fluid and 
solid status. But in contradistinction to these three states of 
inorganic bodies, the living bodies of all organisms, animals as 
well as plants, are in a very peculiar fourth condition of aggre¬ 
gation. This is not hard like stone nor soft like w r ater, but 
between the two. In all living bodies without exception there 

1 The plain truth is that it is impossible for man to know anything about what his 
own limited status prevents him from knowing. But the imagination is the spirit’s 
inner creation, the living creative-idea. The inventions (compositions) of the imagi¬ 
nation are constituted like the culture that produced them.—Schultz-Schultzenstein, 

p. 882. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 977 

is a certain amount of water mixed in (verbunden) with firm 
matter in a very peculiar mode and way, and just from this 
characteristic combination of water with the organic matter 
arises that soft, neither hard nor liquid, aggregate-condition 
which is of the greatest importance to mechanical explanation 
of the vital manifestations. The prime cause thereof lies 
really in the physical and chemical qualities of one single 
indivisible and not to be analysed element, carbon. This ele¬ 
ment plays the greatest part in all known bodies of animals 
and plants. It unites in endless manifold relations of number 
and weight with the other elements. Through combination 
of carbon with oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen (to which 
mostly also sulphur and frequently phosphorus are associated) 
arise those extremely important combinations which we have, 
learned to know as the first and indispensable substratum of 
all vital manifestations, the eiweissartigen (white of egg) com¬ 
binations or Albumenous-bodies. Already earlier (p. 164) we 
have in the Monera learned to know organisms of the simplest 
sort whose entire corpus in completely perfected state consists 
of nothing more than a festflussig (firm-liquid) albumenous- 
like little lump, organisms that are of primal importance for 
the doctrine of the first beginning (origin) of life. Also most 
other organisms are at a certain time of their existence, at 
least in the first time of their life, as egg-cells or germ-cells, 
really nothing else than simple minute lumps of such albumen¬ 
like (white-of-egg-like) formation-material, plasma, or proto¬ 
plasm. They only differ from the Monera in this that the cell- 
kernel (nucleus) within the albumen-like minute body has 
separated itself from the surrounding protoplasm. Haeckel 
then (p. 294) says “ that we are now in condition to refer the 
wonder of the vital manifestations to this material, that we 
have shown the never-ending manifold and involved physical 
and chemical qualities of the ‘ white-of-egg-bodies ’ as the 
actual cause of the organic or vital phenomena.—Haeckel, 
Natlirliche Schopfungsgeschichte 2nd ed. Berlin, 1870, p. 294 ; 
Gen. Morphologie, I. 122-130. The formation of living beings 
is a natural fact governed by natural laws.—Dareste, pp. 33, 
127-130. But an electric stroke can make something else of 
them. 

Wolff in his battle against the doctrine of preexistence took 
up the doctrine of the primitive homogeneity of the embryonic 
62 


978 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


mass; lie completed it by showing that this homogeneous 
mass resolves itself under a slight enlargement by the micro¬ 
scope into a collection (amas) of globules entirely comparable 
to those which form the tissues of young plants (Partes con- 
stitutae, ex quibus omnes corporis partes in primis initiis com- 
ponuntur, sunt globuli, mediocri micro'scopio cedentes semper. 
—Wolff, Theoria generationis, part II. p. 166). The embryo, 
deprived of vessels and of blood, lives and nourishes itself 
during this first period in the way that plants do, and also 
like the tissues which in the adult state have no vessels, such 
as the epidermis, the nails and the hairs, or have very few of 
them, as the bones.—Wolff, p. 170. Thus Wolff in 1768 in¬ 
dicated the grand discovery that Schwann has made in our 
days (about 1877, perhaps) when he has demonstrated that the 
animal organisation is, at starting, entirely comparable to the 
vegetable organisation and that the organic woof ( trame) in 
the two kingdoms is constituted by the same elements, by the 
little cells. Dareste, p. 103. Schwann, Microskopische Un- 
tersuchungen fiber die Ubereinstimmung in der Struktur und 
dem Wachsthum der Thiere und Pflanzen, p. 56 et suiv. de la 
trad, anglaise. Among the modern naturalists the formation 
of living beings is an act of nature, governed by natural laws, 
which we consequently can submit to scientific investigation. 
—Dareste, 127. Felix Adler says : a Providence which inter¬ 
feres with Nature’s laws we cannot accept.—N. Y. Herald 
Report, Oct. 28, 1889. Man, like the other animals, possesses 
a liver, bile, gall-bladder and other appurtenances of the 
brute creation. The theory of Haeckel, the descent of man¬ 
kind through geological eras and ages of organisms, is as 
probable as that of the Semites, and they differed in their ac¬ 
counts. Bel used his own blood in the manufacture of men. 
The Semites had not collected sufficient data to found a true 
theory of natural genesis, so the scribes substituted their own 
notions instead ; but the haadam , the Adonis (Adon mrP), and 
the Hermathene were mind-perceived on exactty the same 
principles as the Brahma of the Hindu philosophy, who is 
himself of duplicate gender. But the Sons of the Sakhya 
(Budha) hold fast to the principle that the course of the world 
has had no beginning. 1 The Brahman Gheber-Worship says 
just the reverse.—Genesis, i. 1; ii. 1. 

1 Dunlap, Vestiges of the Spirit-History, 343. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 979 

Death is the loss of organisation, force, electricity ?, strength, 
mind and hope. Life is the cause which produces this (material) 
machine. Vitality is the force (within the germ) that trans¬ 
forms it gradually into a complete animal by a series of suc¬ 
cessive creations of organs, creations which become slower 
after birth but never completely cease at any period of exist¬ 
ence. The life of the germ is the result of the union of the 
sexes (and there is no such thing as the preexistence of germs. 
—Dareste, Production des Monstruousites, p. 19).—Dareste, 
20, 24. This vital force within the germ rejjroduces the species, 
unless the conditions are modified under which the develop¬ 
ment is intended to go on. Mes experiences donnent done 
aux zoologistes des methodes a l’aide desquelles ils pourront 
aborder scientifiquement la question de la formation des races. 
—Dareste, 40. He does not mean that his experiences give 
all the processes of the formation of races. The modifying 
causes can act before and during the fecundation ; he has em¬ 
ployed only those that act after the fecundation. He shows, 
however that even under altered conditions the monstrosities 
develop in accordance with natural laws, that is, regularly 
(p. 26). Swammerdam first conceived the idea of modifying an 
animal in the course of its development (p. 27). Biology in its 
actual state offers no means of acting on the male and female 
elements of generation (p. 24). But even bunglers in the ar¬ 
tificial hatching of chickens have created monstrosities. The 
germs produce themselves and are developed in virtue of 
natural laws.—ibid. p. 24. The biological Jews, however, took 
a different view of the situation : The God orders the Angel 
who presides over the souls (spirits, ruachoth) to bring that 
spirit which He specially designates. The ruach (soul) ap¬ 
pears, to whom the God says: Get into this! Again comes 
the Angelus conceptionis and restores the animated germ to 
the mother’s womb, giving it two guardian genii, and a lighted 
candle is set upon the soul’s head.—Wagenseil, Sota, Excerpta 
Gemara, pp. 72, 73. This is a more roundabout procedure 
than the scientific one championed by Dareste. The Semite 
philosophers, recognising the vital force within the germ, il- 
logically postulated a primordial Tetragrammaton, an Eternal 
Life Uncreated, Unborn; from whom and by whose fiat all 
individual life on earth is an effluence. We get no confirma¬ 
tion of this view in the experience of man, or the other ani- 


980 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


mals, or from plants. On the contrary Dareste lays it down 
that there is no such thing- as the preexistence of g-erms. The 
germs are composed, composites; and the composition and 
juxtaposition of natural forces renders the composite vital,— 
endued with new power, it is become a thing of life , which 
before the composite stage was not a quality of either of the 
forces until subsequent to their union. The Semites inferred 
a living soul as necessary to the life of the flesh; but the true 
philosopher finds the prerequisites to vitality in the causes , the 
junction of two natural predisposing forces, and these, in 
themselves, composites. A final cause is beyond the grasp of 
the mind’s eye. No telescope can search it in the realms of 
endless space. 

'When the precepts of the Divine Intelligence (Bodlii, Bud- 
lia) were delivered, the Budhists held that “ the manner in 
which being first commenced cannot now be ascertained.”— 
Spence Hardy, Eastern Monachism, p. 5. The scientists know' 
no more about it to-day. It is, so far, an unsuccessful search 
after the origin of life or the conjunction or composition of 
natural and chemical forces resulting in the vital stage as¬ 
sured. But since we know that animals can starve to death for 
want of food it is evident that there can be no vitality without 
a supply of the natural forces donated from food ; consequent¬ 
ly there must be some electrical or chemical power in animals 
and plants capable of uniting with oxygen and other natural 
forces in the creation as well as in the continued support of the 
vital stage. Open a peach. Within you see the marks and 
furrows where the ribs of the stone were secreted from the 
softest, most attenuated elements and filaments until the wdiole 
stone is finally completed, nearly after the model of an ancient 
Dutch vessel. See the secretion of the bones in a human 
being! Is it not the very same analogy according to which 
the soft secretes the hard? Here the analogy between the 
growth of plants and animals from a germ is shown to be iden¬ 
tical. “ Who has made the bones hard,” says the Scripture of 
the Orient.—Hermes Trismegistus, v. 6 ; Eccles., xi. 5. Cut off 
the supply of oxygen and starch in the first stages of osseous 
formation, and they never would have grown hard! It is 
more than a miracle, the manufacture of sugar out of starch 
and solar fire and chemical action ; it is a fact! Nature has 
undoubtedly been put to the trbuble of forming the primal 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 981 


germs, and the beings derived therefrom have taken as far as 
possible the power from their constituents into their own 
hands and continue to supply the germs or seeds of life in two 
halves, one of which is deposited in either sex. The Egyptian 
Hermes very truly said that all generation proceeds from a 
corruption; but what he terms corruption is only the with¬ 
drawal from the corpus of the plant of a portion of its consist¬ 
ence, its composition. Fresh starch can only be put into it in 
the natural way. Consider how man is formed in a mother’s 
body—who has made the bones hard ?—says Hermes. And 
Ecclesiastes says it is ‘ the way of the spirit.’ But a modern 
philosopher would call it the way of all creation, the way of 
Nature ! The unphilosopliic are always fishing after a chance 
to apply the doctrine of causation to an extent, in and outside 
of Creation, about which they don’t know whether they are 
right or wrong. 

As to materialism, a natural death usually indicates that 
there has been a falling off somewhere of the material supply. 
Death by starvation certainly indicates the necessity of organ¬ 
ised matter to the existence of life. An organism dependent 
upon matter, such as ordinary food, for its continued existence, 
may, by parity of reasoning, be held to have been ab initio de¬ 
pendent upon some forms and qualities of matter for its exist¬ 
ence. The forces all seem to be manifested within Nature. 

Will you by investigation discover Aloh ? 

To tlie end of Sadi will you discover?—Job, xi. 7. 

‘9 Theos is spirit, said the Oriental. What is spirit ? A name 
for breath, and that is merely a symbol for life. But, as we 
have just shown, there is no life without organised matter 
with which to feed and support the life of an organism. What 
again is spirit ? The ancients said it was Osiris. What is 
Osiris ? Nothing but the impersonation of certain powers in * 
the sun or in water, an unreal cerebral figment, only an idea. 
Causation is only another name for antecedents ; “ that which 
has preceded them is also that which has produced them,” says 
Havet. What is one man’s suspicion about Theos worth more 
than another’s? To translate the word theos by the word 
God is to identify the Hebrew with the Greek God. 

Henoch, chapters 60, 61, 62, 98, is very closely affiliated to 
parts of the Apokalypse and, like Daniel, has the expression 


982 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


* Son of Man.’ A part of the Sibylline Books is decidedly 
of a Messianic character, — the passage that describes the 
Judgment by Sabaoth Adonaios on His Judgment-seat as 
King! With this is directly connected Henoch, x. 6, xlv. 3, 
xlvi. 2, 3, xlvii. 3, xlviii. 2, 6, lii. 4, lxix. 27, Matthew, xxv. 34, 
40, and the Apokalypse, Bev. i. 13, 16, 20, ii. 5, 15, 20, 
27, v. 5, and especially vi. 17, vii. 10, ix. 11, xi. 15, 18, 
xii. 10, xiv. 8, 14, xvii. 5, 6, 9, 10, xviii. 2, 10, 20, xx. 4 (xi. 7, 8), 
xxii. 12, 20. Here we have plainly depicted the Judgment by 
Christ as mentioned by the Sibyl; but no Crucifixion of the 
Christos. Isaiah, lxiii. 10 has “ they vexed the spirit of his 
Holiness (ruach kodeslio); ” and in the same sense the Bo- 
mans crucified it.—Bev. xi. 7, 8, xvi. 6. Borne killed Jews and 
Christian Messianists alike, at the time when the Apokalypse 
was written in the expectation that the Messiah would come 
and sit in Judgment upon the Scarlet Woman perched up on 
the Seven Hills.—Bev. xvii. 10. But the Crucifixion-theory 
started probably about this time (a.d. 135-140) and from these 
words ; as the Sibyl, Henoch and Bevelations make no men¬ 
tion of a Crucifixion of the human body of the Messiah. The 
Slain Lamb (Bev. v. 6, 9, xii. 10) might be hard to explain in 
any other sense than an adaptation to the later Christian idea of 
the Crucifixion, and then it would be an interpolation. Com¬ 
pare, however, Julian’s Neoplatonist conception of the Sun in 
Aries (the Lamb or Bam) the Paschal Lamb whose blood was 
shed (—Daniel, ix. 20), where the Sun’s disk is to visible 
things the cause of salvation, where he calls the Sun King, 
placing him in the centre of the mind-perceived Gods (just as 
in Bev. i. 12, 13), the Saviour of all things, in the ‘ Little Mys¬ 
teries.’—Julian, 133, 138, 140, 146, 153, 173. Therefore we refer 
Bev. v. 6, 9, xii. 10 to the Little Mysteries in Aries. 

One Zeus, One Hades, One Helios, esti Sarapis.—Julian, iv. 136. 

Korubas men ho megas Helios, ho suntlironos tei Metri.—Julian, Or. v. 1G7. 

In sole tabernaculum suum posuit.—Vulgate psalm, xix. 4. 

Minervam Pronoiam ex toto Sole Rege prodisse totam.—Julian, iv. 149. 

The Mother of the Gods admonished Attis to worship Her and not to leave 
Her, nor love another.—v. 167. 

To the Ram (Lamb) himself they celebrate the Little Mysteries.—Julian, 
Oratio v. 173. 

It is perfectly clear that the apostles to the Heathen under¬ 
stood * the Little Mysteries ’ and saw the Anointed in the 


TEE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBI0N1TES. 9S3 


Young Ram ; and also that the Crucifixion of the Messiah, not 
mentioned in the Sibyl nor in the Book of Enoch, was no part 
of the original Messianist theory, but a later invention pos¬ 
terior to the writing of the Apokalypse, or about the same 
time. 

The Planets moving in chorus round the Sun.— Julian, iv. p. 146 ; so Rev. 
i. 12, 18 ; Jul. 138. 

That union which holds together all things in the ‘mind perceived ’ in one, 
bringing together those about the kosmos into one and the same perfect consti¬ 
tution : the central perfection of the King Sun is single (sole) being seated in 
the intelligent Gods. After this, there is a certain conjugation (or conjunction) 
in the mind-perceived kosmos of the Gods which combines all things unto the 
unit.—Julian, iv. 139. The Mystery of the Seven Stars in my right hand and 
the Seven Golden Candelabras.—Rev. i. 16, 20. 

Henoch, xciv. 1, says; In heaven the angels remember you 
(the just), for good, in presence of the glory of the Great 
(One); your names are inscribed in His presence! Compare 
Matthew, xviii. 10. Their angels in heavens through all time 
shall see the face of my Father who is in heavens.—Codex 
Sinaite. The dead were judged by what was written in the 
books, according to their deeds.—Rev. xx. 12. Thus Henoch, 
Revelations, and Matthew agree on many points; showing that, 
after all, a part of the precanonic evangel is in the Sibyl , He¬ 
noch and Apokalypse. These early Christian works were the 
earliest of all, and none of them mentions the Crucifixion of the 
Saviour ;—showing that in a.d. 130 no such idea existed prior 
to the appearance of the Gospels of one sort and another; for 
Luke says there were many gospels before he began to write. 
The circulation of Christian documents was very much in¬ 
creased as soon as the apomnemoneumata or memorials of the 
Saviour became known ; the connection with the Roman War, 
the Robbers (as patriots), together with the accounts of the 
Crucifixion were -all calculated to create an interest and an en¬ 
thusiasm of feeling that centuries have not entirely cooled. 
The narrative has all the excitement of a novel with the added 
conviction of its truth. 

We have emphasised the fact that Daniel, vii. 13, refers to 
a Messiah not in the flesh; and that Daniel, ix. 25, 26, while it 
has the idea of a slain Messiah-king, is not in agreement with 
the Sibyl nor with Henoch, and only apparently with the Apok¬ 
alypse. But even Daniel does not mention a Crucified Mes- 


984 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


siah. Superstition claimed that a Great Power worked in 
Simon Magus, and also in the Great Baptist.—Matth. xiv. 2. 
Moreover, the idea was that John was risen from the dead, kai 
dia touto ai dunameis energousin en auto “ and for this reason 
the Powers work through him.” Not very remote from this 
conception was the idea that Irenaeus charges Kerinthus with¬ 
holding that the Christos (King of the heavens) came down 
into Iesous, working in and through him. Why did not the 
Sibyl, Henoch, and Revelations wait for the publication of the 
Synoptic Gospels before letting out their own incomplete sys¬ 
tem ? Because the idea of a Crucifixion of Mithra, the Iesoua 
and Salvator, had never been heard of until some one, later , 
put it forth. 1 Even the Apokalypse 2 has not the Jerusalem 
Crucifixion of the Messiah, but Daniel’s Slain Messiah instead. 

The detailed data of the efforts of the oriental mind show 
that the nature of ideas and things is based upon the preceding 
status of their component parts. Nothing happens by miracle 
or unprepared, but all is the combination of previous results 
prepared by preexisting conditions the outcome of anterior 
sources and immediate influences. Facts are the basis of 
truth. All the theory in the world will not make up for the 
absence of facts, even if the world is fed on theory. Nature 
produces in the nerve-organism the soul, from it culture de¬ 
velops the spirit as logical power, makes the sensible into 
material for ideas.—Prof. Friedrich Korner, Thierseele und 
Menschengeist, p. 22. 

When we find the expectation of a * Messiah slain ’ in Da¬ 
niel, when the Targums of Onkelos 3 and Jonathan ben Usiel 
often mention the Messiah who was to come, we know that 
among the leading Jewish rabbis near the end of the first cen¬ 
tury the hope of a Messiah was generally expressed ; so that 
the Christians, after a.d. 138, found the prototype of a Chris¬ 
tos already formed in the idea of the Jewish Messiah. It per¬ 
vaded all, from the Sibyl, Elxai, Henoch, 4th Esdras, down to 
the Revelation of a certain John (a Messianist) who knew 
nothing of the Crucifixion in the gospels. But he knew the 

1 Krishna was shot to death with arrows. 

2 The original Apokalypse could be interpolated by theological or pious fraud. 

3 According to Franck (Gelinek ed. p. 48) Onkelos was connected with R. Jehoshua 
ben Chananja and R. Elieser the Great, who flourished toward the end of the first 
century. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 9S5 


Revelation from the sun (—John i. 16; Matth. xvii. 2, 3) and 
declared the Coining of the Logos (the Memra of the Tar- 
gums), the White Horse and its rider Sosiosh. He prophesies 
like Henoch the coming final Judgment. All that the writers 
of the Christian School had to do was to build the Crucifixion 
theory on the foundation that the Kabalah-tradition of the 
Jews had previously laid, to substitute the Teaching and 
parables of the Saints for the quibbles of the Pharisees. In 
Jewish tradition some one found the materials for a Christian 
offspring. The targum of Jonathan and the writings of Si¬ 
meon ben Iochai repeatedly mention the Messiah.—Galatinus, 
de Arcanis, cap. vii. fol. 218, et passim ; viii. fols. 251, 252, et 
passim. The Talmudists were not wont to deliver the arcana 
of the Messiah except in parables.—ib. 254. In the Machkar 
Aassodoth written by Simeon ben Iochai, he says : I found 
Elias standing on Mount Garizin and praying and weeping. 
I returned to Mount Garizin and found him praying and prais¬ 
ing the Lord of the world. Then I saw coming upon Mt. Ga¬ 
rizin 80,000 legions of angels and in each legion were 80,000 
battalions, and in each battalion 80,000 angels. And they bore 
before them Abraham, Is’hak, Iacob, Moses and Aharon, 
Dauid and Selomon and all the kings of the house of Dauid, 
and the prophets and the just who had been in the world.—ib. 
vi. fol. 192. Simeon ben Iochai wrote in the first part of the 
2nd century ; Matthew’s Gospel as we have shown, probably 
was written fully as late as 160-165. Did the above passage 
in the Machkar liassodoth about Elias and Moses suggest 
Matth. xvii. 3, 5, to the author of the Gospel according to Mat¬ 
thew ? The Gospels retain the Messianic doctrines of the 
Rabbins, the Targums, and the Kabalah. Hence the sugges¬ 
tion to make three tents, one for the Angel-King (the Angel 
Iesua, Metatron 1 ), one for Moses, one for EliaS. The scene in 

1 The Prince of the Lord’s host is called Adoni and Iahoh.—Joshua v. 14, vi. 2. Me¬ 
tatron, his name is like the Name of his Lord.—Kabbala Denudata, X. 528. Rabbenus 
Hakkadosh in the Gali Razia, says: Because the Messiah will save men, he shall be 
called Iesua.—Gal. III. fol. 85; Matthew, i. 21. The Jews had in the expression Son 
of Dauid already solved for the Christians the difficulty of turning an Angel Spirit, 
Archangel, Throneangel or son of the God into a being in the flesh. It was a received 
Jewish idea before Christians took it up. Barnabas speaks of the Covenant of the be¬ 
loved Iesus (_Ant. Mater, 166,167) in a way that reminds us of Mithra and the Jewish 

Angel Iesua. In the hand of Metatron is placed the revivification of the dead !—Caba- 
lista ; Galatinus, Book XII. fol. 304. Metatron is called Angel Iesua, and raises souls 
to heaven.—Bodenschatz, Kirchl. Verfassung d. Iuden, II. 191, 192 ; Sohar chadash. 


9SG 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


both cases is laid on a high mountain !! The ideas that the 
Son of the God shall put on the flesh, that he shall rise on the 
third day, that the dead rise up at the same time, seem to have 
been Jewish Messianist before they became Christian. 1 This 
is closely followed in the Gospels, because it was the received 
impression ; but the Crucifixion and Pilate were not borrowed 
from the teachings of the rabbis. Daniel distinctly says that 
the Messiah shall be slain ; and the rabbis interpreted Isaiah 
as referring to the Messiah, an interpretation that the early 
Christians followed. 2 Henoch, 47. 1, 4, wants the blood of the 
saints expiated and avenged. Rev. vi. 10, viii. 3, 4, xvi. 19, xvii. 
6, xviii. 24, likewise calls to heaven for the final Judgment by the 
Messiah (Rev. x. 7) on those that have shed the blood of the 
saints. But as the word Christian is not used in the Book of 
Revelation, but only the Lion of Judah the root of Dauid, 
Jews, Gentiles and Children of Israel, and as the Christians of 
the 4 Gospels obeyed Caesar submissively while the Book of 
Revelation calls for the destruction of Rome (Rev. xviii. xix.), 
the original form of the book would seem to have been Jewish 
or a work proceeding from the Jewish Diaspora in Asia Minor 
and Antioch rather than from the Christians of the date when 
the Gospel of Matthew was written. Even Matthew, v. 17, 18, 
x. 5 is very much opposed to the Gentiles, but he recommends 
obedience to Caesar, and does not call upon heaven to utterly 
destroy Rome or to bring troops from the Euphrates. 

The fact that the Sibylline Books were in such high consid¬ 
eration in the Church of the second and third centuries that 
Christians were on this account nicknamed Sibyllists carries 
us away from the Canonical Gospels back to an earlier period 

fol. 44. col. 1. Henoch, cap. 61, 62, 69, following Daniel, mentions the Son of Man, as 
existing before, and kept concealed ; and places him on the Judgment seat. The date 
seems to be about the beginning of the second century, and prior to the Apokalypse. 
Chapter 47 reminds one of Rev. xx. 11-15; while Rev. xi. 15, xvii. 14, xxi. 22, 23, 27, 
and xxii. 1, 3, 5, remind one of Henoch, cap. 48, verses 1-6. Cap. 48. 1 might well 
have suggested Rev. xxii. 1. 

1 Compare Galatinus, de Arcanis catholicae veritatis in hebraicis libris, cap. VIII. 
fol. 254. Fiierst, Cultur und Lit. d. Juden in Asien, p. 25, supposes that the Urevan- 
gelium was written in Late Hebrew, not in Aramean. Who did it. 

2 Some one of the Jewish Diaspora or of the Christian Ecclesia, some one acquaint¬ 
ed with Galilee, the Ebionites and the Transjordan, wrote the first evangelium. The 
unfortunate condition of the unlearned mind at that period is thus portrayed in their 
own words: “If our Old-fathers (Altfordern) were angels then we are men; and if 
they were men, then we are asses.” This is not very different from Lucian’s opinion 
of the Christian masses in the East in the years 160-170. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 987 


of gospel writing (Eecollections of the Apostles) and to the 
still earlier period of Enoch, the Sibyls, and the Apokalypse. 
There was an earlier period of gospel-writing connected with 
Sibyllism and Messianism—Supernat. Eelig. II, 168, 169, 170 ; 
I. 290, 292, 299, 321. Origen contra Cels. v. 6 ; vii. 53 ; Jus¬ 
tin, Apol. i. 20, 44; Clemens Al. Strom, vi. 5, § 42, 43; Lactan- 
tius, Div. Inst. i. 6, 7; vii. 15, 19. Therefore in connecting, 
as far as we may, Messianism, the Apokalypse, and Sibyllism 
together, we are going back to a period preceding the various 
gospels that were in circulation anterior to the Canonical Gos¬ 
pels. The rise of these last is merely an additional phase 
of Messianism, or rather Christianism . The advance of Mes¬ 
sianic idea from the Sibyls, Henoch, and the Apokalypse to 
our gospels was stimulated by Essene and Ebionite ideas in 
connection with those of the Didache, parables, and Jewish- 
Diaspora instruction, with the great figure of the Messiah, the 
Saviour, brought constantly before the inner consciousness of 
the people, until at last gospels sprung up and were rapidly 
spread and gradually perfected. If, for argument’s sake, we 
place the Epistle of Barnabas between a.d. 140 and 150 (cf. 
Supern. Eel. I. 235) we find that it exhibits no knowledge of 
any gospel, although it has the name Iesus. This would help 
to locate the period at which the name Iesua was first used as 
the name of a man instead of the Logos or Salvator. Bar- 
cocheba’s war in 134-5 shows Jewish Messianic expectations 
of the Apokalypse kind, a status of opinion too early for the 
establishment of any but a military Messiah. Compare Eev. 
xix. 11 ff. It is true, however, that in the case of Barcocheba 
(as in Jewish Messianism connected with the Son of Dauid) 
the precedent for a Messiah being supposed to appear as 
flesh had been already set, but where did Barnabas get his 
Iesua from unless from the name ‘ Iessaia ’ or from the Salva¬ 
tor Angel Iesua ? If the Apokalypse uses the name Messiah 
(Christos) for warlike purposes, the Christians could certainly 
use the name Iesua (Salvator) for religious teachings regarding 
the resurrection, even if they did represent him in human shape 
and date him over a century earlier. If the Gospel could put 
parables in his mouth, the author of Barnabas could put words 
in his mouth which are not to be found in our Synoptic Gos¬ 
pels.—See Supern. Eel. I, 239. 4 He who desires to be saved,’ 

says the Barnabas Epistle.—Ant. Mater, 89. Markion too fol- 


988 


THE OHEBERS OF HEBRON . 


lows with his antithesis between Iesona and the God of the 
Jews. Irenaeus, III. 2, mentions the Salvator. 

Hermas alludes to the 40 apostles and teachers of the preach¬ 
ing- of the ‘ Son of the God,’ an expression found in Hermetic 
Books of Hermes Trismegistus which are much older than our 
4 Gospels, also to diakonoi or servants or prophets of the God, 
the Son of the God preached through the apostles, apostles 
preaching to all the world and teaching the word of the Lord, 
“ apostles and overseers (episkopoi) and teachers, and diakonoi 
(ministers).” While this looks Christian enough, Antiqua 
Mater, p. 77, calls our attention to the fact that we are on the 
traces of a class of Sectarians or Haeretists equally to be dis¬ 
tinguished from the orthodox Jews, as from the orthodox 
Christians represented by Justin. ‘ Led to the water and 
born again ’ points directly to the Essaioi, the early Ebion- 
ites, Baptists, and Nazoraioi. The Ebionites regarded the 
Son of the God as the Angel Iesua. Hermas never uses the 
word Evangelion. Antiqua Mater, 72, 91, tells us that the 
Epistle of Barnabas mentions the name of Iesous. Perhaps he 
was the first writer, or one of the very first, to do it. Saturninus 
evidently knew the name Soter, as we have the word trans¬ 
lated into Latin in Irenaeus, I., xxii. Whether Saturninus 
knew the name Iesua (Iesou) or not, his ‘ Salvator ’ exactly 
corresponds to Matthew’s explanation of the meaning of the 
Greek word Iesous.—Matth. i., 21. So that to the Teachings of 
the Syrian Diaspora we are greatly indebted for the Christian 
Religion,—“to the Jew first, and then to the Greek.” But 
one thing is certain, that scientific men have for many years 
held a theory of creation the very opposite of the doctrine of 
spirit and matter. And it seems not impossible that out of 
our sight, removed from the reach of even optical instruments, 
phenomena of creation are daily in movement, even if the sub¬ 
ject fails to observe them. 

The Jews in their synagogues cursed the Christians. This 
may explain why Peter and Matthew throw all the blame of 
the crucifixion on the Jews. It also points to a period later 
than the separation from Judaism as the time when such gos¬ 
pels were written. But orientalism, including Judaism, Ies- 
saism, and Christianism, was based on the doctrine of the ori¬ 
ental philosophy,—spirit and matter. There is no evidence 
that man is born of pneuma and matter. 



THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 989 


The sources antecedent to Christian Messianism seem to 
have been the Oriental Kabalah, Judaism, Essenism, the Jew¬ 
ish Diaspora, the Ebionite Didache (supposing one to have 
existed) and the travelling apostles. Justin, Trypho, p. 38, 
knows what is called the Evangel. The Jews were partic¬ 
ularly numerous at Antioch and had made many proselytes 
among the Greeks there—Josephus, Wars, vii. 33. These 
proselytes would (if they read the Septuagint) become Mes- 
sianists. The fact would certainly become known in Syria 
and Asia Minor, and there is no reason to suppose that Mar- 
kion was unacquainted with the Jewish theory of a Presence 
Angel, the Salvator Angel, the Angel lesua, and Metatron. 
If Josephus knew it, Markion could have known it. Before the 
reign of Trajan, Jews had decided that Isaiah and Daniel had 
foretold the sufferings of the Messiah. He w^as expected, like 
the Paschal Lamb, to die as an expiation, an atonement for the 
sins of the Jews. Therefore Rev. v. 6 represents the Messiah 
under the figure of a Slain Logos-Lamb surrounded by the 7 
planet rays (eyes) and their 7 orbits, or horns.—Acts, viii. 32, 
33. This is a view of Clialdaean gnostics or the Jewish Dias¬ 
pora. Some Paul addresses the Synagogue Jews, spends 
years with the Diaspora chiefly, and also with the Greeks.— 
Acts, xiii. 16, xvii. 17, xviii. 4, xix. 8, 10, 17, xx. 21, 19, 28. This 
points to Messianism as a not exclusively Jewish religion into 
which the Dispersion has brought in the Greek. 1 We find the 
Dispersion of the Jews mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. They 
were in all lands ; but most numerous in Syria. The succes¬ 
sors of Antiochus Epiphanes had given them at Antioch equal 
privileges with the Greeks. They increased in numbers and 
in property, and their synagogue was famous for the magnifi¬ 
cence of the gifts presented to it. The Jews were continually 
conciliating the Greeks and taking them to the synagogue, so 
that after more than a century they must have made a great 
many proselytes there. About the years 90-100 in the time of 
Josephus the conversion of the Greeks was still going on. 
For “ always admitting a great number of Greeks to the ser- 


i Paul almost invariably prefers to quote the Greek text of the scriptures.—Bunsen, 
Angel-Messiah, p. 95. This shows that the Paulinist writer represents the Northern 
or Greek Diaspora.—Gal. i. 14, 16, 17 ; ii. 7. Matthew, too, writes in Greek and quotes 
the Septuagint. Was not Antioch therefore the source of Gospel writing as well as of 
Paulinist ? Antioch, too, knew all about Palestine saints and Iessaians. 


1)90 


THE G HE BEES OF HEBRON . 


vices, they made them also in some manner a part of them¬ 
selves.”—Josephus, 1 Wars, vii. 3. The result of these conver¬ 
sions was very great. 2 A new body of religionists was forming 
under the influence of the Diaspora, partaking of Jewish 
morals, Jewish faith, and Jewish Messianism. The resulting 
mental movement spread from Antioch to Laodikea to Asia 
Minor and to Ephesus conveying Jewish Messianism. The 
Apokalypse testifies to this ; so does the Book of Acts. The 
Diaspora believed in the Coming of the Jewish Messiah, 3 and 

1 When as shrewd and cautious a man as Josephus states thus much we may be sure 
that he could have said more. He could have described a movement going on of which 
Antioch was a most powerful centre,—a movement backed up by the country east and 
west of that great city, reaching first to Tarsus, then to all the cities of Asia Minor on 
the west, perhaps to Galatia, possibly to the Euphrates. It might be inferred from 
Acts, x. 45, xi. 1, 2, and Galatians that the movement at Antioch had reached propor¬ 
tions that surprised the Southern Diaspora and those east of the Jordan; for they still 
observed the Law of Moses. Jerusalem had been destroyed thirty years before Jo¬ 
sephus died, and probably may have been of no assistance to the spread of the new 
feeling. In fact it is to the Northern movement at Antioch that we must attribute 
the results merely hinted at in the Book of Acts. After 150 the conflict with the Cir¬ 
cumcision was in full blast, hence the Epistle to the Galatians. Reading backwards 
from Matthew, v. 17-19, 20, x. 5-7, 16, we get the animus of the Ebionites; possibly 
of the Holy Land. For a time the Greek converts, like their Jewish teachers might be 
contented with expectant Messianism as in the Apokalypse. The Jews were persistent 
in waiting. But it is clear that some one later put forth the theory that the Messiah 
had come already. It would seem to have been a Jew; for who else but Jews could 
have written the basis of our first three Gospels ? It seems more probable that the 
Christian movement had its origin in the Diaspora itself. 

2 The Jews alone started the whole thing.—Acts, xi. 19, xiv. 1, 21, 26, xv. 41, xvi. 
1 ; Josephus, Wars, vii. 3. It started from Antioch first. Also the Circumcision 
question had to be treated in Epistles ; but not in the beginning. Galatians, i. 16, 17, 
points to a direct connection with the transjordan Ebionites in Iturea, or somewhere 
between the Dead Sea and Damaskus ; at Beroea possibly. 

3 Rome will be a village, says the Third Sibyl. The Fifth Sibyl says: Land of 
Italia, on account of which many saintly believers, among the Hebrews, and the True 
shrine have perished.—Gallaeus, I. p. 575. The Fifth Sibyl says the City of the 
Latin Land shall remain all-desolate for ages. Book V. sends Rome to Tartarus. 
Book VI. sings the Great Renowned Son of the Immortal to whom the Highest Father 
gave possession of a throne when he was not yet born. Since on account of flesh the 
double (nature) was put together, and Cleansed (he was) by currents of Jordan’s River. 
From Primal Fire First Theos; and he too born by the beneficent Spirit, and (borne) 
in the white feathers of a dove.—Sixth Sibyl. Book, lines 1-7. So far in the Sibyls, we 
have not met the Crucifixion. Although the Sixth Sibyl tastes of the Gospel accord¬ 
ing to Matthew or Luke or certain antecedents of Luke. The Third Sibyl says : And 
then surely God will send from heaven a King and He will judge each man in blood 
and in the light of fire ! See the counterpart of this in Rev. xviii. 7, 8. xix. 13, 20, 21. 
xx. 10,12. White was the Dove, white the Spirit, and white the throne of Almighty 
Judgment. An elevated throne in appearance like the frost, while its circuit re¬ 
sembled the circle of the radiant sun.—Henoch, xiv. 18. And underneath the Great 
Throne came out streams of flaming fire. ibid. 19. A Great White Throne.—Rev. xx. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES . 991 


Christianism is a separated tendency of Judaism. But the 
gospels, all of them, seem to have been a new departure, 
based on Iessaian, Ebionite and Jewish antecedents, morals, 
and parables, preceded by a work that was eminently Jewish 
(possibly the production of the Diaspora), that knows not the 
Gospels, nor Peter, but the Lamb, the Logos, and Home’s 
destruction under the divine Judgment. The Jews read the 
Septuagint Greek, therefore the Diaspora writes in Greek, 
living among Greeks at Antioch. Saturninus taught Doketism 
strongly enough.—Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 220; Irenaeus, I. xxii. 
Paris, 1675. The Old Testament is Doketist, except so far as 
the Son of Dauid enters into the controversy. 

The largest part of the Christian dogmas came from the 
Jews, and what was Jewish seems to have been largely taken 
from the Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians. Nine tenths 
of the Christian belief originally came from the teachings 
of the Jewish rabbis and the expectations of the saints. But 
owing to the frequent use made of the Septuagint Greek 
Version in the New Testament the Duke of Somerset infers 
that the Evangelists had a closer connection with the Greek 
Jews than with their Hebrew countrymen. “ The Syrian 
churches were from the first in the closest union with Pales¬ 
tine.”—Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 218. But Paulinism is said to 
wear an Alexandrian tint. 

Causation, like gravitation, is continuous in the universe, 
but it goes on through existing secondary causes; not by fiat. 
“ The Greek synagogues must have exercised considerable in¬ 
fluence in modifying the old Hebrew doctrines. The Jews scat¬ 
tered throughout the chief cities of the Boman Empire could 
not comply with the religion of Moses. They could neither 

11. All this shows that the line of prophecy in Henoch is continued in Revelations. 
The connection between the two is immediate, while there is direct relation with Per¬ 
sian doctrine and nearly none with the 4 Gospels. Here then is one Christian system 
without the Crucifixion narrative, consequently an earlier one than that exhibited in 
the Gospels. Christianism, like all new germs, had to grow, and a new departure 
occurs in the Gospels. No wonder that the Christians (Jews ?) were called Sibyllists. 
Justin (Apol. I. p. 156) mentions Christ’s “Judgment” of every human race. In 
this he connects himself with the Jewish Sibyl. But the Sibyl mentions no crucifixion 
of the Christos. The Sibyl was too early. So was Philo; for he does not mention it, 
although he lived to years after A.D. 35. Ernst von Bunsen, Symbol des Kreuzes, 152, 
says that the Apokalypse does not mention the Cross (in dieser Schrift von dem 
Kreuze nicht die Rede ist) and that John’s Revelation establishes the prechristian doc¬ 
trine of the enlightenment of mankind through the Word, the Spirit or the Wisdom of 
God, symbolized by the Central Light of the Candelabrum of Moses.—Rev. i. 13, 16. 


992 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


conform to the Law nor understand the language in which it 
was written. For them, the synagogue had become a substi¬ 
tute for the Temple, and the scribe had superseded the priest. 
Every synagogue, moreover, was under the control of chosen 
elders—masters in Israel. Different teachers or expounders of 
Scripture, unconsciously or designedly, introduced diversity 
of doctrine.” Targums differed one from another; Alexandria, 
Rome and Antioch could have their varieties of opinion, while 
Jerusalem might have its own Talmud as Babylonia had hers. 
Galatians opens up the discord between the Paulinist and Pe¬ 
trine views on the subject of circumcision, a source of conten¬ 
tion between the synagogues of Syria and those of Antioch and 
the Grecian states of Asia Minor involving the “ repudiation of 
Judaism.” The question was sprung, was there a difference 
between Jew and Gentile? "Was the Law superseded by faith 
in the Christos ? “ In the way that they call a sect’s opinion, 

so I serve the God of our ancestors! ”—Acts, xxiv. 14. In the 
Paulinist tradition Christianism although released from the 
obligations of the Jewish Law was blended with the traditions 
of the Jewish schools (in the minds of the Diaspora).—Duke 
of Somerset, Chr. Theol. p. 165. Turning to Justin Martyr, 
Irenaeus and Tertullian, their arguments are evidently un¬ 
founded inferences drawn from what was called the Good 
Tidings or from Matthew’s Gospel and from the Hebrew Bible, 
which is itself based on the a priori assumptions of the gnosis 
and the Euhemerist theory that “ the Gods had been men.” 
But all the theologies have been a priori theories unsustained 
by actual facts. The Budhists saw that on this planet creation 
is continuous and continuing. We are here face to face not 
with revelation but with the world of idealism, the world of 
the gnosis, the Kabalah, the Septuagint, Samaritan, and Jew¬ 
ish tradition, the gnosis of Philo, Chaldaea and India, the 
Mysteries of the Sabian Dionysus, the Arab Sun, the Gnosis of 
Simon, Menander, Saturninus, St. Matthew and Justin Martyr, 
all based on the oriental philosophy, the fiction of c spirit and 
matter ’ in their supposed eternal opposition one to the other. 
Secondary causes have in time produced vast changes. These 
last are still operating new creations. It is difficult to find a 
unit that is not the result of a compound, a conjunction of 
causes inter se. It took almost two centuries of self-denial, 
eunouchism, and Messianic ideas before the Gospel according 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 993 


to Matthew was issued. Observe that Matthew does not call 
himself an apostle; but the Pauline author has no hesitation 
in calling- himself one.—1 Cor. i. 1; ix. 1, 2, 5. The word 
apostle does not mean always one of the 12, but a missionary. 
—1 Cor. xii. 28, 29 ; Rev. ii. 2 ; xviii. 20; Rom. xvi. 7. But the 
Paulinist uses the word Gentiles , showing that he was a Jew of 
the Diaspora.—1 Cor. v. 1 ; Rev. ii. 26. Romans, x. 12, xi. 1-3, 
11-13, 23, is Hellenist-Ebionite.—Rom. i. 3 ; Galatians, iv. 4. 
The fragments of Dionysius of Corinth about 173-176 present 
no evidence whatever of the existence of our Synoptic Gospels. 
—Supernat. Rel. II. 166. But Justin Martyr about 160 or later 
indicates the existence of what was supposed to be the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews.—ibid. I. 213, 289, 423; II. 159. He 
does not mention Paul; and if Matthew and Paul wrote in the 
first century Paul could hardly have avoided all mention of 
the supernatural birth of Iesu and the details given by Mat¬ 
thew ; and Justin could not have avoided all mention of Paul. 
All three writers were, very likely, quite late. 

Coming to the final question, 1 Did the Jews have the doc¬ 
trine of the ‘ Atonement 5 as applied to their Messiah ? The 

1 The Lamb of the God who takes away the sin of the world.—John, i. 29. The 
Jewish doctrine of the atonement by the slain Paschal Lamb when applied to a Slain 
Messiah (Dan. ix. 26; Nork. Rab. Diet. p. 395) reappears in Rev. v. 5, 6, 9, 13, vii. 10, 
14, 17, xii. 10, 11 ; 1 Cor. xv.-3. And that the earlier purpose of the Apokalypse orig¬ 
inally was Jewish is obvious and can be seen from Rev. ii. 26, iii. 9, vii. 4-8, xvii. 1, 5, 
6, 7, 9. What is now Christian was once Jewish thought.—Levit. iv. 20, ix. 7, xvi. 10, 
33, 34. The Slain Lamb indicates the Jewish Diaspora doctrine of atonement! The 
Jews applied it to their Messiah. The Christians followed suit.—Justin Dial. p. 58. 
The mere addition of the name Iesus does not turn a Jewish writing into a Christian one, 
for Iesous is only the Greek translation of the Syrian Iesua, which means the Saviour 
Angel Metatron. The only way to separate the Christian effectually from the Jew was 
to write some gospels (that the Jew had never heard about, or rejected as unauthentic) 
and produce an Epistle to the Galatians. He had no fear of a rabbinical doctrine if 
the Christian adopted it. Rev. i. 13, 16, v. 6 points to the Jewish and Chaldaean iao 
Sabaoth with 7 horns and 7 eyes which are the 7 spirits and the 7 rays of the Chaldaean 
Seven-rayed God who carried up the souls to heaven. This is Metatron Iesua whom the 
Christians (and the Jews) have represented as the Slain Lamb in this case. Rev. i. 5, 
6, 7, v. 9, seems to point to an early combination between the dispersed Jews and the 
Greek Christian converts at Antioch. The original Jewish groundwork of the Apok¬ 
alypse (in spite of perhaps Christian later alterations and rewriting) gleams up all 
through the chapters. The word Ecclesiai does appear; but why Christians should 
write those three chapters against Rome-Babylon is inconceivable, unless, at an earliest 
period, Jews and Greeks equally hoped for the total ruin of the Great City. It was 
not very early when John could write to seven Ecclesias, from Ephesus to Laodikea. 
Nor was it early when Justin, Dial. p. 39, mentions “the New Testament,” and (p. 43) 
the “ Logia ” of the Saviour. 

63 


994 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Ialkut Kubeni fol. 30. col. 4 says: “ Tlie Messias carries tlie 
sins of Israel.” Tlie Sohar to Moses, fol. 85. col. 346, says. 
When Israel still dwelt in the Holy Land the bringing- of 
Offerings in the Temple caused all sorrows to keep away from 
men ; now, however, it is the Messias who averts those evils 
from the children of men. The Sohar to 1 Mos. fol. 114 says : 
From that day when the evil Serpent persuaded the Adam 
it got power over the children of the world, and the world can 
not free itself from the punishment of the Serpent until King 
Messiah comes! According to the Pesicta Babbathi, fol. 62a, 
the Messiah willingly submitted to all the sorrows destined 
for him. 

In the month of the Zodiacal Lamb, the Redeemer was 
expected to come to judge the Jews and Christians. The 
slaughter of the lambs the evening before the Passover signi¬ 
fied expiation.—Nork, Real-Worterbuch, III. 153, IY. 443. 
Gautama-Buddha constantly taught the doctrine of vicarious 
suffering, suffering borne for the good of another. He gave 
his body and blood to a hawk to save the life of a dove.—Bun¬ 
sen, Angel-Messiah, p. 49. 

According to M. Henan, the evangels are the Galilean pop¬ 
ular preaching, the agadas. Therefore Messianist. The agada 
made Christianism. Hillel, the authors of the apokalypses 
and apocryphas are agadists, pupils of the prophets. 

Christianism contained adverse parties,being a thing of de¬ 
scent, growth, and party. Irenaeus marks the period following 
the consolidation of the Ecclesia by the uniformity of doctrine 
that the Gospels after the middle of the 2nd century estab¬ 
lished. Justin, p. 54, complains that in his time the name 
Christian was applied to many with whom he did not agree. 
These are the Pseudochristoi and Pseudapostoloi, many who 
taught to speak and to do what is godless and blasphemous, com¬ 
ing in the name of the Iesous; and there are among us of the 
designation of the men, such as the man from whom each Di- 
dache and opinion started. And others in one way or another 
teach . . . with whom we do not communicate . . . who confess 
only the name Iesous, and call themselves Christians . . . And 
of them are certain called Markionites, Yalentinians, Basili- 
dians, Satornelians, and others of one name and another, etc. 
—Justin vs Tryplio, p. 54. From Justin’s knowledge of these 
sects, some of whom were quite as late as Yalentinians , for in- 


the great archangel of the ebionites. 995 


stance, one would think the passage as late as 180. Therefore 
he might well have used Peter’s Gospel or Matthew’s, or the 
Apokalypse, or have known all the opinions that Irenaeus a 
few years later anathematises. Justin is a late Christian, hut 
he tells us something occasionally, and can be used as a wit¬ 
ness against certain claims of the Ecclesia, regarding Tradition 
from the apostoloi of the first century. Clemens Al. informs 
us that Valentinus (about 160), like Basileides, professed to 
have direct traditions from the apostles. He would not have 
needed tradition if he had known any Gospels that he believed 
to have apostolic authority. And even in the time of Irenaeus 
the Valentinians rejected the Writings of the New Testament 
which they would not have done if the Founder of their sect 
had acknowledged them.—Supern. Eel. II. 75-77, 225 ; Iren. III. 
2. 1. Justin constantly says “ Magi from Arabia.” Galatians, i. 
17 also points to Arabia, where the Nazoria and Ebionites were. 
Justin mentions the New Testament, the logia (sayings), and 
tells us that Markion is still teaching. 1 There were earlier evan¬ 
gelical writings no longer extant.—Luke, i. 1. The Gospels 
did not originate complete as we now have them but are the 
result of revisions of previously existing materials.—Sup. Eel. 
I. 397. The Apokalypse ranges along with the Sibylists, the 
4th Esdras and the Book of Henoch ; it expects the End of the 
world and the Final Judgment. It knows none of the apos¬ 
tles, no sayings of Iesu, no logia, no Crucifixion. If it knows 
neither the Gospel of Luke nor that of Matthew other gospels 
came in between the Apokalypse and the two Canonical Evan- 

1 It is a very significant circumstance that, just where there is a question whether 
our canonical Gospels were in existep.ce about 160-166, Justin should quote altogether 
from some uncanonical gospel and that Markion should manufacture his own (Mark- 
ion’s) gospel on the basis (according to “ Supernatural Religion ” ) of another uncanon¬ 
ical evangel.—Sup. Rel., 412, 417, 427; II. 81. The great transformation of Christian¬ 
ity was effected by men who had never seen Jesus.—ib. II. 486. The inference is that 
Markion and Justin did not know any canonical evangel, else they would have quoted 
it or referred to it. If the canonical evangels existed, why should Justin of Samaria 
and Rome quote from any others ? Resch, p. 159, and Marshall hold that there are 
variant antecanonical readings that go back to the days when the Aramaic Gospel 
might be supposed to be still in use. Has Justin used them ? He seems to have relied 
as much on the Old Test, as on the Evangel! In our Greek Matthew various sources 
(authorities) are clearly discernible.—Resch, 85. The long o in Matthew’s Nazorenes 
identifies them with those in the Dekapolis, the Basantis, and Beroea.—Epiphanius, 
Haer., xxix. 7. Justin’s 1st Apology does not use the word Uazoraioi, but Christianoi 
instead. His other leading words are Hystaspes, the Sibyl, and Markion. He then 
must be late.—Acts, xi. 26, 27. Nazor, too, is a late form; therefore Matthew’s Gos¬ 
pel is late, describing the Nazorenes of Epiphanius. 


996 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


gels. Tlie more Christianism was spiritualised by Paulinism 
to lift it to a Worldreligion so much the further it was re¬ 
moved from Judaism, and after the efficiency of Paul was ex¬ 
erted Christianism ceased to agree with Judaism in its foun¬ 
dation principles and the Katholic Church developed itself on 
their newly established basis, only still connected with Judaism 
through the old sources of the revelation. 1 Luke knew the 
version of the precanonic evangel followed by Matthew, and 
he also knew that followed by Paul.—A. Resell, pp. 31, 32, 134. 
Resell supposes a primitive Hebrew text of the Evangel and a 
large number of variant offshoots therefrom.—ib. 32, 111, 135, 
136, 150, 151. But these testify to a great movement of the 
Eastern mind in an Essenian or Ebionite direction under the 
influence of the doctrine of spirit and matter —a general convic¬ 
tion like that which filled the world with cloisters from Egypt 
to England. 

The belief in a Saviour Angel 2 had been prevalent from the 
date of Daniel’s and Isaiah’s prophesies, and Saturninus 3 be¬ 
lieved in a Salvator. See Isaiah, lxiii. 9. When Herakles 

1 Jost, p. 147. They were called Iessaians before they were called Christians.— 
Epiphanius, Haer. xxix. 4. The Nazorenes lived in Beroia around Coelesyria, and in the 
Basantis in Kokabe, and in the Dekapolis around Pella—carefully practised in the He¬ 
brew dialect, and having the Evangel according to Matthew most complete in Hebrew 
letters. They read all the Law and the Prophets and the Sacred Books.—Epiphanius, 
Haer. xxix. 7-9. With this agrees Matth. v. 17, 18. No wonder that Galatians was 
written against them, since they kept sabbaths and circumcision—xxix. 7 ; they pro¬ 
bably had a Hebrew Evangelium resembling our Matthew. 

2 Rev. i. 13, 16, gives us the Light of Mithra, his Seven Planets and 7 rays. Num¬ 
bers, xxiii. 3, 4, shows that Iahoh (the Dual Divine Power) was present at the High 
place of transjordan Sabians. So that the religions on both sides of Jordan were the 
same.—1 Sam. ix. 12, 14 ; 1 Kings, xi. 7 ; xiv. 23 ; Jer. xxxii. 35. The Old Testament 
religion resembles the Mithra worship one hundred years before the Apokalypse ap¬ 
peared. 

3 Markion and Valentinus lived not so long ago (says Tertullian)—about in the reign 
of Antoninus. At first they were believers in the Church of Rome under the blessed 
Eleutherus (a.d. 177-190). — Tertullian, De Prescript., xxx. ; Contra Marcion, iv. 4. In 
the tenth year of the reign of Commodus, Victor succeeded Eleutherus who had held 
the episcopate for thirteen years.—Eusebius, H. E., v. cap. xxii. The tenth year of 
Commodus was a.d. 190. The Superscription to Justin’s 1st Apologia addresses Loukios 
as a philosopher, when he was only eight years old,—according to Diet. Chr. Biogr. III. 
p. 567. This could easily occur in case the superscription were not originally a part of 
the Apologia. The Superscription is at variance with Tertullian, xxx. 1. Eusebius and 
several MSS. change pliilosophos into philosophou.—ib. III. 563. But the author’s copy, 
Paris 1551 (or 1553 ; the title page has been slightly inked just at the date), reads dis¬ 
tinctly 4 philosophos.’ The M. D. L. are uninjured and perfectly distinct. To address 
a boy at all is strange, in such a matter. This might suggest that the Superscription 
was added for effect, or to put an earlier date. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 997 


goes to Hades, Homer depicts him dark as night. Krishna’s 
name means the black. The Arich Anpin of the Kabbala is 
the source of all light. 1 In the Kabalali the Crown is the 
Light point and the Hidden Wisdom. 2 From the Crown pro¬ 
ceeds an endless Light.—Gelinek, p. 127. Krishna in India 
was Herakles ; being' the Incarnation of Vishnu he is Light of 
Light. In the Kabalali, Christna (King of Light) and Christos 
would probably represent the same idea. 3 Mithra dips his be¬ 
lievers, promises expiation of sins from baptism, signs his 
soldiers on the forehead, celebrates the oblation of bread, puts 
on the appearance of the resurrection. The Samarians were 
Kuthim from Persia and must have known the Mithra myste¬ 
ries. Justin, p. 145, says that there were gnostic Christiani 
who held the doctrines of Menander. The Valentinians used 
the name (Iesua or) Iesous. Philo mentions the Archangel 
Lord (Philo, p. 400); and Aristotle said that man and the Sun 
produce man.—Julian, in Solem, iv. p. 151. It would be 
singular if the Jews had a Saviour Angel Iesua, and the Sam¬ 
aritans should not know the name Iesoua.—John, iv. 25. But 
the name Iesous (Iesua) means Soter (Saviour) in the Hellenic 
dialect. Whence, too, the Angel said unto the virgin “You 
shall call his name Iesous, for he shall save (so, sozei) his 
people from their sins.—Justin, Apol. I. p. 148. Out of the 
name Iesua came the ultimate conception of a Messiah pre¬ 
figured in the signs Bam (Aries) and Virgo. Aries is the Ver¬ 
nal Lamb ! Iesua is the Angel who resurrects the souls, and 
carries them up like Bel-Mithra.— Bodenschatz, II. 192. Jus¬ 
tin, p. 87, speaks of the Mitlira-mysteries in the cave as pain¬ 
fully like the Christian story of the birth of Iesu. Perhaps it 
was Iesoua in Simon’s doctrine who appeared as Son in Judea 
and suffered the apparent death which was all that the Gnos¬ 
tics admitted, and old Samaritan beliefs about the Messiah may 
have been in some way blended with that current of Gnostic 
teaching of which Simon in Samaria was the fountain head.— 
Ant. Mater, 258-9 ; Justin, p. 144. When Kerinthus held that 
the Father was Unknown, his Christos was very likely of the 
Markionite order, asarkos. Justin’s first Apology 144, 145,158 
mentions Simon, Menander and Markion together. Justin, p. 

1 Gelinek, 136, 214, 254, 256. 

2 ib. 135. 

3 See above, pp. 580, 601, 612; John, i. 1-4; ix. 5 ; Codex Nazoria, I. 10. 


998 


THE GHEBERS OF HEBRON. 


144, locates Simon Magus at Eome under Klaudius Kaisar 
(in 41-54). It was in the time of Klaudius that, some say, the 
report was published of the resurrection of Iesu. But as Jus¬ 
tin has not proved fortunate in his account of Simon’s statue, 
Klaudius may not date Simon more accurately. The efforts to 
depreciate Simon in the eyes of Christians only make him out 
of more consequence in connection with the origin of Chris- 
tianism, and raise suspicions that there is something in refer¬ 
ence to Simon’s connection with the story of Samaritan Mes- 
sianism that has not been told. The Gnostics were the earliest 
Christians. Elxai, about A.D. 95, belonged to the family of the 
Essenes and Ebionites and acknowledged that there was a 
Christos, but says nothing about a Jesus.—Hilgenfeld, N. T. 
Extra Canon, fascic., III. 157, 159, 163, 164 ; Epiphan., Haer. 
xix. 1, 3. He calls Christos the Great King.—ib. 3. So Matth. 
xxiv. 5, 27, 30 ; xxv. 34. 

Epikurus 1 started with the denial of supernatural interfer¬ 
ence as a practical postulate. 2 He did not know all that 
“ physics ” was to achieve for human “ pleasure,” but he per¬ 
ceived the error of the assumption that proximate causes have 
a supernatural cause. The agnostic sees this error imme¬ 
diately ; the Sadukee probably saw it; the blind Pharisee saw 
but the dreams of his superstitious fancy, which the zealot re¬ 
lied on. 

Nature never says anything different from what wisdom 
says. 3 All being is force. All life is action and tension of 
force. All the faculties, sensation, imagination, understanding, 
reason, will are of the same nature, they differ only in degree. 
All are the affirmations, the diverse energies of one and the 
same force, and this force seems to be inherent in highly or¬ 
ganised forms of matter, a quality of organised matter, not an 
entity separate from it. So the food, after being changed by 
natural forces, enters into a stage of vitality, becoming incar¬ 
nate in the flesh, the nervous system and the organs of mind, a 
living body. Benan says that it is by chemistry at one end 
and by astronomy at the other, and especially by general 

1 born b.c. 302. If Josephus had known of the Evangels, it would not have been 
necessary to interpolate his “ Antiquities,” xviii. ch. 3. 3, and xx. 9. 1. 

2 Westminster Rev. April 1882, pp. 148, 167. 

3 Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 320. The Evangel according to the Hebrews said that the Jor¬ 
dan took fire at the Baptism of the Iesu.—Renan, Origines, 106; Hilgenfeld, N.T. ex¬ 
tra canon, fasc. iv. p. 17, 26. 


THE GREAT ARCHANGEL OF THE EBIONITES. 999 


physiology, that we really grasp the secret of existence of the 
world or of God, whichever it may be called. 1 Mankind have 
lived for ages as forms of matter. Life and mind have only 
been proved to exist in animal organisations. The spirits, 
like the dead, manifest neither life nor mind; and, in case of 
injury to the brain, if life continues, mind ceases. 

There is one infallible law of existence: that man must 
learn by human experience, not by Revelation. The above¬ 
given detailed data of the eccentric efforts of the oriental mind 
show that the nature of ideas and things is always based upon 
a preexisting status. Nothing happens by miracle or unpre¬ 
pared but the law of direct causes is justified in its effects. 
All is the outcome, the product, of the combination of results 
(themselves prepared by immediate preexisting conditions) as 
well as of the propagation of ideas gained in the world’s con¬ 
stant succession of experiences. Two things are essential to a 
sound inference ; a sound material and a knowledge of the 
facts. All the theory in the world will not make up for the 
absence of fact. 

We have examined the theory of causation exhibited in 
Phoenician, Chaldaean and Israelite antecedents. We have 
demonstrated the persistence of faith in the dualist philos¬ 
ophy, which rests on the mistaken theory that such a separate 
unknown quantity as spirit ever existed. The failure of one 
of the two factors in dualism destroys the theory. Yet it still 
lies at the foundation of every creed to-day. Die Natur er- 
zeugt im Nervenorganismus die Seele, die Kultur entwickelt 
daraus den Geist als logische Kraft, macht die sinnliche Welt 
zum Material fiir Ideen.—Prof. Friedrich Korner, Thierseele 
und Menschengeist, p. 22. Nature produces in the nerve- 
organism the soul, culture develops from it the spirit as log¬ 
ical power, makes of the sensible world material for ideas. 

And eloquence and sublime 

Wisdom and statesmanlike 

Impulses man lias taught himself, and in time of uncomfortable 

Frosts to avoid the open fields, 

All-inventive. He comes without resource upon nothing 

Destined to occur ; as to Hades alone 

He shall not contrive an escape.—Sophokles, Antigone, 354-364. 

1 Renan, Recoil, of Youth, p. 220. But the Sons of the Sakhya hold fast to the 
principle that the course of the world has had no beginning. 


1000 


THE GIIEBERS OF HEBRON. 


Quid Styga, quid Tenebras, quid nomina vana timetis, 

Materiem vaturn, falsique piacula mundi ?—Ovid, Metam. xi. 154, 155. 

Why do you fear Styx, why Shades of Darkness, why empty names, 

The stock in trade of the priests, and the punishments of an unreal world ? 
—Ovid, Met. xi. 155. 

The nature of mind cannot arise alone without body, 

Nor exist far apart from nerves and blood.—Lukretius, de rerum natura, 
III. 790. 

Mortal is the soul, since changed in the limbs 

It so very much loses life and prior feeling.—Lukretius, III. 769. 

Resell, p. 113, regards Mark’s Gospel as a Targum to select¬ 
ed parts of the Hebrew primal Evangelium. The internal evi¬ 
dence in Justin’s two accepted writings points to the existence 
of a (nameless) Evangel prior to our first three Gospels. Jus¬ 
tin’s “ Memoirs of the Apostles ” and Papias’s inquiries about 
what the ‘ apostles ’ may have said make the * apostles ’ respon¬ 
sible for the tradition. 1 The Gospel according to the Hebrews 
was called the Gospel according to the Apostles.—Sup. Eel., 
I. 427. 2 The Revelation of the Mystery was the revelation of 
the secret tradition. The truth cannot be found out by those 
who know not tradition. 3 

1 The unerring tradition of apostolic preaching.—Hegesippus ; in Sup. Rel., I. 442. 

2 According to Epiphanius, Haer. xxx. 13, the Hebrew Gospel so-called (named by 
the Ebionites “after Matthew ”) was adulterated and mutilated.—Dunlap, Sod, II. 46, 
47. “And this they call Hebraicon.”—Haer. xxx. 13. “In the Evangel according 
to the Hebrews which even to-day is used by the Nazarenes, according to the Apostles, 
or, as the most think, according to Matthew.”—Hieronymus, adv. Pelag., iii. 2. 

3 Non possit ex his (Scripturis) inveniri veritas ab his qui nesciant Traditionem.— 
Irenaeus, III. cap. ii. 


POSTSCEIPTA. 


P. 79, note 7. The date of the Hebrew Bible (speaking generally) was the 
Encratite Period after b.c. 145. See Isa., iii. 16, lii. 14, lvi. 4, 5 ; Dan., i. 12. 
To leave out the celebration of the Mysteries altogether (we see them still cele¬ 
brated in Ezekiel viii.) and to describe the life of the principal deities as the life 
of human beings (not the principia of the universe) this is Euliemerism. But it 
is the point of view that Moses starts from. Thus if we turn Osiris-Asari and 
Isis in Phoenicia into Isari-Israel and Aisah (Eua), or Brahma and Sarasvati into 
Abrahm and Sahra-Sarah, and describe their life on earth as human beings, we 
will have done what Moses did for Adamas and Eua, for the Mithra and the 
Mooncrescent, for Ani and Iuno, for Keb (Kub) and Kubele (Cybele). 

P. 304. Apliorite. Assuming a Phoenician word hapharah (the fruit-giver) 
from phari = fruit, we have conjectured a form haphari which the Greeks may 
have altered into foam given Aphrodata : from aphros, foam of the sea. 

P. 374, line 18. For Tertullian, read Irenaeus. 

P. 410, top. See Isaiah, vii. 8, 9 ; xvii. 1, 3 (viii. 4). 

P. 458. See Acts, ix. 2, 19, 22; xi. 19-22. 

P. 466, line 7. See 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4. Pp. 469, 472, read Sliemia. 

P. 470. &ucc. 

P. 481. (the acute accent becomes the grave when other words follow in 
connection). 

P. 564, for sunchronous, read synchronous. 

P. 583, lines 12-30. There was a church at Damascus in the 4tli century ; 
and tradition says that the head of John the Baptist was preserved at Damascus. 
—Boston Advertiser. Compare pp. 470, 471. 

P. 606. Epiplianius does not deny that the Nazbraioi preceded the Iverinth- 
ians ; for the Essenes were Nazarenes. Kerinthus was probably an Ebionite Juda- 
ist, connected with the Nazoria at Beroea, the Nazorenes of Matthew, ii. 23, v., 
vi., vii., x. and Epiplianius, Haer. xxix. 7, 9, of the Nazdraioi in Syria, the Dekap- 
olis, Galilee, Pella and East of the Jordan ; because Epiphanius, ib. 5, says the 
Naz5raioi, being by race Jews, adhered to the Law and Circumcision. Kerinthus 
did the same. But, under Justin’s dictum, he was a, Christian, although a little 
ultra regarding the Angels. Matth. v. 17, 18, while adhering to the Jewish Law, 
adds ‘ until all things shall happen.’ The long o in the Nazdrenes of Antioch, 
Beroea and Matthew, assures the identity of Matthew’s sources ; and James, the 
son of Ioseph and brother of the Lord, is declared a Nazoraios, a Nazbrene.— 
Epiphanius, xxix. 4. 

P. 646, line 2. With the name Asariel compare Eliazar.—Gen. xv. 2. 

P. 675, read Emanationslehre. P. 676, for vocantur, read vocatur. 

P. 775, lines 38, 39, the gnosis is found in the Septuagint and in Philo Ju¬ 
daeus. 

P. 789, for Betar, read perhaps Bitthera. 

P. 793, note 1. The Karpokratians held that the Devil carried the souls of 
the perished to his Chief who is one of the makers of the world. This last de¬ 
livers them to another angel to be shut up in bodies again. Irenaeus, I. xxiv. 
See this treatise, p. 888. As Justin p. 54 mentions neither Kerinthus nor Kar- 
pokrates, but Markionites , Justin is late. 

P. 823, line 31, read “ but one intelligent Soul.” 

P. 852, line 10, for avoided giving, read has not left. 


1002 


POSTSCRIPTA. 


P. 946, line 10, for “ must have,” read must have been. 

P. 995, lines 41, 42. No such word as Nazoraios is used in Justin’s Dialogue, 
although Matthew’s Gospel has it. Justin evidently does not follow Matthew in 
this instance. He (p. 98) uses the word Christianos; distinguishing between 
Christian and Nazorene. He (p. 106) recognises Iesu as a Galilean. But Epi- 
phanius recognises the Nazoraian sect at Beroea ; Matthew, ii. 23 recognises them. 
Justin does not. Justin, p. 109, mentions the Diaspora. It is plain, then, either 
that Justin refuses to mention the Nazoraioi of Beroea and the Jordan, or. else, 
that Matthew’s Gospel was not known to Justin. If Justin is late, so is Matthew, 
xxii. 21, xxviii. 19. Epiplianius could not tell which came first, Kerinthians or 
Nazdrenes. He says they were contemporaneous; and that all Christians were 
then equally called Nazorenes.—Epiphan., xxix. 1. Kerinthus, then, may have 
been a Nazorene Ebionite. The Christianism of the Orient proved superior to 
the civilization of Greece and the errors of Rome. 

The Opinion of the ‘Nazoraioi’ is mentioned in Acts, xxiv. 5 and in Luke 
xxiv. 19 we find Nazoraios. All men called the Christians Nazoraioi.—Epiplian., 
Haer. xxix. 6. The son of loseph was born a Nazorene.—ib. 4. Like Eusebius, 
Epiplianius, 4, 5, says that Philo (when he was writing about the Iessaians) 
wrote concerning the Christians ; and he says that Iesous is called Therapeutes 
and Iatros and Soter. They were called Iessaioi for a short time after the ( as¬ 
cension ) taking up of the Saviour,—disciples, to be sure, of the apostles, I mean 
the at this time designated Nazoraioi, being by race Jews, adhering to the Law 
and circumcised.— ib. 5. Epiplianius, xxix. 6, distinctly asserts that the Chris¬ 
tians, after a.d. 70, were called Nazorenes. This New Sect was located in Be¬ 
roea. Coelesyria, the Dekapolis, the country around Pella and beyond the 
Jordan in Arabia.—ib. 7. The author of Matthew’s Gospel found them there. 
The author of Galatians sought them in Arabia-—Gal. i. 17. They use the New 
Testament and the Old, being Jews and nothing else. They agree with the 
Jews in all respects except the belief in Christ. They do not agree with the 
Christians because they observe the Law, Circumcision, the Sabbath, etc. Re¬ 
garding Christ I cannot say if they consider him a mere man, seduced by the 
perversity of what we have mentioned concerning Kerinthos and Merintlios, or 
believe that he was bom of Maria through the holy spirit.—ib. 7. It is clear 
just where portions of Matthew’s Gospel came from. From these late Nazorenes, 
who gave up being called Jews or Christians. Against them Galatians was writ¬ 
ten. They began there (in Beroea, etc.) all the apostles having resided in Pella. 
Their Haeresis had its beginning after the siege of Jerusalem.—ibid. 7, p. 80. 
Dindorf. This fits in exactly with Matthew, v. 17, 18, xxii. 21. Justin is late, 
since he knows about the Markionites ; he knows Christians, but not Nazoraians 
nor Matthew perhaps. But these last are later than Justin,—having dropped 
the word Christian and taken a name unknown to Justin. Then Justin scarcely 
knows Peter, but Matthew builds his Church upon Peter. Our 4 Gospels must 
be the latest of all, three using the word Nazorene, while Mark yields to Caesar 
as Matthew does. 

P. 996 (222 and 982). Justin, Dial., p. 81, mentions, in connection with 
Mithra-Mysteries, Dionysus torn to pieces, dying, and rising again ! The Son of 
Dios, he is Zeus-Belus or Bel-Mitlira the Logos, the Archangel and Soter.— 
Exod. xxiii. 21. Isa. lx. 16. See Movers, I. 553, 555. See above page 71, 
note. 

Pp. 996 and 729. In the 8th year of the New Sothiac period (a.d. 138) 
we find the head of Serapis surrounded by the 7 planets, the whole within the 
12 Zodiac signs.—Sharpe, Egypt, II. 177, 178. Ptolemy (a.d. 127 to 161) held 
that the planets revolve round the earth. Rev. i. 13, 16, agrees with the time of 
Serapis-worsliip and the period of Ptolemy, who took observations in 127. In 
127-134 Jews might expect Rome’s ruin, as in Rev. xviii. 2, 4, 8-10; but not 
after Betar fell in 135. The Planets. —See Exodus, 37, Numb , 23. 2 Kings, 23. 
For the basis of Nazorene spiritualism, see Plutarch, Iside, 62, 79, and Philo 
before him. Serapis is the Logos, Source of all life, God of heaven. Hades, the 
sun, God of the dead and the next world, to reward the good and punish the 
wicked. Comp. Matthew, xxv. 34, 41, Rev. xx. 12. 






































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